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Health & Fitness

Can American Legion Survive?

Can American Legion survive?

I am proud to be a member of the American Legion.

But times are changing... and quickly.

Each month when I walk into the meeting room for my Post's monthly meeting, there are less and less members physically present. Each passing month, each tick of the clock, more and more of the dyed-in-the-wool veterans are gone, the men who have been the backbone of American Legion the past 50 years.

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Believe it or not, there are still men in the room each month who charged the beach at Normandy or who flew over the skies of Berlin or who sailed with McArthur in the Phillipines or who nearly froze to death on the infamous Frozen Chosin with USMC legend Chesty Puller.

But the simple fact remains that it takes an extraordinary sacrifice on my part to attend these meetings held in the morning on a regular Monday business day. My peers all have to work. Times remain difficult, economically speaking. The friends I've made who are close to my age who are eligible veterans, men who could, ostensibly join the American Legion's ranks, simply cannot leave work to attend a two- or three-hour meeting.

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I cannot count how many times I have tried to explain this to my Legion counterparts. I've discussed at length how American Legion in many areas of our country has reached a crisis point. Of the 2.4 million members, how many of them have the ability to meet the morning of a regular working day? Not many, I'm assuming. If my post is any indication of how things are going across the Nation, then indeed, Legion is in trouble. Something must change if new leaders are going to be put into place. It is a vastly different, hyper-technical universe we are immersed in now. The days of the lone spouse working to support a family are long, long gone.

If Legion is to survive and thrive, it must by all means change.

And the same goes for American Legion baseball.

As a sixth-year American Legion Head Baseball Coach now in my 25th year coaching baseball overall, my American Legion team just captured the Post's first-ever Massachusetts State Championship. I was doubly proud that I was following in the footsteps of my great-grandfather, Everett Walsh, who coached both American Legion Baseball as well as semi-pro basketball in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Freeport and Bellmore. He coached the Freeport Red Devils, Bellmore Legion, the Long Island Monarchs and even the Jericho and Roosevelt Rotary Athletic Clubs.

As a longtime Babylon resident, Coach Walsh played baseball in his younger days in the sandlots of the Bronx and then later on Long Island with the likes of Karol Yastrzemski, father of Red Sox Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski. 

More importantly, as an American Legion member and World War II veteran, my great-grandfather instilled in his sons, grandsons and great-grandsons a deep sense of Patriotism. I can still remember walking through his Oak Beach house and reaching out to touch the heavy bronze American Legion shield near his art studio. I sit and stare at his sketches of World War II US Coast Guarsdmen, drawings so vivid they seem like living, breathing heroes.

But just as their forefathers before them, today's American Legionnaires remain standing. To stand recently side-by-side a Korean War or World War II veteran, shaking the can for pocket change to help the Post 206 ballteam make its way to Old Orchard Beach, Maine was yet another of the proudest moments I've ever experienced.

With our three-foot, 40-lb. Massachusetts American Legion State Championship trophy standing on a fold-out table, my players and I stood outside the local supermarkets and stores for hours for two weeks prior to taking a bus to Maine for the Post's first-ever participation in the American Legion Northeast Regionals. Had we won, we'd have taken a plane to Shelby, North Carolina for the American Legion World Series.

I still cannot believe the fortitude of men fully immersed in the collective winters of their lives who are willing to stand all day, cane in hand, to help a young baseball team realize its dream. I still cannot believe more people affiliated with the team did not come out to help us. It's unconscionable and completely unacceptable that a 90-year-old Purple Heart recipient stands out of sheer pride and hope in front of a supermarket in the blazing heat collecting nickels so that someone else's son can enjoy putting on a baseball uniform.

To take that for granted even for one moment is the most egregious of selfish acts. Personally, I don't want anyone to associate themselves with American Legion baseball who doesn't bow down and genuflect before these heroes; men not only veterans of ancient battles, but also of today's war to preserve Americanism at its very core.

Yet it's a sign of the times. In this "me-me-me" or "I-I-I" generation, it is the old soldiers and sailors who still cling to the hope that America will continue to pull through our darkest hours. These men donning their American Legion caps, bones aching, are no less heroic in their latter years than when they were 18 or 20 years old.

Whenever I hear a fellow coach use the word "I" when speaking to a team, it makes me wince. Whenever I hear someone say "what about me?" I cringe. Simply put, in the presence of the team, the words "I" or "me" cannot be forced from my lips. I was not raised that way. The coaches who fostered in me a love of all athletic competition - not even one - ever spoke in the first-person.

The team always comes first. The mission? It always supercedes individual wants and whims and desires. Ego? There is no place for ego in a baseball dugout any more than there is for selfish interests in an American Legion meeting room.

These "old men" had it right once before and they still have it right. But for how much longer? How long can we cling to the victories of yesteryear before it's too late. I hope, for American Legion's sake, the organization that facilitated and continues to facilitate Hall of Fame-caliber young men can continue to do so.

But survival requires change.    

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