PRIME LIVING
A place to remember Found by the banks of the Taunton River at the intersection of President Avenue and Davol Street, Fall River’s Veterans Memorial Bicentennial Park has lived up to its name. Michael J. DeCicco
On May 15, 2021, the park dedicated its 80-percent scale replica of Washington, D.C.’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall with a ceremony attended by dignitaries, including Lt. Gov. Karen Polito, and those who worked to bring the monument to the city, including the city’s Veterans Council and Wall Committee. October 3, 2021 marked the official unveiling of the Italian-American Veterans Memorial monument that honors Fall River residents of Italian descent who died in World War II (10), the Korean War (three) and Vietnam (three). They join a dazzling yet somber array of monuments memorializing the local departed war veterans of the 20th and
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21st centuries. Along the pathway that leads to the Vietnam Memorial Wall you’ll find monuments dedicated to the Gulf War and Global War on Terrorism, Korean War Veterans, and Gold Star Families, which was sponsored by the Gold Star Mothers organization, dedicated to those whose sons and daughters have died in service to American armed forces. The largest of these memorials to our war dead centers the park: the World War II monument that recreates, on an enormous scale, the famous Iwo Jima statute of U.S. Marines raising the American flag at the top of the once-Japanese-held Pacific island. It was officially dedicated on November 6, 2005, in time for Veterans Day that year. (Dedication
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remarks were delivered by James Bradley, co-author of the bestseller Flags of Our Fathers, which tells the story of the battle and of the lives of the soldiers depicted by the monument, including that of Bradley’s father.) Surrounding its base you’ll find a walkway of bricks inscribed with more local veterans’ names. Of the latest monuments to join this display, retired Fall River Veterans Agent Ray Hague said he sought to move the Italian-American War monument, sponsored by the Italian War Veterans Post 10, from the parish grounds of the Holy Rosary Church in Fall River when the church was closed. In the late 1990s, local lawyer Brian Cunha bought the Newport home of the designer of the original Korean War memorial in Arlington, Virginia, and gave the mold of that design to Fall River, Hague said. The city installed the resulting recreation of the original at Bicentennial Park in 2001. A Congressional Medal of Honor recipi-
