By now, you’ve seen all the memes and read all the comments. From the moment Lexington’s Volunteerism Arch catastrophically morphed into Lexington’s Two Volunteerism Pillars at the Patriots’ Day Award Ceremony on April 17, the snark commenced. An inspirational moment turned instantly and unintentionally hilarious, leaving the stunned organizers and craftsmen who created the Arch no option but to pick up the pieces — literally — and press on.
Well, guess what? The story didn’t end there. This is Lexington, whose proudest moment is the battle when 10 percent of its militia was slaughtered in a matter of minutes — and whose second proudest moment is that same militia picking itself up off the mat, regrouping, and carrying on with the work at hand, prevailing in the end.
So, sure enough, some small echo of that heroic resilience has played out in workshops and side yards this past month in modern-day Lexington. The master carpenters who put so much effort and skill and community spirit into making the Arch have been screwing and gluing and resurrecting, and just as Parker’s men had their Revenge, those craftsmen are determined that the Arch would rise again.
And so it will, taking the place of the fondly-remembered countdown calendar that these same carpenters built. The Arch is intended to count up Lexingtonians’ volunteer hours until the 250,000 hour mark is reached sometime next year. By then, the April 17 catastrophe will just be a hideous memory for the men who built, and rebuilt, the Arch.
“We’re all on stage, holding it, looking down to go to our mark,” recalled John Flanagan, the lifelong Lexingtonian and materials-processing expert who rendered the massive eagle that perches atop the Arch — or did. “There was no feedback from the bottom, because it’s so tall. So we didn’t know it till it hit the ground. And you, I’m in shock, total shock.”
The top of the Arch separated from the other segments and stayed together when it hit, though its finish was beaten up and the whole thing was badly deformed. But Flanagan’s beautiful eagle smashed into pieces. “I went over to it, and I’m looking around for pieces, and I didn’t even find all the pieces. Someone came up to me later in the night and said, ‘Hey, you sure you have all the pieces?’, and he has a sizable piece of wing in his hand.”
“I was just like, Oh my God — I didn’t know what to do. Do I [make] it again, or can I get it back together?” Flanagan said he didn’t sleep at all that night. “If I tried to remake it completely, it might not come out as well, and it would take a lot longer.”
“Then Friday, I just said, You know what? Let’s give it a try. So I got all sorts of epoxy out and different kinds of glue, and just started piecing it back together.” In the end, it took just four hours, but four hours of painstaking precision, to get the eagle back together, though the drying took a lot longer.
And was there ever a moment when Flanagan considered just not rebuilding at all? “No. No, because I knew Eric had a bigger job.”
That would be Eric Campbell, the carpenter who spent five weeks building and painting the sixteen-foot high Arch, made to match the one the Town constructed for Ulysses S. Grant to enter in 1875 as he arrived at the Centennial celebration. Then in a few seconds April 17, Campbell felt all that work smash to the ground.
“There was nobody in front of the stage to direct us, and we assumed everything was clear,” Campbell recalled. “The curtain started to move out of the way, and it’s like, okay, show time. And then we had no idea that it was just catastrophe waiting in the wings, just because of that one little detail.”
In the aftermath of the calamity, Campbell was left with a warped trapezoid instead of a curved box shape. He had at least a week’s worth of damage to repair. Miserable but determined, he got to work — clamping and gusseting and re-stenciling the letters, on and on, replacing all the star decorations torn when the Arch hit the stage.
The rollout had worked perfectly well in rehearsal, Campbell said. Tape marked the spot on the floor showing Select Board Chair Doug Lucente and the carpenters where to place it.
But during the actual awards ceremony, one element was different. The screen showing title slides and a video salute to volunteerism had not raised all the way up before the Arch was moved forward. About four inches were still hanging down over the Cary Hall stage, leaving less clearance than the sixteen feet necessary. The rest is Internet history, or at least Lexington lore.
The eagle, the Arch and the pillars on which the Arch fits — all of it was intended to take the place of the Countdown Calendar, which faithfully marked down the days until the Big Event — the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington. Community groups cheerfully took turns changing the numbers on the calendars and taking photos and making goofy faces and giving huzzahs and posting, posting, posting the results.
The calendar was an engine of semiquin community spirit. Lucente loved it, and knew a successor should be devised. But what? He and others involved agreed the next “Thing” could count up, not down. Finally, Sandhya Iyer, the Town’s director of economic development, hit on that Thing: volunteers will log their hours online, and the cumulative total will light up the Arch and its pillars, progressively climbing up the pillars as hours are recorded.
Eric Campbell, Lucente’s brother-in-law, spent five weeks executing the Arch and the pillars. Flanagan — an expert plastics machinist whose day job is making molds so high-tech they defy full description by laypeople — manufactured the eagle, and felt understandably pleased. It was decided that the annual Patriot’s Day Awards ceremony would be the perfect moment for the grand unveiling. And yet, for Lucente, the wellspring of all of it, something about the 17th was just — off.
“I was frazzled going into the night,” Lucente recalled with a smile in his voice. “The video presentation wasn’t setting up right and we were messing with it right up until the last minute, and the night just started out scrambled. We had rehearsed (the rollout), and when we did it at the ceremony, we all four were looking down, because we didn’t want the wheels to catch on anything. I heard the crowd, and I thought it was gasps of joy. Instead it was gasps of horror.
“My first thought was, ‘what just happened?’” Lucente remembered. “My next thought was, ‘I’m going to resign from everything.’” But on the threshold of the semiquincentennial he’d planned for so long, he knew that was not an option. “I told myself, I can’t wallow in pity. John and Eric were devastated. I had to go on with it.”
So like Capt. Parker’s men in 1775, Lucente braced himself for his next duty — in this case no more demanding than presenting the annual Pat Flynn Youth Award, but challenging nonetheless under the circumstances.
“Good evening, everyone,” he said from the podium. “When we were planning this, I said, ‘You know, I want something really memorable.” Cary Hall exploded with applause and laughter.
“At first I wasn’t going to say anything, but you know — there was an elephant in the room, and so I just — I went for it,” Lucente said.
As for the Arch of Volunteerism and its replica 1875 eagle, Lucente only ever had one point of view, from the moment of catastrophe: “I don’t care if it’s a million pieces, we’re putting this thing back together.”
As for Campbell, he’s just as unwilling to let adversity, however viral it may have gone, hold him down.
“I was very happy with it, I was very pleased. Everybody said it looked nice, it looked great. And now it’s just — I want to redeem myself. You know, things happen, and it could have been worse. I just want to get it on display, and then if people like it, great, which I think they will, but I just want to bring it back from the ashes.”
Lexington pride drives restoration of the volunteerism tracker arch, which broke on stage at Cary Hall during the Patriots' Day awards ceremony.
