To the editor:
On a very cold Sunday morning in January, a bus filled with veterans from Menlo Park Veterans Memorial Home wound up in a precarious situation.
For some unknown reason, the bus with 19 people—many of them wheelchair-bound—were parked at the Park Ridge Elks lodge expecting a room filled with people and a breakfast ready for them.
These veterans of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars were certainly in need of a hot meal, having traveled from Menlo Park only to find they were at the wrong place that morning.
Coincidentally, the past Exalted Rulers of Park Ridge Elks Lodge #2234 were meeting that morning and invited them in. The Elks readied their skills and prepared a fresh home-cooked breakfast with all the fixings for such deserving American patriots… and for the next few hours spent time talking with these heroes.
As veterans any Elk lodge will never forget them, because Elks will always respect and honor the fighting veterans who protect us each and every day.
Park Ridge Elks is one of 112 lodges in this state who are truly a family-oriented organization daily helping our communities, the programs we work on across the state, and our veterans.
I hope you can find a place for this in your paper for it epitomizes the type of people Elks are and how we treat our veterans.
Joe Pedone
Park Ridge
Editor’s note:
Staff writer John Snyder looked into this. Here is what he learned:
Joe and his fellow Elks sure were in the right place at the right time, in contrast to the busload of visiting veterans, who were in the right place at the wrong time.
According to New Jersey Veterans Memorial Home at Menlo Park CEO Elizabeth Schiff-Heedles, “We were supposed to be there March 1. The dates were changed but we somehow didn’t get the message, which is why they showed up there.”
She added, “The Elks did an amazing job. Our veterans had a great time, and it was really nice that they were able to pull it all together on such short notice.”
Schiff-Heedles told Pascack Press that the home sends residents to the Park Ridge Elks lodge once a year, part of a wider schedule of outings.
“We go all over New Jersey and locally, and that’s very different than in the private sector because we get so many trips and it’s all the support of our many sponsors: the Elks clubs, the VFWs, and all those different programs. We couldn’t do it without them,” she said.
The home, licensed by the New Jersey Department of Health and surveyed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, was rebuilt in 1999 on 109 acres.
The 312-bed facility features a town square core with services and resident living areas arrayed around it.
The home is open to veterans who were honorably discharged from U.S. wartime or peacetime services; veterans’ spouses; and to Gold Star families—spouses and parents of members of the military who were killed in action during a time of war.
For more on the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, see “Elks Lodges Support Our Veterans,” Pascack Press, Oct. 28, 2019.
