Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 26, 1994 TAG: 9405260107
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BEDFORD NOTE: ABOVE LENGTH: Long
This isn't your run-of-the-mill school play.
For Charlie Hodge, that's been an advantage. "The lady who lives across the street from me knew my character," says the Staunton River High School junior.
But for classmate Danielle Morrison, that's what's given her not exactly a case of stage fright, but more a case of jitters about characterization.
After all, her character is still very much alive.
"I'd like to talk to her," Morrison says, "but I'm afraid it would bring up bad memories. I'd feel weird calling her up and saying, 'I'm playing you in a play.'''
A half century and two generations later, Bedford's sacrifice in the European theater will be played out again on a much different stage.
This time, a school stage.
While presidents and prime ministers prepare to gather on the Normandy coast for a lavish commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, the community that lost more men per capita than any other that day will mark the anniversary in a more homespun way.
This Friday and Saturday nights, students from the county's three high schools and one middle school will stage their own D-Day commemoration, a flag-waving program of patriotic songs, speeches and skits about Bedford's role in the attack.
With its honor guard of Girl Scouts presenting the colors and its high school chorus harmonizing "Yankee Doodle," the "D-Day Remembered" program is an event so vintage Americana that already it has attracted international attention.
Earlier this month, in a reverse invasion, French TV and radio crews trooping through Bedford to interview D-Day veterans stopped by to record the program's rehearsals.
The county's last living D-Day veterans, Ray Nance and Roy Stevens, have been by to watch rehearsals and have given their stamp of approval.
Bedford lost 19 men on Omaha Beach the morning of June 6, 1944, and the 50th anniversary of the community's grief will be marked in more ways than one.
There's a special exhibit of wartime memorabilia at the Bedford City/County Museum.
There'll be a Memorial Day concert on the courthouse steps by the 29th Division Band - whose predecessors were among those who were in the first wave that came ashore into the lead bite of Nazi machine guns.
And then there's "the show," as it's being called locally, an event that's passing on Bedford's D-Day history to a generation so young it doesn't even remember Vietnam, much less the events on Vierville Draw.
Or, as Hodges puts it: "I thought this was a little nothing town."
Until he found himself re-enacting the community's role in what's been called "the single most important event" in the world's biggest war.
"I'm excited," Morrison says, "It's important to know what Bedford did. You're proud of it."
The show is the brainchild of Nancy Johnson, a Bedford farmer ("I grow apples, ride horses and raise hounds") and theatrical mainstay in the city's Little Town Players.
"I wanted to do a special celebration for D-Day," she says.
And the American Studies class at Liberty High School - taught by Steve Mayberry and Terry Finch - was looking for a class project relating to World War II.
Johnson and the class teamed up during the winter to research and present a program.
But the more planning they did, the more the show grew - until now it also includes the Liberty chorus, the Bedford Middle School chorus, as well as a handful of students from Bedford's other two high schools, Staunton River and Jefferson Forest.
The show traces Bedford's role in D-Day from Feb. 3, 1941, when the county's National Guard unit was inducted into federal service.
But the emphasis is squarely on D-Day. There are recitations of Gen. Eisenhower's pre-invasion message to the troops and the prayer President Roosevelt read over the radio.
But the most memorable parts of the show may be the series of skits about the reaction back on the Bedford homefront.
One, played by Liberty students, portrays two Bedford families - one white, one black - who had sons go off to war and not return.
The point, says Liberty junior Wayne Swain, is to show how the war helped unite a community that had been divided by race.
He says he knew about Bedford's D-Day role before he got involved in the show - but only as an artifact of history. "We saw them as numbers, not people," he says.
Now, after reading letters some of the Bedford veterans wrote home, he feels he knows them.
That's especially true for the Staunton River students who play perhaps the most poignant scene - a re-enactment of the day in mid-July when the death notices from D-Day started clacking over the Western Union telegraph machine in Green's Drug Store.
Morrison plays Elizabeth Teass, the young telegraph operator that day. Hodge is Harry Carder, the city's funeral director. Damon Arrington and Matt Smith play Sheriff Jim Marshall and cab driver Roy Israel, who were pressed into service delivering the notices.
Before she started studying up on D-Day this spring, Morrison confesses she knew "zilch" about the invasion and even less about Bedford's invovlement.
After all, she moved here from Nebraska.
But, she quickly points out, "I know a lot about it now."
She says she remembers her grandfather telling stories about his Naval service in other battles of World War II - but she never really appreciated them until now.
"You just think they're telling grandfather stories," she says.
But now that she's been rehearsing the death-notice scene, "you can know how horrified you'd be, getting [notices about] nine people you know" - the number of telegrams that arrived just in the first batch.
As an educational project, the show already seems to be a success, even before its debut.
Kids, Finch says, often "take the community they're from for granted."
In researching this show, partly by interviewing D-Day veterans and others old enough to remember the event, "they're finding people here have made contributions," Finch says. "Even though there may not be a big monument there, there are things here."
Johnson just hopes the community doesn't find the show - which concludes with a candle-lighting ceremony for each Bedford man killed at Normandy - too maudlin.
"We want it to be uplifting," she says.
\ D-Day recalled
What: A show of songs, skits and speeches.
When: Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.
Where: Bedford Middle School, Bedford.
Admission: $5. (Proceeds go to the Bedford City/County Museum.) Veterans may pick up free tickets at the Bedford City/County Museum or NationsBank on E. Main St.
to mark Bedford's role in D-Day.
NationsBank on E. Main St. in Bedford, or
by CNB