05/24/2026
For Johnny, we never knew ye…This may reach new friends, my old ones will hopefully humor me again this Memorial Day. 10 years in October since we lost historian Kevin Wright. He wrote this in 2010, it’s long but beautifully composed:
From these honored dead....
The Irish have a song for every occasion. One old ballad went, “A doleful damsel I heard cry, Johnny, we hardly knew ye.”
My grandmother, May Mullen, who lived on the first floor of a stuccoed house on Kingsley Street, Leonia, had a sister named Irene. Perhaps to distinguish her from my mother’s older sister, also named Irene, we—her grand nephews and nieces—simply called her Auntie Bye.
I think I was still in high school when I once overheard my mother and grandmother discussing Auntie Bye in our kitchen. When I blurted out matter-of-factly how I distinctly remembered her, they looked at me in utter disbelief. While I obviously didn’t know her name at the time or her relationship to me, I could summon a clear image of her in my mind’s-eye. I recalled Auntie Bye because she took my older brother Keith and I to a corner store on Broad Street in Leonia. There she bought us each a stuffed dog with a leash made from suspender-like material. As we walked home along the uneven sidewalks, I remember the dog bouncing from this elastic leash as if we were walking a real pooch. Obviously, it stuck in my memory.
My mother and grandmother were incredulous. They also recalled the occasion——the funeral of my mother’s youngest brother, Johnny, who was killed in Korea on March 22, 1953. While they attended the funeral at Kreusch’s Funeral Home in Palisades Park, Keith and I were left in Auntie Bye’s care. I was seventeen months old at the time. Irene Diemer died in May 1954.
Cousin Georgette Diemer is a few years older than I and lived upstairs on Kingsley Street. It turns out my mother, my brothers Keith and Tim, and I were living with Grandma in Leonia while my father attended Armor School at Fort Knox. Georgette filled in the story with her own vibrant recollection. From upstairs, she remembered hearing a pitiable wail as my Grandmother collapsed to the floor … her hand grasping a telegram announcing her youngest son, Johnny Mullen, had been killed in an ambush. He was 24 years old.
Grandma insisted that she be buried using only the small burial stipend that she received from the government as an American Gold Star Mother. In keeping with her wishes, we buried her in the family plot in Tenafly in her Sunday best, lying in a simple particleboard coffin, which we draped with a quilt we received as a wedding present.
This Memorial Day [2010], I had the great privilege to stand at the Korean War Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D. C. Ghostly images of those who did not return stared from the wall as a sculptural parade of soldiers advanced.
Overlooking a memorial pool, the words read, simply but truly: Freedom Is Not Free.
This was a stop on a pilgrimage I had long hoped to make. Deborah and I first visited the new World War II Memorial and found the column inscribed “New Jersey.” My father participated in Operation Torch in November 1942, landing on the beaches of North Africa, only a month shy of his nineteenth birthday. Except for a few snapshots from Tunisia and from the Liberation of Rome, we knew little of his service. Typically, he said little. As a boy, however, I remember that he still suffered malarial fits. In 1971, he died of pancreatic cancer at 47 years of age. Towards the end, he required morphine shots every twenty minutes to ease the pain. He sat on the edge of his bed, smoking ci******es down to the stub until they burnt the tips of his fingers. Because we had no health insurance, my mother had to continue teaching kindergarten; my grandmother Wright and I took turns staying up all night with him, making sure he didn’t burn the house down. One night, he relived a terrible moment from the Italian Campaign, where our infantry suffered greater casualties than in any other campaign in Western Europe. To my horror, he seemed to be calling for a medic as he tried desperately to help a friend who had been shot in the gut.
I also visited the Vietnam War Memorial and found the name of my uncle, Lt. Colonel Mortimer O’Connor, on panel 47E, line 35. He was killed in action in June 1970, leaving my aunt and seven cousins in Tucson, Arizona, without a husband and father. I recalled attending his funeral at West Point. Indeed, freedom is not free.
We culminated our stay with a visit to Arlington National Cemetery. From the gravesite of President John F. Kennedy, we ascended the mount to Arlington House, former home of Robert E. Lee. There, in Mrs. Lee’s rose garden, we saw the burial vault where Brigadier-General Montgomery C. Meigs interred the remains of 1,800 fatalities from the Battle of Bull Run—it was Meigs’ intention to place the terrible cost of preserving the Union at Lee’s doorstep, forever rendering the Confederate General’s home uninhabitable. As we descended through the shady vale of a glittering stream, en route to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, I was silently astonished at row after seemingly endless row of white markers. The words of Psalm 23 immediately occupied my thoughts: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me….”
Finally, at the Tomb of the Unknowns, we witnessed the Changing of the Guard. Just before we departed, we watched a beautiful wreath laying ceremony honoring the Japanese American Veterans Association and the patriotic Nisei experience during World War II.
What gave meaning to our whole trip, however, was a pilgrimage to the Lincoln Memorial, where we encountered people of every age and many nationalities, gathered in a most sacred place with great respect for what it costs to preserve the highest ideals of a free people and this wonderful experiment in self-government. Over the murmur of many languages, my eyes moistened to Lincoln’s eternal phrases, cut in stone, but echoing across the Mall in the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, who once stood at the very portal of this temple:
“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Or, as electric troubadours of our own generation have sung, “Find the cost of Freedom, buried in the ground."
Deborah Powell
