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Marie Meiers

MassLive: Marvin Howard Receives Captain Thomas Hudner Jr. Valor Award- November 11, 2024


Marvin Howard, a longtime volunteer at the Massachusetts Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Agawam and a Director on Friends of the Massachusetts Veterans Memorial Cemetery at Agawam board, was honored Monday with the Captain Thomas Hudner Jr. Valor Award during a Veterans Day ceremony at the State House in Boston. Howard, an Air Force veteran, was joined, from left, by Andrea Gayle Bennet, of the state's Executive Office of Veterans Services, Gov. Maura Healey, and Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll. (John L. Micek/MassLive)John L. Micek


On Monday, November 11, 2024, on a Veterans Day in a long life, Marvin Howard made his first trip to the State House in Boston to collect what he called the greatest honor of that long lifetime.


With scores of his fellow veterans, spanning generations, looking on, he was awarded one of the state’s highest honors, the Captain Thomas Hudner Jr. Valor Award, named for a Massachusetts hero of the Korean War.


“It‘s kind of unbearable, you know?” he told MassLive. “I was told this a week ago. It’s a great honor, a great honor.”


Howard, who served in the U.S. Air Force, retiring in 1961, has never really stopped serving.

Since 2003, he has volunteered five days a week at the Massachusetts Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Agawam, where he helped preside over more than 12,000 interments of his fellow service members.


He‘s read the Governor’s Memorial Day and Veterans Day proclamations every year since 2005, earning him the nickname “Mr. Proclamation.” He’s also a member of The Wilson-Thompson American Legion Post 185 in Agawam and serves on its Honor Guard.

An ironman by any other name, Howard has completed 39 marathons, including the Boston Marathon, and stays active by running four to six miles daily.


The story of the award is as extraordinary as the man who earned it.


In December 1950, during the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, Hudner, a Naval aviator who was white, intentionally crashed his plane to save his wingman, Jesse Brown, the son of a Mississippi sharecropper and the Navy’s first Black fighter pilot.


Despite a herculean effort by rescuers, and in freezing conditions, Brown, who had been shot down, died of his injuries, according to an official history. In 1951, President Harry Truman awarded Hudner, a Fall River native, with the Medal of Honor.


Hudner served 27 years in the Navy and went on to serve as the head of the state’s Department of Veterans Services from 1991 to 1998.


It‘s the kind of story that Veterans Day is intended to celebrate, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, whose father served in the U.S. Public Health Service, told the crowd that gathered in the State House’s flag-draped Great Hall on Monday.


“In Massachusetts ... we have a proud heritage of patriotism and of fighting for American democracy. And I’m proud of that. I’m proud of who we are,” Healey told the crowd.


Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll, whose father served in the Navy, further emphasized that legacy of service. “You show us that any challenge can be overcome if we come together,” she said.


And there, in the middle of it, was Marvin Howard, natty in a suit and a bowtie; stooped, but his grip still strong. “This is probably one of the highlights of my life,” he said of an Air Force career that took him from the suburbs of Springfield, then halfway around the world, and back.


The others standing in the room with him likely felt it was theirs.


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