May is for remembering!

May is just about my favorite month. The cold winter is past and the heat of summer is yet to come. Azaleas, Rhododendron, and Roses are blooming, and the grass is green; spring is in full bloom. May is also a month for remembering. Memorial Day ends the month and we pause to remember Nyack’s brave men and women who went off to war. There are others who also did their part in our county’s wars; perhaps they did more most of us will ever know. When their boys boarded a bus, most of the time mom was there to watch and wave good-bye. I remember my mother back in the summer of 1965 standing at the corner of Cedar Hill Avenue and Broadway, waving and smiling as I boarded a Red & Tan Lines bus to Whitehall Street and a stretch in the Navy. I would tell you the story of just two Nyack Mothers who saw their sons off to war. The Polhemus family lived in a lovely two-story home on Castle Heights Avenue, right behind Gerhardt’s store on Broadway. Their home was one of the first on the block to display a “Blue-Star-Flag” signifying a son was serving in the Armed Forces. World War Two had hardly begun when a telegraph was delivered to Florence Polhemus. “We regret to inform you that your son Willis Polhemus is listed as Missing-In-Action. His Navy Destroyer, the USS Peary, was sunk during action engaging the enemy and all hands are presumed lost.” You can imagine the shock when she realized her son would never return. The Blue Star Flag in the window was soon replaced with a Gold Star Flag, the first of many that would fly in Upper Nyack. Florence Polhemus busied herself with her family as she watched two more sons go off to war. She began a scrapbook. Each day she would cut out any story in the Nyack Evening Journal about a boy in the service. Her scrapbook has the faces and stories of hundreds of the boys who boarded a bus. My wife is the granddaughter of Florence Polhemus and she inherited that scrapbook. Seventy years later the pages are worn and fragile, but if you would like to look through those memories we would be pleased to share. Ella Bohr also had a number of sons go off to war, but she wanted more than a flag with blue stars in her window when her sons went into the Army. Her modest home was on Depew Avenue opposite Memorial Park and she found a special way to show pride in her sons as well as express her patriotism. She chose looking after the American Flag in Memorial Park Starting in 1942 Ella Bohr could be seen in the early morning hours crossing the upper plateau of the park an American Flag carefully folded over her arm walking towards the flag pole near the head of the steps where Nyack’s memorial is located. When she reached the pole, she unfolded the flag, attached it to the halyard and raised it to the top. She returned at sunset to lower the flag, fold it correctly and carried it home. For more than fifteen years, Blackie, her Labrador retriever, accompanied her. After the war was over, Ella Bohr continued her service and after more than twenty-five years of caring for our flag she was dubbed the “Betsy Ross of Nyack” and presented with the Nyack American Legion’s Americanism award for faithful and dedicated service to her country and the flag. No woman more justly deserved that tribute. These are but two the mothers of Nyack who watched the boys they bore and nurtured board a bus and head off to war. There were hundreds more, and this Memorial Day as we honor the veterans of our community also think of all the mothers who worried; mothers, who wrote letters, sent packages of cookies and clean socks and always had a smile when they sons came home. I can tell you that as a veteran that all of my comrades in arms take a moment each Memorial Day and says: “Thanks Mom.”