Artist and sculptor Pietro del Fabro believes that a memorial monument should be more than a just block of stone with a plaque on it.
Del Fabro, a long-time West Windsor resident who has designed two monuments commemorating veterans at the township municipal site, prefers creating an experience, a mood, rather than simply designing something that looks like a glorified headstone.
His first monument, installed in the 1990’s in front of the West Windsor municipal building, is a haunting statue depicting a wounded soldier barely kept whole by ribbons of his clothes and body. The statue is stylized and yet realistic — just human enough to know it’s a person, but abstract enough to make people think about what it means.
Del Fabro wanted to do something different for latest public work—the American Legion Centennial Memorial, which was installed in September and formally dedicated during a township ceremony on Veterans Day. He wanted to create something to celebrate the lives of deceased veterans as individuals.
Located about 50 yards away from the soldier statue, the multi-piece Centennial Memorial features a stone obelisk standing before a stone wall.
Although it looks simple at first, the monument is far more complex, del Fabro says. The obelisk is a cenotaph — a marker constructed in memory of a deceased person whose body is buried somewhere else — that carries four poems and a star field created by friends and families of deceased veterans. The story of each star is listed on a memorial website hosted by the township at westwindsornj.org/memorial-home.html.
The cenotaph is made of Danby white marble from Vermont, and the wall is constructed with a mix of marble, limestone and granite blocks. Embedded in the back of the wall are relics of American Legion members and other veterans. The relics include dog tags, pins, bullets from the battle of Gettysburg, coins from countries where soldiers fought and commemorative coins given to soldiers.
Unlike a lot of veterans monuments, the centennial memorial is not just meant to commemorate the war dead, but all deceased veterans. It’s also not meant to commemorate a general, nebulous group of veterans. It is, del Fabro says, meant to bring each veteran honored to life through the telling of stories by those they’ve left behind. Each star incised represents a specific person.
And the vet did not have to be a resident of West Windsor Township. “This,” del Fabro says, “is for every [deceased] veteran.”
As of the beginning of this month, there were 33 persons commemorated at the monument. Veterans like Luther Pickrel, an army captain who served in Europe in World War II. The author of the book, The Problem of Fragmented Farm Holdings in Bavaria, Germany, he worked after the war to help to rebuild Germany and transition it from a crushed regime to vital member of the world community.
Another is Guerino Freda. Some people who are old enough might have bought a suit he tailored at Langrock’s men’s clothing store in Princeton. He was the head tailor there after his time in the military was up. Freda served in the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, before he was even granted American citizenship.
Del Fabro says the point he is trying to get across is that these veterans were real people — businessmen, family men, members of the community. They weren’t just names, and they are too important to not keep alive.
Del Fabro himself served in the U.S. Army. He was born in Yonkers on New Year’s Day, 1946, and graduated from Princeton High School in 1963. After graduating from Hobart College in 1967, del Fabro served in the infantry until 1969. Despite it being the height of the Vietnam War, del Fabro was stationed stateside and was able to complete his MBA from Rutgers in 1970.
His professional life began in insurance. Del Fabro worked for New York Life, in charge of “investigating companies that came to us,” he says. He was introduced to captains of industry and various corporate types, and the experience taught him a lesson almost immediately: he didn’t want to be a big businessman like his father.
“I learned what big business and business leaders were like,” he says. “I learned that I wanted to be an artist.”
So del Fabro studied the old-fashioned way — in a studio with an established artist, developing his skills at watercolor. Around the same time, he and his wife, Maria, started making what to date have been 42 trips to Italy. There he saw the timelessness of stone art, and he was hooked. From then on, del Fabro’s favorite medium became stone, which he parlayed over his career into several pieces, including the American Civil War Memorial in Waterloo, New York, the Forget-Me-Not sculpture in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and pieces at St. David the King Church in West Windsor.
The American Legion Centennial Memorial came about when Post 76 commander Bob Cox and adjutant Michael McMahon approached the township looking for a way to “create a memorial plan that will honor all veterans and especially the members of Post 76, for their patriotism and sacrifice.” The township, still impressed with del Fabro’s veterans memorial, recommended him.
The legion’s criteria was to “remember who we are,” del Fabro says. “I said, ‘Let me go back into the history of this.”
Del Fabro considers himself a history buff, but he didn’t know that the American Legion was formed out of World War I. Finding that out struck a creative nerve. For one thing, he’s long been a fan of poetry written during that war, which he considers the best war poetry ever crafted. For another thing, he realized that veterans of the two world wars are almost all gone now. The last surviving veteran of the War to End All Wars died in 2012, and the ranks of World War II vets are diminishing by the day, as are those who served in Korea.
“In the ’50s, we grew up with military people,” he says. “That was just part of our lives, and we had great understanding and respect for them. But that’s not part of people’s lives these days.”
The idea hit del Fabro that he could make the American Legion monument a history project; something that living family and friends can still contribute to with firsthand accounts of veterans and something that would encourage others (especially younger people) to take a more active interest in the lives of those who served.
Del Fabro refers to the memorial as “poetry in stone,” a fitting description given that the marble obelisk is inscribed with a poem from Craig Dworkin, considered one of the country’s foremost poets of the 21st century.
The idea to use a 21st century piece was del Fabro’s way of connecting the decades that mark the American Legion’s century. The cenotaph aspect was inspired by Dante’s cenotaph at the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence, Italy.
“We are very excited about the unique design of the memorial and the way in which it will include members of the communities who wish to participate in honoring our veterans,” Cox says. “We see this memorial as a special opportunity for remembrance and reflection.”
For del Fabro, bringing the project to fruition has worked its own magic on him. One of the incised stars commemorates a man named Alfred Zanoni, a bomber pilot who died in a crash in New Zealand I World War II. The star was placed by Zanoni’s son, Alfred D’Alessio.
“I’ve known Al (D’Alessio) for years,” del Fabro says. “I never knew that about his father, though.”
