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The day the telegram came
(by Karen F. Mrnarevic - September 23, 2008)
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Photo Courtesy Of Annette Mills
This 1943 photo shows Samuel “Sammie” Pepe in his U.S. Air Force uniform. The Emerson resident was killed on November 10, 1944, while flying a mission over Fontenbleu, France. He was 19 year old.
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Samuel Pepe was only a few months shy of high school graduation when he decided to enlist in the military. Rosy-cheeked and wide-eyed, the 18-year-old Emersonian joined the Air Force, because, as his sister Annette Mills says, “he always wanted to be a pilot.” It was 1943, World War II was in full swing, and Sammie knew he would be drafted sooner or later, so he and a bunch of friends marched down to the enlistment office and signed their young names on the dotted line. A year and a half later, Sammie’s bomber squadron was flying a mission over Fontenbleu, France, when his plane crashed into a mountain. The plane and the crew were incinerated. “All that was left,” says Annette “was their dog tags.”
Annette was 14 when the telegram arrived notifying the family that their only son had died serving his country, but she remembers it as if it were yesterday: The knock on the door, her mother collapsing on the floor, her own voice ringing in her ears, “It’s not my brother! It’s not my brother!”
It is the details of Sammie in life that have faded most with time, even though Annette has tried to preserve every last shred of evidence that once, a long time ago, she was a little sister. “He used to ride me to school on the handlebars of his bicycle,” she remembers, describing a brother who was protective, kind and brave. “I feel like I never had him that long,” she says. “I try to remember everything I can about him.”
For Annette, her brother is an emblem of bravery, and time has intensified her admiration for the heroic sacrifices he made while just barely out of boyhood.
When Sammie went away to war, he left behind his high school sweetheart, a girl named Edna. Just before shipping out, says Annette, Sammie called home from base and said, ‘Dad, do me a favor. Buy Edna an engagement ring. And Dad, can you put it on her finger?” So the family got together for dinner, and Annette’s father “proposed” to his son’s young love. “We put an announcement in the paper,” says Annette. The announcement was mailed to Sammie, already fighting in the European Theater. But Sammie never got it. “He never did know they got engaged.”
In a gesture of her love and respect for Sammie, Edna wore the ring for two years. Eventually, says Annette, Edna married Sammie’s best friend, and Annette remains close to the woman who would have been her sister-in-law.
Throughout her life, Annette would frequently feel the pain of being a lone child, as both her parents mourned for what seemed like forever. Her mother wore black for so long after Sammie’s death that Annette finally had to force her to stop. “It was sad to see what happened to my dad,” she says, “he never smiled after that again.”
A 14-year-old girl, suddenly the only child to a pair of wounded parents, she says she envied another family that continued to have children after losing a child in the war. “The Genatempo boy that was killed [Patrick Genatempo] – his mother got pregnant after that and had a little girl,” she recalls sadly. “I thought, “Why can’t my mother do that so I could have a brother or sister?”
The pain of losing her brother, and how utterly her family was changed by the experience, dominated Annette’s existence for much of her young life. Now, more than four decades later, she has begun to wonder whether those around her have forgotten the war that claimed the lives of seven young Emerson residents.
Following the second World War, the borough named eight of its streets after the men who lost their lives serving their country, but only used the soldiers’ first names. Recently, when Dwight de Stefan, a former longtime resident of Emerson and councilman in River Vale, contacted Emerson’s governing body and requested the borough revise the street signs to include the last names of the men for whom they were named, Annette became involved in the effort. She is aware that the borough has war memorials, with the full names of the men who served, and those who died, etched in neat rows into granite stones. But she is puzzled, and saddened, that the road signs bear only the men’s first names, making the names seem arbitrary to most people who read them.
The borough has argued that changing the street signs would be a complicated undertaking that may not even necessarily serve the purpose of informing the community of the men’s sacrifice. Councilman Ken Hoffman suggested that the borough compile biographies of all WWII casualties and print them in the borough newsletter, so that Emerson residents might learn more about the men than just their names and that they died serving their country. Annette, who says that normally she doesn’t “cause a fuss ever,” was not appeased by the council’s response and has made her displeasure known.
“How hard would it be to add their last names and a gold star to the sign?” she asks, adding that if she could get enough support and raise the money, she would do it herself. It seems that the borough has offered its final answer on the matter, but Annette holds out hope that de Stefan will somehow persuade them to revise the signs.
“The memorial at Villano is so nice,” she says, acknowledging what the borough has already done to recognize its veterans. However, she explains that she has gone most of her life with no place to visit to remember her brother. His only grave is in an American military cemetery in Epinal, France, and she has never been able to go there.
For Annette, street signs bearing the full names of the war dead, and small gold stars to represent their sacrifices, would fulfill the intended purpose of creating the streets in the first place. She will never abandon the desire for what she sees as a simple gesture of recognition that her brother once lived here, a son of Emerson.
“It was a very close knit family in Emerson years ago,” she says, reminiscing about the town she has called home for her entire life. “Nobody was wealthy, nobody was poor. It was just beautiful.” And Annette rode to school on her big brother’s handlebars.
Karen F. Mrnarevic's e-mail address is Mrnarevic@northjersey.com.
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