THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 19, 1996 TAG: 9605170245
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 12 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: STAFF REPORT
LENGTH: Medium: 56 lines
Portsmouth's Memorial Day parade Monday, May 27, has been a tradition for more than 100 years, and it will continue this year under new management.
Paul Forehand, an administrator in the Parks and Recreation Department, is putting the parade together, and former City Councilman J. Herbert Simpson, who for much of this century staged the event, will be honored as grand marshall.
Forehand says nine school bands will participate in the parade, which will contain about 60 units.
It will start at 10 a.m. on London Boulevard, near the site of the new I.C. Norcom High School, and proceed down London to Crawford Street, where it will disband.
A reviewing stand will be set up on London Boulevard at Middle Street, with Irvine Hill as master of ceremonies. Military brass and city officials have been invited to sit on the stand.
In addition to the parade, Memorial Day will be celebrated in other ways.
The annual service at the Navy Medical Center will begin at 9 a.m. on the hospital grounds, where 800 graves will be marked with flags of many nations.
Hospital Commander Rear Adm. William Rowley will speak at the remembrance ceremony, sponsored by the Tidewater Council of the Fleet Reserve Association.
After the ceremony, retired Navy Capt. Ted Conaway, the hospital historian, will lead a tour of the cemetery, whose graves date to the 1830s. Those who are interred there came from many nations, and each grave is marked with a flag from the person's home.
The hospital program is open to the public.
A new memorial stone dedicated to those who built and manned the CSS Virginia, the ironclad that made wooden warships obsolete when it engaged the ironclad Monitor in Hampton Roads, will be unveiled in a 1:30 p.m. ceremony at Cedar Grove Cemetery.
The memorial was created with a piece of granite from the first drydock at the Naval Shipyard, where the steam frigate Merrimack was converted into the ironclad Virginia.
The shipyard commander, Capt. William R. Klemm, will participate in the program.
Re-enactors will form both Union and Confederate color guards for the ceremony in the Confederate section of the cemetery.
Cmdr. Barton Campbell of Virginia Beach, head of the Virginia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, will be the principal speaker. The memorial was a project of the local Stonewall Jackson Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Following the ceremony, historical tours of the cemetery will be conducted by William and Edith Blake. by CNB