Gone, but not forgotten

Calen Cortamasch is remembered by some of his childhood friends as one of the boys who played touch football in the neighborhood. Others recall Cortamasch, along with his pals Loren Engstrom and John Patrick Lee, as a familiar face that worked at Ralphs grocery store in La Crescenta.

But on Monday morning, with the American flag hanging at half staff, old friends remembered these three former residents of the Crescenta Valley for one thing: being soldiers.

Cortamasch, Engstrom and Lee, all three of them war veterans from the La Cañada-Crescenta Valley, fought and died in Vietnam.

"They left their beloved valley and families to serve in Vietnam, never to return," said Charles Beatty, master of ceremonies of this year's Memorial Day service in Montrose, sponsored by the Montrose-Verdugo City Chamber of Commerce and Montrose Shopping Park Assn.

Beatty led the service at the foot of the first Vietnam memorial in the nation, which commemorates 13 local men, Beatty said.

When the Montrose Vietnam War Memorial was set in the ground at the corner of Ocean View Boulevard and Honolulu Avenue in the Montrose Shopping Park, the year was 1968 — 100 years after the nation's first Memorial Day, first called "Decoration Day," on May 5, 1868.

The Vietnam War, like the ongoing conflict in Iraq, was hardly a memory. It was still raging.

But though today's conflict is the subject of political controversy and wavering support from the American people, no American military engagement in history ever fueled public hatred for soldiers like Vietnam did, Beatty said.

"It was an ugly, hateful war," Beatty said. "People didn't know how to separate the people who fought the war from the people who told them to go fight. That's why it's so important that we honor these men for their service in that war."

The memorial was established by the late Don T. Carpenter, the former publisher of The Ledger newspaper, said Glendale City Councilman John Drayman, a lifelong Montrose resident.

"They did something very gutsy, because in 1968, this was not a popular war," Drayman said.

"But he bet that the community would come together around this."

Thirty-nine years later, Carpenter's bet seems to have prevailed.