After 46 years, Lake Worth woman sends POW bracelet back to veteran
LAKE WORTH — The Vietnam War had a profound impact on Missy McArdle Rovinelli.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, while living in Milton, a small city in Santa Rosa Count y nestled between the Naval Air Station Pensacola and Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, Rovinelli learned at a young age about the horrors of combat.
“We had a lot of casualties from our area,” said Rovinelli, now 64 and living in Lake Worth. “The war hit us pretty hard.”
So much so, in 1970 Rovinelli paid $1 for a nickel-plated commemorative POW bracelet that was made to honor and remember a lost, captured or missing man from the war.
Each bracelet was engraved with the name, rank and loss date of an American serviceman. Part of the money raised was used to pay for bumper stickers, brochures, buttons and newspaper ads to draw attention to the missing men.
The bracelets, created by a California student group called Voices in Vital America, became quite popular. More than 5 million were distributed, according to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall Page’s website.
For Rovinelli, a musical theater actress the past 35 years, buying the bracelet was the least she could do.
“T h e re was a t re mendous amount of patriotism and support for the troops where I lived,” Rovinelli recalled.
The engraved name on Rovinelli’s silver bracelet: Cmdr. Robert Doremus, a New Jersey-born serviceman who was shot down over North Vietnam by a surfaceto-air missile on Aug. 24, 1965, and who was held captive until his release on Feb. 12, 1973.
Rovinelli wore the bracelet faithfully every day for about seven years. “I never took it off,” she said. After the war ended, Rovinelli