Allan Appel Photo
The honoree with Commissioner Connolly.
Lifelong Morris Cover Tom Gagliardi, now 87, remembered that his mom cried for two weeks when as a 16-year-old he tried to enlist in the navy toward the end of World War Two.
Although he was too young and was for that reason turned down, he persisted.
Roll the clock ahead a few years, and, at the still tender age of 19, Gagliardi was discharged, after having served on the U.S.S. Burdo, a training ship for naval underwater demolition teams.
Gagliardi’s was just one of dozens of stories — and the people who proudly embody them — honored Tuesday at a Connecticut Veterans Wartime Service Medal ceremony, which convened at Gateway Community College.
The medal, created in 2005 by the Connecticut state legislature, honors all Connecticut vets who have served during wartime.
At Tuesday’s quietly moving ceremony, State Sen. President Martin Looney, State Sen. Gary Winfield — himself, like Gagliardi, a Navy vet, having served on the U.S.S. Enterprise— Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman and other officials awarded the medals to vets ranging in age from their 20s to their 90s. The vets served in conflicts ranging from World War Two through the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
“You can’t help but be touched that years later they remember. It’s great for the state to do this. I appreciate it,” Gagliardi said before the ceremonies began.
He actually already had his medal in hand, sent, along with a letter in the mail, from Looney’s office, he said.
Before he ran a Wooster Square grocery for 50 years, Emiddio Cavaliere (pictured with Looney) served in an army intelligence unit in the Phillipines.
The gathering was timed around Veterans Day, said the Senate Democrats’ spokesperson, Adam Joseph. Its purpose in part was also to increase awareness of the medal.
When state Department of Veterans Affairs Commissioner Sean Connolly heard that Gagliardi had already had two years service in World War Two behind him at age 19, his response was a quietly uttered, “Wow.”
Connolly said that he and other officials had been presiding at many of the ceremonies lately, approximately 20 in the last month, he said.
That’s in part because, as Mayor Toni Harp pointed out in remarks at the event, 8 percent of the state’s population has veteran status.
Another vet to receive her medal was Annex-born Patty Ann Rienzo (pictured at right). Inspired in part by her older brother Salvatore, who served as a mechanic in the army, she enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps and served stateside during the Vietnam War from 1968 to 1971.
“‘So you’re going to be a WAC,’” Rienzo recalled him saying to her, with a big smile.
Rienzo, seated by per proud niece Deborah DeFelice, said by the end of her service she had top secret clearance because her job — working with personnel records — included where the battlefield-bound soldiers were going to be deployed.
Like Gagliardi, Rienzo recalled a wartime experience that cemented friendship through the years; they both are involved with their American Legion posts, Rienzo in West Haven and Gagliardi in East Haven.
Commissioner Connolly pointed out that the recent bombings in Beirut and Paris should remind us that America’s stature as the world’s longest-enduring democracy is due to the service of the people before him, to whom the medal is being presented.
“People who serve their country are people who do not turn inward. People who serve their country are of a generosity of spirit,” Looney added in his remarks.
Looney said the medal is the first such established by the state since World War One.
Perhaps Tom Gagliardi’s father received the one he referred to. Gagliardi recalled that although he was only 16, his father had given his permission, in writing, to sign up for the navy. “He was a World War One vet,” he added.
Good idea.
I received mine for WW2 at a similar recent ceremony In Hamden recently.
Similar story to Gagliardi. Signed up for Marines at 17, but waited for high school graduation, but then, luckily for me, Marine quota was then filled (Luckily as my cousin Donald entered Marines at thesame time I started, and never came back)
Then enlisted in Navy at 17 and served in the Pacific Theater and aboard Destroyer USS Harry Hubbard. Like Gagliardi, hostilities were pretty much over when I got there except for a few wandering mines which our gunners -mates used for practice.
Most kids, in those days were anxious to enlist and do their parts it seems in retrospect
(Is this the same Tom Gagliardi who managed the local CT Labor Dept later ? Do not recognize the pictures, but have not seen him in 30 to 35 years)