Hermosa Beach honors veterans with candlelighting at Community Center
Arlene Zobrist, Robert Chiota, Dennis Wild, Kirk Gillet and Mayor pro tem Jeff Duclos lit ceremonial candles honoring the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Coast Guard at Saturday’s Veteran’s Day Celebration at the Community Center. Photo
Jill Villalpando knows the value of a freshly prepared sandwich.
Villalpando is the manager of the Bob Hope USO Center at Los Angeles International Airport, and on Saturday she spoke to a crowd of veterans and residents at Hermosas Beach’s annual Veterans Day ceremony. The center sees hundreds of active-duty service members pass through every day, and, she said, they are always looking for volunteers to fill a four-hour shift.
Mike Flaherty, a veteran, and member of the city’s Planning Commission served as emcee and recalled with a smile how enjoyable it was seeing Raquel Welch at a USO event in 1967. But Villalpando stressed that the USO offered rewarding opportunities for everyone to give back to veterans. The duties may not seem like a lot, but something as simple as a quick meal can make a world of difference to a traveling soldier.
“They are away from home, away from their families. It means everything to them,” Villalpando said.
The community celebrated Veterans Day with the customary bagpipes and presentation of colors, but also a variety of reflections on what it meant to serve or to help those serving. The ceremony took place at the Hermosa Beach Veterans Memorial, which was established in the early 1990s by a resident who worked as a counselor for homeless veterans and is now maintained by the local Vietnam Veterans Post 53.
Along with Villalpondo, Mayor pro tem Jeff Duclos, who served in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve, spoke of his hesitancy about being honored because he had never seen combat. He cast Veteran’s Day as an opportunity to reexamine the issues that veterans experience. Returning is difficult for vets not just because of the trauma they may experience, he said, but because of the increasingly discrete portion of the country that enlists.
“Less than one percent of the population now serves. The result is a military far less connected” than it has ever been, Duclos said.
As darkness fell, Flaherty called forth a veteran or representative to light a candle for each branch of the armed services: Duclos, for the Coast Guard; Arlene Zobrist, on behalf of her son, Major General Scott J. Zobrist, for the Air Force; Kirk Gillet, on behalf of Bob Civitello, for the Navy; Dennis Wild, for the Marine Corps; and Bob Chiota, for the Army.