For decades, the city’s Memorial Day ceremony has followed a familiar and fitting rhythm: the colors posted, the anthem sung, a keynote, a moment of silence, Taps. This year, on Monday, May 25, something was added that several longtime attendees could not recall ever happening before — every name was read.
Standing at the podium in the War Memorial Building on Fair Oaks Avenue, Mayor Sheila Rossi read aloud the names of 88 South Pasadena residents who gave their lives in service to the country: 80 from World War II, 7 from Vietnam, and 1 from the war in Afghanistan. She paused after each one, and longer after the last.
“These are the names of South Pasadena residents who gave their lives in service to this country,” Rossi told the room before she began. “Some we know well. Some we are only now recovering from history. All of them belong to this community.” When the reading was finished, she closed it simply: “May their names never be forgotten.”
For a ceremony that residents have attended for generations, the full roll call landed as a quiet revelation. Several attendees said afterward that in years of coming to the ceremony, they could not remember the complete list of the city’s fallen ever being read from start to finish. The response in the room — and in the conversations that followed in the lobby — it struck a chord.
HOW THE LIST CAME TOGETHER
The reading did not happen by accident. It happened because someone went looking.
Mayor Rossi made the roll of names a priority for this year’s ceremony and asked the city to pull what records it had. The compiling fell to City Librarian Olivia Radbill, who assembled the list of South Pasadena’s war dead — drawing on city archives and outside sources, and even verifying some entries against old South Pasadena Review records kept on-file in the South Pasadena Library archives — in under six hours.
Rossi singled her out from the podium. “A community that cannot name its own dead has not yet fully honored them,” the mayor said, before thanking Radbill by name. It was, in the end, a small act of municipal effort — a request, an afternoon in the archives — that produced something a lot of people in the building will remember.
A CEREMONY, AND A TRADITION
The rest of the morning honored the form the day has long taken. Public Information Officer Jennifer Colby served as master of ceremonies. Boy Scout Troop 333 presented and later retired the colors. South Pasadena resident AwenRose Miller — a daughter of a military family, singing for the second year — performed the National Anthem. Navy veteran Don Oliva, president of the Pasadena City College Veterans Club, delivered the keynote.
Councilmembers Michael Cacciotti, Jon Primuth and Janet Braun attended, along with Enrique Robles, representing Congresswoman Judy Chu, and Jennifer Tang, district director for Assemblymember Mike Fong, who offered remarks. After the reading came the moment of silence and Taps; the reception that followed featured live bagpipes by Megan Kenney.
In her welcome, Rossi drew the distinction that gives the day its weight. “We are not here to celebrate. We are here to remember,” she said — and noted that the cost of war is carried not only by the fallen but by the families they leave behind.
That is the part worth saying plainly, especially in a city that has changed a great deal over its 138 years. South Pasadena incorporated in 1888, the sixth city in Los Angeles County, and for all that time it has been a small, participation-minded town — the kind of place where a ceremony like this one is not a formality but a thread in the civic fabric. The Memorial Day observance is among the oldest of those threads. Maintaining it — and this year, deepening it by naming the dead in full — is one of the quiet ways the city keeps faith with the people who built it and the people it lost.
The names below are the complete list read on Monday, according to the City’s Librarian on task. They belong to South Pasadena. They are honored, for the record.
SOUTH PASADENA RESIDENTS WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN SERVICE TO THIS COUNTRY
WORLD WAR II
James K. Amend
Curtis Ahlstrom
William A. Ashland
Gregory C. Baker
Lewis Barlow
George O. Beals
Hubert Beach Jr.
Robert Beedle
Wilmer S. Becker
Cyrus M. Birney
Robert Buyrle
Joseph S. Brohm
Edward Porter Bruck
Geary R. Bundschu
William Dubois Burnham
Robert W. Callaway
Thornton C. Chamerlain
David M. Churchill
Ira Cheaney
Bill Clausen
Kenneth E. Cotton
Ora E. Cross
Henry Darrah
Harry C. Darah
William J. De Voto
Gladys De Lancey
William B. Dewey
Donald P. Ferguson
Charles L. Ferry Jr.
John T. Fletcher
Hugh Garmany
Hans J. Gaspar
Sherwood Griswold
Thor Hamrin
Paul Haupt
Robert L. Hames
T. Craig Harvey
John W. Hilkerbaumer
David Hooper
Preston Hurthle
Howard D. Jensen
Richard Jensen
Harold E. Jones
Vivian Kellogg
Wesley L. Kroenung
Alan Harry Lawyer
Henry Lee
Stephen M. Lehman
Woodrow A. Lewis
Robert E. Lucas
John L. Malloy
Gladys I. Marson
George McClung
Hugh McCall
Kenneth McDaniel
George McNulty
Douglas McGee
George L. Mee Jr.
Howard Murchie
David John Nolan
Walter B. Oglesby
Vincent L. O’Leary
Porter J. Osborne
Rufe Parilla
Ian A. Robertson
Evan M. Smith
Warren Smith
Clive A. Strangman
Warren Stilson
David Stuart
Erwin William Thurnher
Jesus Villa
Harry Walker
Charles C. Webster
John David Wickham
John Tenney Williams
Alfred Wilstam
Otto A. Wirz
Frank Wood
Henry Melvin Young
VIETNAM WAR
Robert D. Campbell, age 21 — KIA May 19, 1967
Ralph N. Duemlin, age 25 — KIA August 18, 1970
Terry Brooks Dyer, age 19 — KIA December 26, 1969
Bruce C. Hunt, age 23 — KIA November 4, 1970
James “Kelly” Patterson, age 27 — MIA May 19, 1967
William Sype, age 19 — MIA / lost at sea, December 7, 1965
Peter L. Wood, age 26 — KIA January 20, 1968
(James “Kelly” Patterson and William Sype were declared missing in action. Their remains were never recovered.)
AFGHANISTAN
William J. Gilbert, age 24 — KIA May 14, 2013
