War Memorial

Pasadena.--The words are not easy to read, because the letters have become worn in the almost 50 years since they were inscribed, but with care they can still be made out: ''27 Aout 1944. Entree du 'First Special.' Liberation de Saint Paul.'' Saint Paul is St. Paul-de-Vence in Provence, France, and the words are inscribed on the ancient stones of one of its gateways.Around me the tourists are flocking up the narrow street to shop at the boutiques and ateliers of this charming village. After lunch they may drop by the cemetery so that they can tell their friends back in Ohio or Burton-on-Trent that they have seen the grave of Marc Chagall.

It was war at the War Memorial -- though it was only a political battle, and the weapons were shouts, chants and placards.Supporters of City Councilman Martin O'Malley gathered for a rally for his campaign with key endorsements from state lawmakers, and supporters of Council President Lawrence A. Bell III crashed the event, shouting for their candidate."

The rally was called "Voices Against Violence," and the voices cut through the icy cold air with a somber fury. The mayor spoke and the police commissioner spoke and the children spoke and the advocates spoke. They wanted the people to rise up and the violence to stop. They wanted more money for programs to help youth and for the governor to not cut back on money for schools. They wanted a symposium on education, health and jobs. They shouted the word "Life" and a man called Brother Truth led them in rhyme: "Too many mothers have cried; too many fathers have lied; too many children have died."

QUESTION: In Memorial Stadium's heyday, was there anything we could count on more than the inevitability of huge crowds flooding the ballpark like the tide coming in each glorious autumn Sunday? Answer: Yes. We could count on the voice of Harry Shriver, who handled the public address system for every Baltimore Colts game for 15 years, announcing over the loudspeaker that some lunkheads, in their zeal to watch the ballgame, had overlooked one or another of life's essentials. "People were always so eager to get inside the ballpark," Shriver remembered one recent day, "that there was always some car on the parking lot with its motor running.

Historians who study these things disagree about the time and place of the first Memorial Day, though all seem to agree its roots were set in soil still fresh with the blood of the Civil War. The village of Waterloo, N.Y., claims the first Memorial Day -- May 5, 1866. But Boalsburg, Pa., marks a Sunday in October 1864 as the nation's first. There are other towns, sites of Civil War battles, claiming to have held services to honor the dead in 1865, either before or shortly after the war ended.

ON SOME THINGS, Robert Ehrlich is dead on the money. He's on the money when he acknowledges that "my party" has not paid much attention to African-American voters for the last, oh, 40 years. And he's on the money when he says the Democratic Party instinctively takes black voters for granted. And he's on the money when he said, three nights ago at the NAACP gathering at the War Memorial, "This is a campaign that African-Americans should at least take a look at." But he should hope they don't look too closely.

We must not stop striving to develop superior weapons The article by Carroll Pursell, "Endless race for superiority" (May 13), was a classic example of starting with a flawed premise and reaching a flawed conclusion. The idea that weapons should not be developed if they are doomed to obsolescence is nonsensical. All weapons (and inventions) eventually become obsolete. If the possibility of obsolescence precluded the development of weapons, we would never develop weapons. Mr. Pursell cites many examples of defense systems that failed and seemed to link their failures to their obsolescence.

FORGET THE budget debate. A mere family spat. We've got a real ruckus on our hands now -- competing designs for a war memorial. Nothing so engages the visceras of our gypsy town.One faction, born to lose, wants to preserve some natural beauty and architectural symmetry in this best designed of American cities. The other wants to honor with infinite specificity the veterans of a war, in this case Korea.The commission overseeing the project selected an uncommonly lousy design and turned it over to a local architectural firm which promptly made it worse.

Now that the front of Memorial Stadium has been spared from the wrecking ball, what should be done to make sure it's an appropriate memorial to war veterans and an asset for the nearby Stadium Place housing development? That's the question facing city officials four months after they agreed not to raze the 110-foot-tall Memorial Wall facing 33rd Street. Contractors are about to begin bracing the wall so it will stand long after the rest of the stadium has disappeared. But planners still need to make sure this remnant will coexist comfortably with the $47 million, 430-unit retirement community planned for the former site, bounded by 33rd and 36th streets, Ellerslie Avenue and Ednor Road.

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial - more familiarly known as the Iwo Jima Memorial - has stood since 1954 on a ridge in Arlington, Va., just over the Potomac River from here. Now a group wants to build a memorial to the Air Force only a stone's throw away. And that has sparked the latest battle in Washington's war over monuments.Opponents of the new memorial - mainly Marines, joined with people from the neighborhood - complain that it would detract from the old, and they have filed suit to block it. Its supporters respond that the proposed memorial, a modernist, star-shaped structure, would do no such thing.