14-06-2025
Vietnam memorial at MHS undergoes re-visioning
Jun. 13—It's a roll call for the ages at Morgantown High School.
One including Thomas "Tommy " Bennett, Roger Bise, Major Dalton, Robert Hoskins, Howard Jackson and Dave Kovac.
Carroll Lilly, James Messenger, Charles Nowell Jr. and Gordon Perry, also.
You can add John Pickett, William Ross Jr., Ron Rowsey and Jack Wade Scarborough Jr. in there, too — along with William Sisler, Joseph Slavenksy Jr., Dean Spencer III and Delmas Townsend — to complete the eternal class.
Those 18 names have something else in common, besides being graduates of the red-bricked school on Wilson Avenue.
All paid the ultimate price in Vietnam.
Kovac, who was popular and nice to the kids who weren't cool, joined the Marines right after graduation. He was killed in an ambush in the early days of the fighting.
Lilly had been an established fighter pilot when he was shot down — he remains listed as missing in action to this day, as his body was never recovered.
Bennett was a conscientious objector who died as a combat medic while rescuing buddies in heavy fire. He would be bestowed posthumously with the Medal of Honor, the military's highest recognition for bravery.
With the help of the MHS Key Club—classmates Bennett and Kovac were ranking members—the school put up a memorial years ago with the names etched in marble that sits along the side of the school.
Over the years, though, unattended shrubbery took over the monument, obscuring the names.
"Yeah, we needed to do something about that, " said teacher Jenny Secreto, who has long championed the fallen, particularly Bennett, who regularly gets a unit in her English honors classes.
"I'm not sure a lot of our kids know the monument exists, " she said.
Now, just in time for Flag Day, those names are as visible as they've ever been.
Secreto enlisted graphic artists at Morgantown's City Neon to come up with an additional design element to better showcase the 18.
A donation from the Key Club and proceeds from Kona Ice sales paid for the project.
The new-look monument comes in the form of an additional frame to house a gallery of yearbook photos of the students, who, with the exception of Lilly, made the trip home from Southeast Asia in a flag-draped coffin.
The gallery is printed on a sheet of polyurethane-type composites to better withstand rain and snow, said Rudy Hoffert, a design manager at City Neon.
"Of course, we feel good about being able to help, " Hoffert said. "We're a Morgantown company, and so were the people and their families that we get to help honor. And when the gallery needs replacing, we can just do a new one and slide it right back in. It'll last a long time, though."
Secreto, though, wants that collective, composite memory and acknowledgement to last forever.
After all, the teacher said: it's a time-bridge. "I tell our kids today that these guys sat in the same classrooms, " she said.
They roamed the same hallways, took lunch in the same cafeteria and sat in the same bleachers at Pony Lewis Field on football Friday nights, Secreto said.
"And look at what they were facing in their time. They were so young — just like you."
