thedrifter
03-13-07, 05:06 AM
A club of grief, back in action
Gold Star Mothers, who've lost a child in military service, hoped to fade into history. But new wars have brought new members.
By Faye Fiore, Times Staff Writer
March 13, 2007
Washington — THE house is so quiet you can hear the clocks tick, except on those weekends when the mothers come in from around the country. Then the clocks are drowned out by all the chatter as everyone takes turns in the kitchen.
Emogene Cupp, 87 — her boy Bobby stepped on a land mine near Da Nang and was buried on his 21st birthday — makes a pea salad that is out of this world.
Georgianna Carter-Krell, 75 — her 19-year-old son, Bruce, threw himself on a grenade in Vietnam to save his buddies — is famous for her fried snapper. She catches the fish herself and brings it all the way from Florida in a carry-on with her makeup bag.
This brick four-story home in the chic Dupont Circle neighborhood is the clubhouse for a sorority no woman wants to join: The only qualification for membership is to lose a child in military service.
For a while, it looked as though the American Gold Star Mothers, which has tended to grieving women for eight decades, was on the brink of extinction. Enrollment pushed to 30,000 by two world wars had shrunk to 900-plus, most of them little old ladies in their trademark white suits and two-cornered garrison caps.
The thinning of the ranks wasn't a bad thing, or so thought Betty Jean Pulliam, the group's 81-year-old president. Years of peacetime had reduced the number of sons and daughters killed in action the way her Dale was taken by Vietnamese mortar fire on Mother's Day 1967. And that is exactly the way the mothers had hoped their beloved organization would fade into the history books, happily rendered obsolete.
But the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have killed more than 3,500 U.S. soldiers, sailors and Marines, creating a wave of newly qualified Gold Star candidates. Now, the women who sent their sons to Korea, Vietnam and other battlefields — most well into their 80s — feel a renewed sense of duty to keep on, sustaining the memories of their lost children and consoling a new generation of bereft mothers.
Pulliam makes sure homeless veterans get a dignified burial, complete with a flag-draped coffin, an honor guard and a 21-gun salute. When there is no family to receive the flag, she takes it home with her.
Ethel Pedrick, 80, sews 150 Christmas stockings every year on the machine in her Alameda, Calif., home; on Dec. 28, she starts the next year's batch. She does it for the men at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, but also for her Charles, who was killed while loading a wounded comrade onto a helicopter in Vietnam. He would have turned 60 this year.
Judith Young — at 67, she's one of the young ones — sits anonymously in the back row of any military funeral she can get to from her home in Moorestown, N.J., just to pay her respects. She lost her Jeffrey in the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and remembers being in no mood to have some stranger approach her about joining a club. So she follows up with a sympathy card and a note saying the Gold Stars are there, if needed.
But old age is catching up with a group once so vital that Franklin D. Roosevelt — and every president since — declared the last Sunday in September Gold Star Mothers Sunday.
The old guard is dying almost as fast as the new recruits are joining. There are about 145 chapters sprinkled across the country, but some have as few as one member. Just when a new chapter of Iraq moms popped up in Tennessee, the Toledo group fell apart as its five remaining mothers moved into nursing homes. There are no Nevada chapters anymore; those mothers have to join what's left in California. And one 85-year-old woman is single-handedly representing the entire state of Delaware.
"Most people today don't know what a Gold Star mother is," Pulliam said from the house on the outskirts of Wichita, Kan., where she raised four children and now lives alone with a Pomeranian named Bubba.
Once the governor invited her to Topeka to help dedicate the Dwight D. Eisenhower State Office Building. She wore her whites, of course, and the young lady seating people asked what branch of the service she was in.
"I'm an American Gold Star mother," Pulliam answered proudly.
"What's that?" the girl asked.
"Well that's the problem, honey, nobody knows."
THE group was founded by Grace Seibold, whose son, George, went missing in action in World War I. It was named for the gold stars families hung in their windows to honor a son or daughter who died in the service.
The Gold Stars have always seen their mission as twofold: comfort one another and turn grief to action, reaching out to American veterans by volunteering in hospitals, halfway houses and anywhere else they are needed.
In their heyday, they were a busy bunch. Pulliam's Wichita chapter met like clockwork one afternoon a month at the local ladies club. They put on pots of coffee and somebody always baked a pie.
"Each of us had something to be a-doin', sometimes making little crafts for a craft show," she remembers.
Today there are 13 Gold Star mothers left in Kansas.
Their hope would be to have the mothers of this war step in to keep things going, and some have.
But signing up new members is difficult. The Defense Department does not release the addresses of soldiers killed in action, only their hometowns. The mothers scan their local newspapers for death notices and try to track down family phone numbers through mortuaries and the white pages. (They don't care much for computers, e-mail or the Internet.) The detective work is harder than it used to be because a mother's name isn't always the same as her child's, which almost never happened in their day.
About 8% of the newly eligible mothers have joined — roughly 280 in three years. But about as many veteran mothers passed away in that same span of time. The pool of experienced Gold Stars is so low that the executive board passed a bylaw allowing past national presidents to serve again because they were running out of qualified candidates.
The new recruits aren't always ready to dive into administrative duties so soon after a painful loss. The older mothers call them "card-carriers," because many can't manage much else.
The Gold Stars' tradition-bound ways can also be frustrating and mystifying to a new generation of mothers. Many women today work full time and are only free to meet at night, when the older ones don't like to go out. Sometimes the younger ones wait months for membership cards because the older ones forget to send them out.
Then there are the white suits and caps. Gold Stars have been wearing them since 1928. People occasionally mistake the mothers for nurses, but they don't mind. After all, if they were standing around the Vietnam Wall in their jeans, who would notice?
But most of the new mothers find the white suits dowdy.
They hate the hats.
"Some of them want to change everything," Pulliam says, though she has to admit she understands the hat objection. "It's OK as long as you keep it on, but if you take it off, your hair stands up just like the hat."
Still, a tradition is a tradition, and Ethel Pedrick, like many of her Gold Star comrades, has worked hard to hold to as many as she can. Recently she won an award for 10,000 hours of service at the VA hospital on a bluff overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. This last year she sewed up a storm and made 180 Christmas stockings, exceeding her goal.
She can also whip up a ditty bag in 10 minutes — little pouches she sends off to the reaches of Afghanistan and Iraq for the soldiers to carry lip balm and other personal items. Volunteers drop off the fabric, and she puts it in the basement where it seems to multiply unassisted.
"You know what happens to rabbits?" she observes. "Well, it happens to fabric, too."
PEDRICK is old enough to know that some things never change. For instance, she is still glad she married Henry 62 years ago. "I've never thought of divorcing him. I've thought of killing him a few times, but divorce is completely out of the picture."
The other thing that never changes is how much she misses Charles, even though it's been 40 years since he enlisted to be with his younger brother, who was drafted. One came home and the other didn't. You can never get over losing a son, but you can get through it — the other mothers helped her see that.
She loves the Gold Stars and tries her best to keep things going, sometimes signing her letters from the Alameda chapter: "Ethel Pedrick, secretary, treasurer, president and everything else."
Recently, though, she had to give up on the annual dinner she used to throw for her Gold Star friends. They got too old to drive and had to be chauffeured by their children, doubling the number of dinner guests from five to 10, which is a lot of chicken. But the thing that really did it was when Blanche Johnson, who is 100 and has a little trouble navigating the ladies' room, stopped drinking fluids two days before the big event, then passed out at the table from dehydration.
"That was it for me," Pedrick says.
The Gold Stars operate on a shoestring budget, relying on donations to make ends meet. The board was recently forced to increase the annual dues from $9 to $15 (it's free after age 90), causing quite a flap among the older members. But it was either raise the dues or stop printing the monthly newsletter, the executive officers explained, and no one wanted to see that happen.
The clubhouse in Washington is situated on a street with several embassies. The Gold Stars bought it in the 1950s as a home for the national president, but nobody wants to live there anymore. So Judith Young, who is the national service officer, drives her maroon SUV down I-95 from New Jersey every Monday morning, stopping only once at a Wawa market for cigarettes. She spends the next four days living out of a suitcase — seven days, actually, when you consider that she doesn't bother to unpack on weekends at home because, what's the point?
She runs the headquarters, processing applications, answering phones and keeping the house in order for whenever the executive board comes to town. The bedrooms are wallpapered in pink, green and blue, with sheets to match. Young's office has a gold star rug in front of the fireplace and a picture of her Jeffrey on the mantle taken a few days before he was killed; even in his helmet, he had a baby face.
There is a new flat-screen computer she is getting used to and an electric typewriter she prefers; it broke once but the repair shop that fixed it went out of business, so she doesn't know what she's going to do the next time.
The rows of metal file cabinets hold applications of Gold Star mothers dating back to World War II — a catalog of maternal grief and pride: "Sophia Cebulski, of Georgetown, Illinois … son, Tom, Air Force pilot, crashed in England in line of duty, April 6, 1945. Joined Gold Stars: 1972."
Sometimes it takes awhile to muster the will to sign up. It took Sophia Cebulski 27 years. And that's part of the problem. Without some new members, the Gold Stars don't have a lot of time. There is much they would like to accomplish.
They walk the halls of Congress for causes they care about, such as a proposed $125-a-month stipend to compensate mothers for the loss of children who won't be around to help out through old age and fixed incomes.
They are raising money for a statue on the National Mall to honor women who make perhaps the least recognized wartime sacrifice of all, a child. They already have a bronze prototype of a maternal figure wearing a house dress and a wistful look.
"World War II, Korea, Vietnam … they all had mothers," Young likes to say.
AT age 87, Emogene Cupp is the oldest surviving past national president. She lives in a brick split-level in northern Virginia, across the Potomac River from headquarters. A gold star hangs over her front door in the spot where Bobby was always throwing a ball against the house. Thud, thud, thud. She would hear it while she was cooking dinner, a noise so familiar it blended into the soundtrack of her life unnoticed, like the hum of a refrigerator.
When he was killed, the Vietnam War and its soldiers were not popular and neither were their mothers. People would ask her, "Why on Earth did you let him go?" He was drafted, she would answer, horrified.
When his boots and uniform came back in a box, the postman wouldn't walk them to the front door. She had to meet him at the curb. Maybe it wasn't an intentional slight, but it sure felt that way.
The Gold Star mothers saved her, she says. They honored her loss. They made her feel important. She even went to Vietnam in 2002 with some of them to plant little American flags at the spots where all their sons died. The Vietnamese people passing by stopped out of respect, their heads bowed.
That's why she is so determined to keep the Gold Stars going (though she does not wish for more wars, for heaven's sake). She threw a chapter meeting recently and a friend baked a cherry pie. Two Iraq mothers came, but they were sort of quiet and didn't touch the pie.
"That's OK," Cupp says. "I never give up."
Judi Tapper, 67, of New Jersey, is one of the recent recruits. She says she cannot believe how much the Gold Stars have helped her since her Navy Seal son, David — 32 years old and the father of four — was killed in an ambush in Afghanistan three years ago.
She is already president of the Camden chapter, taking over for a Vietnam mother who was 86. She volunteers at a halfway house that mainstreams homeless veterans back into society. She recently held a winter sweater drive for vets; her goal was 50, but she rounded up twice that.
Her wounds are still raw, not like the older mothers. They don't talk about their losses much with one another anymore. "We talk about our aches and pains," Pedrick says.
But when a new mom like Judi Tapper is around, they know just what to do. They let her talk until she's talked out if she wants to. They listen, sometimes with moist eyes. Then one of them says something like, "God never makes a mistake," or, "Honey, just put one foot in front of the other."
And Judi Tapper feels just a little bit better.
Yes, she does.
faye.fiore@latimes.com
Ellie
Gold Star Mothers, who've lost a child in military service, hoped to fade into history. But new wars have brought new members.
By Faye Fiore, Times Staff Writer
March 13, 2007
Washington — THE house is so quiet you can hear the clocks tick, except on those weekends when the mothers come in from around the country. Then the clocks are drowned out by all the chatter as everyone takes turns in the kitchen.
Emogene Cupp, 87 — her boy Bobby stepped on a land mine near Da Nang and was buried on his 21st birthday — makes a pea salad that is out of this world.
Georgianna Carter-Krell, 75 — her 19-year-old son, Bruce, threw himself on a grenade in Vietnam to save his buddies — is famous for her fried snapper. She catches the fish herself and brings it all the way from Florida in a carry-on with her makeup bag.
This brick four-story home in the chic Dupont Circle neighborhood is the clubhouse for a sorority no woman wants to join: The only qualification for membership is to lose a child in military service.
For a while, it looked as though the American Gold Star Mothers, which has tended to grieving women for eight decades, was on the brink of extinction. Enrollment pushed to 30,000 by two world wars had shrunk to 900-plus, most of them little old ladies in their trademark white suits and two-cornered garrison caps.
The thinning of the ranks wasn't a bad thing, or so thought Betty Jean Pulliam, the group's 81-year-old president. Years of peacetime had reduced the number of sons and daughters killed in action the way her Dale was taken by Vietnamese mortar fire on Mother's Day 1967. And that is exactly the way the mothers had hoped their beloved organization would fade into the history books, happily rendered obsolete.
But the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have killed more than 3,500 U.S. soldiers, sailors and Marines, creating a wave of newly qualified Gold Star candidates. Now, the women who sent their sons to Korea, Vietnam and other battlefields — most well into their 80s — feel a renewed sense of duty to keep on, sustaining the memories of their lost children and consoling a new generation of bereft mothers.
Pulliam makes sure homeless veterans get a dignified burial, complete with a flag-draped coffin, an honor guard and a 21-gun salute. When there is no family to receive the flag, she takes it home with her.
Ethel Pedrick, 80, sews 150 Christmas stockings every year on the machine in her Alameda, Calif., home; on Dec. 28, she starts the next year's batch. She does it for the men at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, but also for her Charles, who was killed while loading a wounded comrade onto a helicopter in Vietnam. He would have turned 60 this year.
Judith Young — at 67, she's one of the young ones — sits anonymously in the back row of any military funeral she can get to from her home in Moorestown, N.J., just to pay her respects. She lost her Jeffrey in the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and remembers being in no mood to have some stranger approach her about joining a club. So she follows up with a sympathy card and a note saying the Gold Stars are there, if needed.
But old age is catching up with a group once so vital that Franklin D. Roosevelt — and every president since — declared the last Sunday in September Gold Star Mothers Sunday.
The old guard is dying almost as fast as the new recruits are joining. There are about 145 chapters sprinkled across the country, but some have as few as one member. Just when a new chapter of Iraq moms popped up in Tennessee, the Toledo group fell apart as its five remaining mothers moved into nursing homes. There are no Nevada chapters anymore; those mothers have to join what's left in California. And one 85-year-old woman is single-handedly representing the entire state of Delaware.
"Most people today don't know what a Gold Star mother is," Pulliam said from the house on the outskirts of Wichita, Kan., where she raised four children and now lives alone with a Pomeranian named Bubba.
Once the governor invited her to Topeka to help dedicate the Dwight D. Eisenhower State Office Building. She wore her whites, of course, and the young lady seating people asked what branch of the service she was in.
"I'm an American Gold Star mother," Pulliam answered proudly.
"What's that?" the girl asked.
"Well that's the problem, honey, nobody knows."
THE group was founded by Grace Seibold, whose son, George, went missing in action in World War I. It was named for the gold stars families hung in their windows to honor a son or daughter who died in the service.
The Gold Stars have always seen their mission as twofold: comfort one another and turn grief to action, reaching out to American veterans by volunteering in hospitals, halfway houses and anywhere else they are needed.
In their heyday, they were a busy bunch. Pulliam's Wichita chapter met like clockwork one afternoon a month at the local ladies club. They put on pots of coffee and somebody always baked a pie.
"Each of us had something to be a-doin', sometimes making little crafts for a craft show," she remembers.
Today there are 13 Gold Star mothers left in Kansas.
Their hope would be to have the mothers of this war step in to keep things going, and some have.
But signing up new members is difficult. The Defense Department does not release the addresses of soldiers killed in action, only their hometowns. The mothers scan their local newspapers for death notices and try to track down family phone numbers through mortuaries and the white pages. (They don't care much for computers, e-mail or the Internet.) The detective work is harder than it used to be because a mother's name isn't always the same as her child's, which almost never happened in their day.
About 8% of the newly eligible mothers have joined — roughly 280 in three years. But about as many veteran mothers passed away in that same span of time. The pool of experienced Gold Stars is so low that the executive board passed a bylaw allowing past national presidents to serve again because they were running out of qualified candidates.
The new recruits aren't always ready to dive into administrative duties so soon after a painful loss. The older mothers call them "card-carriers," because many can't manage much else.
The Gold Stars' tradition-bound ways can also be frustrating and mystifying to a new generation of mothers. Many women today work full time and are only free to meet at night, when the older ones don't like to go out. Sometimes the younger ones wait months for membership cards because the older ones forget to send them out.
Then there are the white suits and caps. Gold Stars have been wearing them since 1928. People occasionally mistake the mothers for nurses, but they don't mind. After all, if they were standing around the Vietnam Wall in their jeans, who would notice?
But most of the new mothers find the white suits dowdy.
They hate the hats.
"Some of them want to change everything," Pulliam says, though she has to admit she understands the hat objection. "It's OK as long as you keep it on, but if you take it off, your hair stands up just like the hat."
Still, a tradition is a tradition, and Ethel Pedrick, like many of her Gold Star comrades, has worked hard to hold to as many as she can. Recently she won an award for 10,000 hours of service at the VA hospital on a bluff overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. This last year she sewed up a storm and made 180 Christmas stockings, exceeding her goal.
She can also whip up a ditty bag in 10 minutes — little pouches she sends off to the reaches of Afghanistan and Iraq for the soldiers to carry lip balm and other personal items. Volunteers drop off the fabric, and she puts it in the basement where it seems to multiply unassisted.
"You know what happens to rabbits?" she observes. "Well, it happens to fabric, too."
PEDRICK is old enough to know that some things never change. For instance, she is still glad she married Henry 62 years ago. "I've never thought of divorcing him. I've thought of killing him a few times, but divorce is completely out of the picture."
The other thing that never changes is how much she misses Charles, even though it's been 40 years since he enlisted to be with his younger brother, who was drafted. One came home and the other didn't. You can never get over losing a son, but you can get through it — the other mothers helped her see that.
She loves the Gold Stars and tries her best to keep things going, sometimes signing her letters from the Alameda chapter: "Ethel Pedrick, secretary, treasurer, president and everything else."
Recently, though, she had to give up on the annual dinner she used to throw for her Gold Star friends. They got too old to drive and had to be chauffeured by their children, doubling the number of dinner guests from five to 10, which is a lot of chicken. But the thing that really did it was when Blanche Johnson, who is 100 and has a little trouble navigating the ladies' room, stopped drinking fluids two days before the big event, then passed out at the table from dehydration.
"That was it for me," Pedrick says.
The Gold Stars operate on a shoestring budget, relying on donations to make ends meet. The board was recently forced to increase the annual dues from $9 to $15 (it's free after age 90), causing quite a flap among the older members. But it was either raise the dues or stop printing the monthly newsletter, the executive officers explained, and no one wanted to see that happen.
The clubhouse in Washington is situated on a street with several embassies. The Gold Stars bought it in the 1950s as a home for the national president, but nobody wants to live there anymore. So Judith Young, who is the national service officer, drives her maroon SUV down I-95 from New Jersey every Monday morning, stopping only once at a Wawa market for cigarettes. She spends the next four days living out of a suitcase — seven days, actually, when you consider that she doesn't bother to unpack on weekends at home because, what's the point?
She runs the headquarters, processing applications, answering phones and keeping the house in order for whenever the executive board comes to town. The bedrooms are wallpapered in pink, green and blue, with sheets to match. Young's office has a gold star rug in front of the fireplace and a picture of her Jeffrey on the mantle taken a few days before he was killed; even in his helmet, he had a baby face.
There is a new flat-screen computer she is getting used to and an electric typewriter she prefers; it broke once but the repair shop that fixed it went out of business, so she doesn't know what she's going to do the next time.
The rows of metal file cabinets hold applications of Gold Star mothers dating back to World War II — a catalog of maternal grief and pride: "Sophia Cebulski, of Georgetown, Illinois … son, Tom, Air Force pilot, crashed in England in line of duty, April 6, 1945. Joined Gold Stars: 1972."
Sometimes it takes awhile to muster the will to sign up. It took Sophia Cebulski 27 years. And that's part of the problem. Without some new members, the Gold Stars don't have a lot of time. There is much they would like to accomplish.
They walk the halls of Congress for causes they care about, such as a proposed $125-a-month stipend to compensate mothers for the loss of children who won't be around to help out through old age and fixed incomes.
They are raising money for a statue on the National Mall to honor women who make perhaps the least recognized wartime sacrifice of all, a child. They already have a bronze prototype of a maternal figure wearing a house dress and a wistful look.
"World War II, Korea, Vietnam … they all had mothers," Young likes to say.
AT age 87, Emogene Cupp is the oldest surviving past national president. She lives in a brick split-level in northern Virginia, across the Potomac River from headquarters. A gold star hangs over her front door in the spot where Bobby was always throwing a ball against the house. Thud, thud, thud. She would hear it while she was cooking dinner, a noise so familiar it blended into the soundtrack of her life unnoticed, like the hum of a refrigerator.
When he was killed, the Vietnam War and its soldiers were not popular and neither were their mothers. People would ask her, "Why on Earth did you let him go?" He was drafted, she would answer, horrified.
When his boots and uniform came back in a box, the postman wouldn't walk them to the front door. She had to meet him at the curb. Maybe it wasn't an intentional slight, but it sure felt that way.
The Gold Star mothers saved her, she says. They honored her loss. They made her feel important. She even went to Vietnam in 2002 with some of them to plant little American flags at the spots where all their sons died. The Vietnamese people passing by stopped out of respect, their heads bowed.
That's why she is so determined to keep the Gold Stars going (though she does not wish for more wars, for heaven's sake). She threw a chapter meeting recently and a friend baked a cherry pie. Two Iraq mothers came, but they were sort of quiet and didn't touch the pie.
"That's OK," Cupp says. "I never give up."
Judi Tapper, 67, of New Jersey, is one of the recent recruits. She says she cannot believe how much the Gold Stars have helped her since her Navy Seal son, David — 32 years old and the father of four — was killed in an ambush in Afghanistan three years ago.
She is already president of the Camden chapter, taking over for a Vietnam mother who was 86. She volunteers at a halfway house that mainstreams homeless veterans back into society. She recently held a winter sweater drive for vets; her goal was 50, but she rounded up twice that.
Her wounds are still raw, not like the older mothers. They don't talk about their losses much with one another anymore. "We talk about our aches and pains," Pedrick says.
But when a new mom like Judi Tapper is around, they know just what to do. They let her talk until she's talked out if she wants to. They listen, sometimes with moist eyes. Then one of them says something like, "God never makes a mistake," or, "Honey, just put one foot in front of the other."
And Judi Tapper feels just a little bit better.
Yes, she does.
faye.fiore@latimes.com
Ellie