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Memorial on wall finds a new home
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The memorial removed from the original Woodrow Wilson High School on Gibson Street was removed when the school was demolished. The marble memorial was saved and is back in place facing north in the eventual court yard area.
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LASTING TRIBUTE: The names of 42 young men from Woodrow Wilson High School killed in World War II and the names of three who died in Vietnam are listed on the war memorial now adorning a wall at Wilson Middle School on Gibson Street. Local Gold Star Mothers raised the money to build the memorial after World War II, and it was originally attached to Wilson High School which no long exists.
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The original marble memorial with the High School Name etched in it.
A war memorial from the demolished Woodrow Wilson High School is now a part of the new Woodrow Wilson Middle School on Gibson Street.
Built as a tribute to Wilson High School students who lost their lives in war.
Funds for the original project raised by Gold Star Mothers.
Built as part of a gymnasium addition at Wilson High School in 1953.
Officially dedicated in 1954.
Names of 42 military veterans who died in World War II.
Names of three military veterans who died in the Vietnam War.
Inscription: “We dedicate this memorial to those who died in war that we might live in peace.”
Source: Woodrow Wilson High School alumni
The memorial was built as a lasting tribute to those who died serving their country.
YOUNGSTOWN — A war memorial to fallen heroes that once graced an exterior wall of Woodrow Wilson High School has a new home — the courtyard of the new Woodrow Wilson Middle School now under construction.
The site is adjacent to where the high school once stood on Gibson Street on the city’s South Side.
Preserving that memorial was something that Wilson alumni insisted upon and something the school district took seriously.
Tony DeNiro, assistant superintendent for school business affairs, said Delphi Consulting Inc. of Houston, Pa., preserved the memorial as the high school was being demolished last year, and it has now been installed in the courtyard of the new middle school.
“It’s in good shape,” he said.
It’s a lasting tribute, a memorial created through the efforts of Gold Star Mothers who lost sons in World War II, said Jack Bolkovac, a 1953 Wilson alumnus and retired teacher.
The name of his brother, John, known to family and friends as “Jake,” is on that memorial.
Jake didn’t graduate from Wilson because he was drafted into the military after his junior year when he turned 18. He died at 19 in a B-17 training mission crash in Florida, Bolkovac said.
“My mother was one of the committee that collected money for the war memorial,” he said. “All of the mothers got together, and they organized. They canvassed the entire South Side.”
The effort raised enough money to build the memorial as an addition to a 1953 high school gymnasium project at the school. There was enough left over to put a fence around the football field, Bolkovac recalled.
It’s important that the memorial be preserved, he said.
“It was really a community project, and everyone supported it. It was the goal of those mothers to put up a lasting tribute,” he said, adding that some of those families still live in the area.
The memorial lists the names of World War II veterans from Wilson who made the ultimate sacrifice, and the names of several others who died in Vietnam, said Joe Nudo, a 1951 Wilson graduate and former teacher.
Among the names is that of his brother, Dominic, a 1944 Wilson alumnus killed in a battle on Okinawa in 1945.
“We never want to forget the sacrifice that these boys made for our country,” Nudo said. “What we have today, we owe to them.”
“We’re thrilled to death that they’re going to do that,” said Howard Friend of the preservation effort. “Guys that I was in school with are on that list.” Jake Bolkovac was in his class, said Friend, who graduated on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
“I left eight days later,” he said, explaining that he wound up as an infantry machine gunner and was wounded in a battle in Bastogne, Belgium, part of what became known as The Battle of the Bulge.
His wounds left him hospitalized for a year, followed by another six months of surgeries.
Yet he considers himself “lucky,” he said, because his injuries took him out of the war and he survived.
Friend went on to also become an educator, teaching at Wilson and other schools in the area and becoming superintendent of the Mahoning County Joint Vocational School.
The memorial is important, he said.
“I think it represents all of the young people from that area of town. That’s a memorial to those kids.”
DeNiro said that, in addition to the war memorial, a large mural depicting a battle scene that hung between doorways leading into the auditorium of Wilson High School has also been preserved.
Wilson alumni paid for its restoration, and it also will be placed in the middle school, he said.
gwin@vindy.com