Ranks of Gold
Star Mothers fade

Once-powerful group
of women, who lost children
to war, has few members left

Burns

By Theo Francis
Daily Record

When Charlotte Hoffman tells people she is a member of the American Gold Star Mothers, many congratulate her, thinking that a gold star simply means a job well done.

"When you had parades," she said recently, "they had the Gold Star Mothers riding in front. People didn’t even know who we were."

For thousands of women since 1928, the gold star has stood for an exclusive group they never wanted to join — women whose children died serving in the armed forces. Hoffman lost her son, Larry Wayne Maysey, during the Vietnam War, and has belonged ever since.

Once more than 32,000 strong, with enough clout to sway Congress and the president, the American Gold Star Mothers now counts fewer than 1,400 members nationwide, with just 62 in New Jersey.

A plaque on the Morristown Green honors them, but the Morris County chapter has dwindled to just Hoffman, its only active member. Ann Burns, a 103-year-old Morris View nursing home resident who lost her son three days after the invasion of Normandy during World War II, is probably the oldest Gold Star Mother in the nation.

Ann Hanrahan, Burns’ granddaughter in Cedar Knolls, remembers accompanying her grandmother to parades and bingo games after her father’s death in 1944, the older woman wearing the white dress of the organization on holidays.

"They always used to put a gold star wreath at the various monuments (on Memorial Day)," Hanrahan, 59, remembered recently. For Christmas, the group would decorate a tree on the Morristown Green, putting a gold star at the very top.

Most younger Americans, however, have never heard of the group.

"They say, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ and right away you know they don’t have any idea," said Frankford Township resident Anna Biber, a past president of the national organization and president of the Paterson chapter, which now encompasses most of northern New Jersey.

The Gold Star Mothers was once among the most revered institutions in the nation, according to G. Kurt Piehler, director of the Rutgers University Oral History Archive of World War II.

Even before the group was founded, the mothers of soldiers killed in World War I were known by the gold star as part of a government effort to avoid demoralizing symbols like black crepe, Piehler said.

It was a potent symbol. As a boy, Robert Tracey’s younger brother, Don, delivered telegrams in Morristown, some bearing the worst news.

"If it had a gold star on the telegram," Tracey, a former town postmaster, remembered, "he knew he had to get a priest or minister before he delivered it."

Chartered by Congress in 1928, the American Gold Star Mothers honored women as mothers and nurturers, part of the same sentiment that gave birth to Mother’s Day two decades earlier.

Soon, the group lobbied the government that created it. Some 30 percent of those killed in World War I were buried overseas, and the Gold Star Mothers urged a postwar Congress to pay for each mother’s visit to her son’s European grave.

They succeeded, despite President Calvin Coolidge’s notorious frugality, with racially segregated pilgrimages taking the mothers to cemeteries in France and Belgium, Piehler said.

The group continued to thrive during and after World War II, and, though the government-paid pilgrimages ended, the mothers’ influence remained strong, Piehler said.

John F. Kennedy invoked the group during his presidential campaign, and on a visit to Morristown during his own 1968 campaign, Robert F. Kennedy lauded the organization as well, walking over to touch a 1946 plaque honoring the group at the Green’s southern corner, remembered Tracey, then a Morristown alderman.

The organization began to decline as the Cold War intensified, Piehler said. The Korean and Vietnam wars were less popular, and those killed in battle were no longer kept overseas until the fighting stopped.

Vietnam War mothers were at first excluded from some chapters, remembered Biber, whose son, Joseph, was killed in Southeast Asia in 1968. Today, most of the group’s members lost children in Vietnam.

Biber and others attribute the membership decline to a weakened sense of patriotism and difficulty publicizing the organization.

"People are less willing to be part of anything," said Jeanne Penfold, the group’s national service officer in Washington, D.C.

The group doesn’t advertise, and it often can’t find the mothers of fallen soldiers, she said. The military only releases names and hometowns, not full addresses, for those who die on active duty.

Biber tries to send letters to New Jersey parents. Sometimes it works, more often it doesn’t. So the group relies, as it has for decades, on word of mouth.

Hoffman joined when her son was declared missing in Laos in late 1967, after three local Gold Star Mothers invited her in. She found both patriotic and emotional reasons to stay.

"In my heart, I thought it might help Larry if he knew I was standing behind him," Hoffman said. "It means a lot to me, being a Gold Star Mother. It keeps us up on what’s going on."

Penfold said she sees hope in the future.

"More organizations are starting to honor their Gold Star Mothers in their areas," said Penfold, who receives more queries each year from mayors and civic groups nationwide. "We’re gradually getting it back."