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Fort Edward honors its veterans with banners

Post-Star - 8/9/2020

Aug. 9--FORT EDWARD -- Elaine Trackey-Saltsman's father would never talk about his time fighting in Europe during World War II.

He said, "The things I went through and the things I saw, I don't want you kids to know about," she said.

Her father, William J. Trackey, died in 2012, and wanting to honor him, Trackey-Saltsman decided to put his face on a banner and hang it from a lamp post in the village.

"He'd be very upset knowing his picture was up there," she said. "He didn't want recognition."

But Trackey-Saltsman feels her father and other veterans deserve to be recognized, so, following the model of a project done in Hudson Falls, she made arrangements for banners to be made.

She sold 57 of the banners for $100 apiece that village and town crews, with help from the fire department, have put up without charge on lamp posts throughout the community.

Banners of the graduating senior class were up earlier in the summer, and when those came down, the veterans went up.

The banners will stay up until after Veterans Day (Nov. 11), then come down for the winter. They'll go back up before Memorial Day, which falls on May 31 next year.

The banners should last for three seasons, before they "start to get a little raggy-looking," she said.

After paying for the banners, she had about $200 left over, Trackey-Saltsman said, and she "thought about donating to a food pantry or something like that."

But then Vicki Frawley Plude, director of the Fort Edward Free Library, suggested using the money to put together a book of all the veterans from the village. Any money raised from selling the books will go to the library and the Fort Edward Historical Association.

Plude has also taken up where Trackey-Saltsman left off on the banners, although she has had to charge a bit more to include brackets, because all the lamp posts were taken.

Will Doolittle is projects editor at The Post-Star. He may be reached at will@poststar.com and followed on his blog, I think not, and on Twitter at

@trafficstatic.

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