Around Town

Did You Hear … ?

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The town on Tuesday issued a permit for Acme, the Elm Street grocery store known for decades as Food Emporium, to do a $1.5 million interior renovation at the store. The work at 288 Elm St. will include “shelving, display units, refrigerated cases” and checkout areas, according to the building permit, a total of 25,198 square feet. ***

Lindsay Benko, a New Canaan High School graduate whose father, Steve Benko, is the town’s longtime recreation director, is to be married June 9 of next year at First Presbyterian Church with a reception to follow at Waveny House (her dad’s workplace). She met her fiancé, Albany, N.Y. area native Chris Gardner, while the two studied nursing at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. 

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Four members of New Canaan Girl Scout Troop 50121—Olivia Licata, Megan Lydon, Emma Gibbens and Lily Plum—intend to install three bike racks at Waveny, Irwin and Kiwanis Parks as their Silver Award projects.

Around Town

‘So Many Ways To Stay Connected’: New Canaan Memorial Day Parade and Ceremony [PHOTOS]

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New Canaan’s Jim Talbot arrived in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, a major campaign of the war that launched in early 1968 and involved a series surprise attacks. A Maine native who had gone on to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, U.S. Army Capt. Talbot by that time had undergone airborne and Ranger training, and spent one year stationed in West Germany. In six months as battery commander, Talbot saw four killed and 40 wounded in his towed artillery unit. “When you ask a veteran about Memorial Day, faces flash in front of us,” Talbot said from a podium outside the north entrance of Town Hall following a re-routed Memorial Day parade. “Memories of relatives in more distant wars arise from the fog of time.

Around Town

VIDEO, PHOTOS: Hundreds Gather in Downtown New Canaan for Re-Routed Memorial Day Parade, Annual Ceremony

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Memorial Day Parade 2016
Uploaded by Michael Dinan on 2016-05-30. A person’s sense of accountability defines him or her, hard work and mastery of complex things is a virtue, be a professional and war is not glorious, though those who fight beside one another are—these are the four great lessons that William Ruoff carries with him on knowing, observing and serving with U.S. Armed Forces veterans. As a midshipman first-class in his senior year at the U.S. Naval Academy, the New Canaan resident recalled Monday, he applied for consideration to make submarines his warfare specialty following graduation. “To enter that specialty, I first had to interview with Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program and father of the modern nuclear submarine force,” Ruoff told the crowd of locals gathered outside the northern entrance to Town Hall following an abbreviated Memorial Day Parade downtown.

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New Canaan Marks Veterans Day in Ceremony at Town Hall

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Though the many ways that civilians thank U.S. military veterans are right and appropriate—parades, observances, moments of silence and simple thank-you’s, for example—the most complete ways to honor those who have served must deliver both recognition and lasting empowerment, one active serviceman said Wednesday. The United States currently counts about 50,000 homeless veterans—a group that is susceptible to suicide at a 50 percent higher rate than civilians, according to statistics cited by Lt. Todd Kniffen, who commands an officer candidate company of 100 young men and women in Newport, R.I., and whose mother lives here in New Canaan. “Indeed, more veterans have been lost to suicide than have been killed in combat operations since the global War on Terror began,” Kniffen told more than 100 people (many of them in uniform) gathered in the Town Meeting Room for the community’s annual Veterans Day Ceremony, moved inside from its usual location by the Wayside Cross at God’s Acre due to foul weather. “Raise awareness of these facts, volunteer your time and resources to causes that fight these trends. By doing so I promise that you gain, for the world and for the nation, a person whose core motivation is duty and service.

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PHOTOS, VIDEO: New Canaan Memorial Day Parade 2015

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New Canaan’s Boyd Harden gained his greatest appreciation for what Memorial Day means in 1995, about one year after flying dozens of international relief missions to Somalia as a U.S. Marine Corps aviator and officer. As a member of the “Thundering Third”—the third battalion, fourth Marines—the 1983 NCHS graduate went to the island of Iwo Jima, a small volcanic island that had seen some of the bloodiest fighting of World War II in February and March 1945. Addressing hundreds of New Canaanites gathered at Lakeview Cemetery for a solemn ceremony following the annual Memorial Day Parade on Main Street, Harden asked the crowd to envision what those Marines had faced in what would be a pivotal battle of WWII. Imagine, Harden said, that loaded with 120 pounds of combat gear, it was the job of those gathered to get from Lakeview Cemetery to the water towers at Waveny, with 22,000 Japanese soldiers lying in wait in every home along the way. “They [the Japanese] have been practicing for months and their sole intention is to kill all of us,” Harden said.