The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
State man pushing for better care of veterans’ graves
BRANFORD — Ed Zack gets angry when he visits his parents’ graves at St. Agnes Cemetery and sees dozens of flat, flush grave markers that have sunk below ground level and, in some cases, become overgrown by grass and vegetation to a point where the names of the American soldiers buried there are not immediately readable.
These are people who sacrificed for their country, he notes.
People like Angelo M. Carbone, who served as a private first class in the Army during World War II and died on Nov. 21, 1991; George W. Leary, who served in the Navy during World War II and died on Feb. 6, 1993; and Daniel T. Wysocky, who served in the Navy in Korea and died on June 28, 2014.
Zack thinks it’s a matter of respect to maintain the veterans’ grave markers — and believes it’s the perpetual care cemetery’s responsibility to do so.
Leaders of some of Connecticut’s biggest veterans organizations — one of whom has had issues with the care of his own veteran father’s gravestone in St. Michael’s Cemetery in Stratford on the Bridgeport line — agree.
And the directors of two state cemetery associations, the Catholic Cemetery Association of the Archdiocese of Hartford and the Connecticut Cemetery Association, both said that while continued maintenance of the grave markers is an issue at all cemeteries, many cemeteries do keep up with it
John Pinone, executive director of the Catholic Cemeteries Association of the Archdiocese of Hartford, which runs about 30 cemeteries in New Haven, Hartford and Litchfield counties, including in the cities of
New Haven and Waterbury, said keeping up with marker maintenance “is a challenge, to say the least.”
“To keep up with thousands and thousands of flush markers, it’s definitely a challenge,” Pinone said.
But after hearing about Zack’s complaints about St. Agnes, Pinone said, “That’s that cemetery’s issues.”
Branford’s St. Agnes and St. Rose cemeteries both are run by the St. John Bosco Parish, not by the Archdiocese of Hartford.
“They should be taken care of,” said Jeff Pelletier, president of the Connecticut Cemetery Association and Evergreen Cemetery in Watertown.
While it is a challenge to keep up with things such as sinking and/or overgrown grave markers, “it’s part of the maintenance of the cemetery,” Pelletier said. “I mean, weed-wack around the stone.
“I run a cemetery in Watertown,” Pelletier said. “We honor our veterans. We take care of their stones.”
That said, “We are not the cemetery police,” Pelletier said. “We don’t make up the rules for other cemeteries.”
One of the veterans buried at St. Agnes is Zack’s father, Edward John Zack Sr., who was a corporal in theArmy during World War II. He’s buried right next to Zack’s mother, Carol Sennett Zack, who died in 2015.
That grave is immaculate — clear and edged about six inches around on all sides.
He also cleared the markers of Army veteran Thomas P. Cummings, who died on July 5, 1988, and Mary V. Krista, who died in 1990 at age 97, which are located near his parents, just because “I felt sorry for them,” he said.
Neither the cemetery manager nor Keefe returned phone messages seeking comment. Shea said in a
brief conversation that they would not be commenting.
“Our policy is not to comment on matters involving the press,” Shea said.
Zack said, “I’ve gone through the chain of command and they know there’s a problem there.”
Statewide challenge
For the Catholic Cemetery Association, grave marker maintenance “is an ongoing process and the objective is always to keep all the flush markers raised, so they’re above ground level, and also edge,” said Pinone.
“Some cemeteries can be more challenged than others” and “some are wetter than others,” Pinone said.
With many of the flush markers, the problem is that they were laid over plain dirt, which compacts over time, causing the marker to sink and become more susceptible to overgrowth, he said.
“We try to raise them on an ongoing basis. ... We’ve undertaken a program of putting crushed stone” beneath all the flush markers over time, he said.
In many cemeteries, overgrown grave markers tends to be a bigger problem in spring or summer, when it rains a lot, than it is now,
Pinone said.
Andrew Hodes, administrative director of the Jewish Cemetery Association of Greater New Haven, said that in the association’s cemeteries, “after the first year it’s the family’s responsibility” to maintain grave markers.
He called the flat footstones “absolutely a huge and constant problem ... They are an enormous challenge to keep up with.”
That’s because they can’t be cleared with the same equipment used to cut the grass and “to go through with a weed wacker, it’s tremendously time consuming,” Hodes said.
A few years back, the Jewish Cemetery Association had three youths working on an Eagle Scout project maintain all the footstones in one cemetery, Mount Sinai Memorial Park in New Haven, which he said has “over 1,000 footstones in there.”
Without volunteers, doing that kind of maintenance “is a function of finances,” Hodes said. “It’s expensive to do. If you only have to do one, it’s not a budget breaker. But if you have to do hundreds — or thousands — it’s just untenable.”
Connecticut VFW Adjutant/ Quartermaster Ronald “Rusko” Rusakiewicz, who lives in Milford, has experienced the issue of cemetery maintenance firsthand. His father, the late Army World War II veteran Joseph Rusakiewicz, is buried at St. Michael Cemetery, which straddles the Bridgeport-Stratford line.
Rusakiewicz said he occasionally has found his father’s grave marker in need of clearing.
Officials from Catholic Cemeteries for the Diocese of Bridgeport, which oversees 17 cemeteries in Bridgeport, Danbury, Newtown, Stamford, Greenwich, Darien, Norwalk, Westport, Trumbull, Stratford, Bethel and Ridgefield, including St. Michael, could not immediately be reached for comment.
“I don’t know how to solve the problem,” Rusakiewicz said. But “if people who bought perpetual care for their loved ones aren’t getting it,” they need to stand up and be heard, he said.
“There’s no organization that I know that does it,” he said.
In Rusakiewicz’s 18 years as adjutant, “no one’s ever addressed it,” that he knows of, he said.
Connecticut American Legion Department Commander Dennis Beauregard of Southington said that in all cemeteries, “The footstones have a tendency to sink into the ground if not kept up, and they tend to be overgrown.
“You’ll hear that same story from anybody that takes care of a cemetery,” Beauregard said.
How big of a problem it is “depends on how they get kept up,” he said. “If it’s not prepared properly, they tend to sink.
“It is on our radar screen, for the American Legion,” he said. Among other things, “There are many local
American Legions that go out” and help maintain veterans’ graves, “including mine in Southington.”
But “I don’t see how they can do every one of them,” Beauregard said. “These are private cemeteries. We can’t just go in.”
Most of the oldest veteran graves typically are headstones, he said. “The footstones are mostly from World War II on. It would be nice (to fix them all) but I’m not naive enough to think that that would happen.”
But “just cleaning around it would be a big help, because it would be easier to identify,” he said.
While “there’s no official, unified program, or something that we can do on a yearly basis ... it is a community issue,” Beauregard said. “It is something that needs to be addressed.”
In Branford, Zack also has taken it upon himself to clear some of those currentlyunrecognizable graves— about 15 so far, only a few of which are relatives or people who were neighbors or friends in life.
“This is growth over years,” Zack, also wearing a mask, said one recent morning, the knees of his jeans stained dark with moisture and dirt from kneeling to bring the names and details of deceased soldiers’ lives back to light.
“These veterans were common people — privates, corporals,” Zack said. “They sacrificed quite a bit — and to be treated like this” after death “is wrong.”
It takes him about 15 minutes per grave, he said.
But Zack, who also has several aunts, uncles and other deceased relatives buried among St. Agnes’ 2,962 graves, wonders aloud, “When I’m gone, who’s going to take care of it?”