After 56 years of marriage, Jean Kidd figured she had seen just about everything her husband possibly could show her. But as the Ohio couple surveyed the new National World War II Memorial yesterday, Karl Kidd sprung a new one on her.
"I had never, ever, seen him cry," said Jean, who married Karl two years after he got out of the Navy in 1946. "Today I saw him cry."
They were among the first visitors to descend on the long-awaited memorial, arriving minutes after it opened about 9:30 a.m. Karl, 78, stood in front of the 43-foot-tall arch that represented the Pacific theater of war, where his Avenger torpedo bomber was shot down when he was 18. A narrow glint of water was trapped between the bottom frame of his eyeglasses and his cheek as he read an inscription about the Battle of Midway.
"To make him cry," his wife said, "now that's doing something."
Thousands of people -- busloads of students, cane-toting veterans escorted by their grown-up children, office workers on their lunch breaks -- got their first glimpse of a memorial that has been 17 years in the making. And like Jean Kidd, many of them also got unexpected glimpses of entirely unprecedented events, small-scale dramas seen and heard within the landmark's 7.4 acres.
For the first time in his 90 years, William O. Abernathy heard someone -- namely Nick Falcone, a 13-year-old on a school trip from Norwalk, Conn. -- ask him for his autograph. Taken aback, Abernathy, a resident of the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Northwest Washington, smiled and penned his spidery signature on a National Park Service brochure.
For the first time in his 81 years, Harry Atanossian of Kensington heard two students young enough to be his great-grandchildren, both on a school trip from Detroit, ask if they could shake his hand.
For the first time in his 84 years, John Pettavino watched a woman he had never met walk up and thank him for something he did on another continent, when his hair was another color, back in a time that he assumed had been relegated to ancient history by younger generations.
"I'm so glad I got to see this," said Pettavino, a resident of Metairie, La., who is visiting his daughter, who lives in Arlington. "I was hoping it would open before I died, because I'm going on 85 now."
Years of debate
The idea for a memorial was introduced in Congress in 1987, and it endured years of debate as federal panels tried to decide how it should look and where it should go. The site chosen in 1995 -- between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial -- was criticized by some who said it would create an unwelcome obstruction on the Mall. And some said the design was too grandiose, too triumphal and not poignant enough for those who did not have a personal connection to the war.
Some critics certainly remain, but they were hard to find among yesterday's crowd of camera-carrying tourists and curious locals.
"I think it's quite beautiful," said Peter Meister, 31, a NASA employee who walked to the memorial during his lunch hour. "It's really not so interfering with the line of sight as everyone said it was going to be."
The memorial's main plaza is set six feet below street level, which designers hoped would allow people standing at either the Lincoln Memorial or the base of the Washington Monument to gaze over the new structure. Kim Steenberg, 34, a State Department employee who joined Meister for a lunch-hour tour, said the technique worked.
"When approaching it from the [north] side, I thought it would be this big thing that would interfere with the skyline," she said. "But I could barely see it at first. It's set kind of low."
Memorial officials chose to leave standing portions of the chain-link fence around the memorial, hoping it might discourage people from walking on sections of newly applied sod. An information center was opened on the memorial's south side, where Park Service rangers distributed copies of a brochure explaining some highlights of the site.
One of the first to show up at the memorial yesterday morning was architect Freidrich St. Florian, the man who designed it. Shortly after the first few hundred visitors streamed into the main plaza at 9:30 a.m., he stood by the waterfalls near the wall of 4,000 gold stars -- each signifying 100 American war deaths -- and watched as people milled around him.
'Extremely moving'
Some of the schoolchildren threw pennies into the fountains. A worker put a finishing touch on the base of the Pacific arch, spreading a grainy paste into a crack in the stone. Tourists debated which angles would produce the best snapshots. With 56 pillars representing the wartime U.S. states, territories and the District of Columbia, many of the tourists elected to take photos of the pillar for the place they call home. Sherry Konjura and Bernice Diyanni, tour guides from Pennsylvania planning to lead groups to the site in the afternoon, walked through the grounds and studied the Park Service's brochures like students cramming for a test.
"It's extremely moving to be here and all of a sudden see all of these people coming in," St. Florian said. "I have always felt the war was a people's war and the memorial should be for the people. The idea of this plaza always was meant to be a civic place, where people could come and practice democracy, have a dialogue, have discussions and voice opinions. They don't even necessarily know what they're doing is practicing democracy, but that's the greatest compliment."
Many of the veterans who showed up yesterday said the same thing: They're the lucky ones, the ones who lived long enough to see the finished product. They knew the reason officials decided to open the memorial yesterday instead of waiting for the dedication ceremony May 29. They knew the grim statistics.
"We're dying at 1,100 a day," Pettavino said, repeating a number that has been publicized by officials with the American Battle Monuments Commission, the memorial's sponsor, when explaining why they wanted to open it this week.
The final decision to open yesterday was made only the afternoon before. Because of the uncertainty, many of yesterday's visits were accidental. The tourists and veterans from out of town just happened to be in the area, had heard that the memorial might open, and visited the Mall without knowing whether they would get in or not.
One busload of tourists -- including 14 World War II veterans from Decatur, Ill. -- timed the visit to Washington perfectly, showing up at the memorial shortly after it opened and getting a serendipitous tour of a landmark that many had waited years to see.
Fran Henderson, leader of a Junior ROTC group from Seabrook, N.H., showed her 38 students around the memorial in the morning, lingering over inscriptions that described the battles the group had studied in school.
"You read about it in books, you watch movies, but it's like you can reach out and touch it here," said Henderson, 51, who was moved to tears by simple inscriptions of words such as "Iwo Jima" and "Okinawa." "It's right there. Actually in front of you. It's there. I don't know how else to explain it."
