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Forgotten no more
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Jerry Nunziato, a retired criminal investigator from Youngstown, writes down names of soldiers from World War II and the Korean War that are listed on the Smoky Hollow Memorial so that he can do research on them.
By CHRIS COTELESSE
The NewsOutlet.org
YOUNGSTOWN
Until last year, monuments bearing the names of fallen soldiers had been forgotten in the corners of cemeteries and neglected on the properties of vacant buildings all over the Mahoning Valley.
“It seems like they deserve to be recognized for more than just a name on a monument that nobody knows anything about,” said Jerry Nunziato, a retired criminal investigator for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Together with 11 other monument hunters, Nunziato has located and documented more than 20 war memorials in Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties.
“It’s kind of fun. It’s almost like a scavenger hunt,” Nunziato said. “When you find one, you feel like at least someone remembered it.”
The quest to map these statues and stone slabs began with the Polish War Veterans’ Memorial that used to sit outside Krakusy Hall on South Avenue.
Lisa Lotze and Aundrea Heschmeyer, with the group Polish Youngstown, feared the monument would be vandalized after the Polish cultural center closed.
Lotze comes from a military family that goes back to her grandfather, who came to America in the late 19th century and joined the army. Her family’s military service has driven her to document these tributes.
“You just don’t take their service for granted. And if they lose their life, that’s something you don’t want to forget,” she said.
When she saw an opportunity to rescue the Polish War Veterans’ Memorial, she said she had to act.
“There is the contribution of an entire ethnic group to the American conflicts since prior to the Revolutionary War,” she said.
They worked for months tracking down the owners of the monument and selecting an appropriate final location.
“We wanted the location to be relevant, and we wanted it to be accessible,” Lotze said.
They eventually settled on Peterson Park in Poland. That park already had a monument to two Revolutionary War generals, Casimir Pułaski and Tadeusz Kosciuszko, Polish immigrants for whom the Youngstown suburb is named.
After the Polish War Veterans’ Memorial was rededicated at Peterson Park last summer, Lotze began searching for anyone with a master list of all the monuments in the area, but couldn’t find one.
“The historical society didn’t. None of the veterans’ groups had one. And I thought that’s a shame,” she said.
But a column written by Todd Franko in The Vindicator galvanized the project. The column by the newspaper’s editor asked for residents to help Lotze locate monuments across the Mahoning Valley.
“At that point, I was committed to the project,” Lotze said.
People Lotze had never met began calling and emailing her with monuments they had rediscovered.
Nunziato had already been researching the names on the Smoky Hollow memorial. He grew up there, and so did those fallen soldiers.
He feels a connection with these men that decades and death can’t sever. He calls them “my soldiers.”
“Some of them lived only two or three doors down from where I grew up,” Nunziato said.
After reading Franko’s editorial, he decided helping Lotze was the logical next step.
So when he’s out and about doing background checks for the government, he’ll stop at a local diner and ask around.
He’s amazed at all the monuments that are tucked away in quiet corners of small communities. The more he finds, the more he feels the need to look for more and share these tributes with the public.
“Nobody knows. Nobody cares. Unless we do something like this,” he said.