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01/09/2019 09:15 AMMarie McFarlin found the town’s World War II (WWII) Memorial plaque lacking. As the president of the Old Saybrook Historical Society, she found it especially irksome as the organization began work on its WWII exhibition in the spring of 2016. Every time she walked into Town Hall, she’d notice it, surrounded by a large, white frame, the names printed on slips of paper, some damaged to the point of being unreadable. There were obvious errors, the list was incomplete, and there was no heading—nothing that designated the names as individuals from the town who had served in the war. They deserved so much more.
Creating a new one would make a good high school senior project, she decided.
McFarlin suggested it to Adam and Jonah Nucci, then juniors in the Class of 2018 at Old Saybrook High School (OSHS) who’d interned at the historical society since the 8th grade. They were understandably not so sure they wanted to take it on.
“They had to go to the Connecticut State Library to look it all up to make sure they were accurate, figure out how to get [the old one] taken down, figure out how to put [the new one] up, and make sure it was all perfect. That was a huge undertaking. Huge,” said McFarlin.
“They’re very busy people,” McFarlin added.
Both boys were involved in sports, had jobs, and were dedicated students, but McFarlin had confidence they could do it. Reliable, intelligent, and interested in history, the twins were a natural team who could take this on successfully, she was sure. Their biggest hurdle, she thought, would be learning to manage their time.
They recognized the enormity of the project, gave it some thought, and decided to take it on for the senior project the following academic year, 2017-2018.
“Once we got it going, it was full force. We weren’t going to stop until we got it complete,” said Jonah Nucci.
Their friend, Dean Nobile, also a senior, offered his help.
“It was more than a two-person job, so I decided to hop on and help them, because I needed a senior project, too,” Nobile said.
Their first step was to search for whoever created the existing memorial plaque.
“We never figured that out,” Adam Nucci said. “We wanted to track down whoever made the old one just to get their permission because they put in a lot of work just as we did to make [the new one]. We wanted to give them credit, we wanted to make sure we were allowed to take their work down because obviously we didn’t want to step over any bounds in that sense. But we never found them.”
Their research began with a document belonging to the historical society, “kind of an honor roll list,” Jonah Nucci said, “names of people who had served during WWII in Old Saybrook. Mrs. McFarlin said we really don’t know if this is correct; we don’t know if the names are spelled right; we don’t know if there’s additional names; we don’t know if people shouldn’t be on here.”
“We had to make sure that everyone that had served in WWII from Old Saybrook was on this final project,” Nucci continued. “So all three of us did some research on our own, and we went to the state library” in Hartford.
“Eventually we formulated this list from different documents we had found at the state library, at the historical society and online through our research, so we created this master list of people,” he said. “As of right now, I don’t think we forgot anyone.”
“I guess you never know,” said Adam Nucci. “There are so many documents to check with, that it’s hard to say we’re 100 percent.”
McFarlin had told the boys that the historical society would help fund the project, if needed. The boys looked into the cost of etching the names on glass; it was thousands of dollars.
“Part of these programs is similar to the eagle scout projects where kids seek their funding,” said McFarlin. “On their own they decided that the first bids were prohibitive and they needed to find alternatives.”
Others in town were willing to lend a hand. Carl von Dassel, Jr., owner of Tri-State Glass Company, donated the glass, removed the old plaque, and mounted the new one. And the OSHS shop teacher, Gerald Carlone, allowed the boys to use a recently purchased glass etcher. He showed them some etching basics, and they taught themselves the rest, using practice sheets of glass.
“We spent a couple of weeks playing with settings and materials on the machine and what was going to come out the best,” Adam Nucci said. “After doing all that research on what we were going to do for the etching…all we had to do was to put all the names that we found into the etching software. We only had one run at it because once you start it, you can’t really go back and undo anything.
“It took about 14 hours for the whole thing to be laser etched,” Nucci continued. “That was a process of trial and error with practice pieces of glass and finally getting it where we wanted it to.”
“It was also the first time that the school had used that machine to etch glass, so it was the three of us…as the guinea pigs in this project,” Jonah Nucci added. “We had to cover [the top of the glass] with a layer of dish soap because apparently when the laser hits the glass, the dish soap helps disperse the heat so it makes sure that the letters come out a little more crisp.”
It was a bit nerve wracking, putting that large, generously donated sheet of glass in the machine and letting it run. But they’re happy with the result, which they stopped by Town Hall to see in the first days of the New Year. And so is First Selectman Carl P. Fortuna, Jr.
“That’s a piece of art,” Fortuna said. “I love it so much.”
Memories Made, Lessons Learned
The significance of the sacrifice the names represent is not lost on Nobile and the Nuccis. As they worked on the project, they thought and talked about the fact that they were around the age of many of those young men when they went off to fight a war overseas.
“We talked about it. We looked at the yearbooks,” Nobile said. “We had to present it to our class—all of us did. We kind of wanted to make sure our generation didn’t forget the sacrifices these men and women made for us.”
“We didn’t live through any major war or anything like that that our grandparents and parents lived through, so we don’t have that same connection,” said Adam Nucci. “So taking the step to make the memorial as a high schooler was something to motivate other kids to never forget the soldiers. And especially moving into the future to always have these memorials and re-establish them once they’re falling apart.”
The memorial plaque “was something we wanted to leave” behind, Jonah Nucci said. “As we all aren’t spending as much time in this town, we kind of wanted to leave our mark in some sort of way.
“It’s really for those who served, though,” he added. “We really wanted to emphasize that we were commemorating those who served for their country back when it was a different place.”
All three are now freshmen in college: Adam Nucci at Northeastern University in Boston, Jonah Nucci at UCLA, and Dean Nobile at the University of Connecticut.