The Scofield Park Memorial

The year is 1925 and the great war "to end all wars" is now largely a benchmark of memory for veterans who are now in the midst of their own postwar period economic boom.

The entrepreneurial craftsmen, the immigrants or the children of immigrants that were the spine of a still largely agrarian economy were now fading in the "Fordization" of mass production, electrification, national advertising and an unprecedented era of mobility and communication...radio...the arrival of aviation...1925 was flush with unprecedented confidence, and the era of the disposable, the irreparable was yet to arrive.

Public buildings, automobiles and even something as mechanically simple as the new convenience of an electric fan were fabricated with a sense of permanence. The Great Depression is yet four years distant in the unknowable future.

In this year of 1925, a permanent monument as a memorial is about to be completed by a team of craftsmen. This is a work that cannot be mass produced and it was built perhaps as an extension of human memory just as the written word is placed on a blank sheet of paper, lest we forget. On that monument was inscribed the names of those who went, rightfully or wrongfully to wage war to end all wars. One name in particular for this writer also serves as a reminder, an extension of a personal memory that of my grandfather. Oscar.

Below is an image of the local paper extolling the completion of the memorial and in my mind's eye. I see him at the breakfast table. paging through the morning edition with his coffee and orange juice and coming upon this;

How did he view this memorial in his back yard, so to speak? He had served in the field artillery in the this last and first truly global conflict. The last to use the horse to draw the weapons of war

Now the age of the automobile had arrived, the "fliver" with it's output measured in "horsepower". Even in the last year of his life, a Sunday drive with yours truly in the backseat was a recreation that I suppose, now looking back, I am fairly certain, the driving of an automobile had an entirely different meaning to him, than it does to me. Driving is now a almost exclusively a necessity, not an object of pleasure.

Recently, this work of craftsmen who have long since having passed from this life, that remains in Scofield Park,  has demonstrated their wisdom of working with material mediums that  transcends their lives, restorative to a legacy based on a confidence in it's permanence. More permanent than the post editorial resolution that World War One was the war to end all wars.



A life, many lives bench marked by the ritualized conflicts of war and personal memory juxtaposed against the external extensions of memory in memorials..certainly a contrast  but yet, as one person noted that what we see, that which we experience internally and without in regard to others is simply a shadow of an individual as hopeful, as cynical and as bewildered as the rest of us.