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No Public Display, But Williamstown Legion to Honor the Fallen

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Field Park will be silent on Monday morning.
 
It just won't be the usual, solemn moment of silence that accompanies American Legion Post 152's annual Memorial Day observance.
 
The silence will be total, because the usual Memorial Day ceremony and the parade that precedes it were canceled nearly a month ago by the post in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
But although there will not be a public gathering or a closure of Main Street, there will be remembrance of Williamstown veterans who have died — either in service of their country or during peacetime.
 
"We're basically going to do the same thing we do on Veterans Day," Post 152 Commander Tom Webb said on Wednesday. "What that consists of is we're going to each of the [town's] cemeteries and doing a short ceremony.
 
"We'll lower the flag, do Taps, fire a gun salute, raise the flag and go to the next cemetery."
 
He said everyone will wear masks and maintain social distancing rules, and he suspects that will be a little easier than usual because the ceremonies likely will involve fewer veterans than usually participate in the November memorials.
 
"We're basically notifying all the members of the honor guard, but I'm fairly certain at least half of them won't come," Webb said. "We'll pare it down, but it will be pared down voluntarily. In the end, we'll probably have somewhere between six and 10 people to do all the cemeteries."
 
Webb said he was not sure how other American Legion posts in the area were handling the holiday. He said the decision to cancel the public remembrance in Williamstown was an obvious one.
 
"There's not a lot you can do about it," he said. "It is what it is. It's better to be safe than it is to pull off some kind of event. We had, basically, a ceremony prepared for this year, but we'll use it for next year's ceremony instead.
 
"At this point, I don't think there's much anybody can do."
 
One thing the Legionnaires can do is honor the memory of their fallen comrades. They just will do so outside the public eye.
 
"We're not making an announcement of where we're starting or when because we don't want the public to come," Webb said. "We appreciate people coming out any other year, but this is something we're going to do more or less privately for safety concerns."

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Williamstown Select Board Awards ARPA Funds to Remedy Hall

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Select Board on Monday allocated $20,000 in COVID-19-era relief funds to help a non-profit born of the pandemic era that seeks to provide relief to residents in need.
 
On a unanimous vote, the board voted to grant the American Rescue Plan Act money to support Remedy Hall, a resource center that provides "basic life necessities" and emotional support to "individuals and families experiencing great hardship."
 
The board of the non-profit approached the Select Board with a request for $12,000 in ARPA Funds to help cover some of the relief agency's startup costs, including the purchase of a vehicle to pick up donations and deliver items to clients, storage rental space and insurance.
 
The board estimates that the cost of operating Remedy Hall in its second year — including some one-time expenses — at just north of $31,500. But as board members explained on Monday night, some sources of funding are not available to Remedy Hall now but will be in the future.
 
"With the [Williamstown] Community Chest, you have to be in existence four or five years before you can qualify for funding," Carolyn Greene told the Select Board. "The same goes for state agencies that would typically be the ones to fund social service agencies.
 
"ARPA made sense because [Remedy Hall] is very much post-COVID in terms of the needs of the town becoming more evident."
 
In a seven-page letter to the town requesting the funds, the Remedy Hall board wrote that, "need is ubiquitous and we are unveiling that truth daily."
 
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