Tom Hughey's Parade Goes On Though He's Gone

For the 15th year the veterans marched through Town 'N Country Saturday in honor of Veterans Day, which is this coming Tuesday.

One of the vets didn't make it this year. Tom Hughey died in July after a long illness. In a lot of ways this was his own personal parade.

He would have had mixed feelings about this year's version. He would not have liked the pirates and the beads and candy being handed out. He always thought the parade should be strictly for the veterans and that it have at least a little dignity to mark something he cared deeply about. "Pirates aren't veterans,'' he growled at last year's event.

Aaron Griner

On the other hand he would have been especially proud that this year's honoree was an Army medic. Corporal Aaron Griner, 24, was killed in Afghanistan on June 28, 2006, when his vehicle struck a mine while serving with the 10th Mountain Division. Griner had been a student at Tampa Bay Tech

Hughey had been a Navy hospital corpsman, His war was Vietnam, where he served two tours with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment. You might want to know this about Hughey. While in Vietnam, he and a couple of fellow corpsmen helped set up a medical clinic in a nearby Vietnamese village. They even set up their own fund to send some of the village children off to school.

Hughey earned a purple heart when he took some shrapnel while on patrol

The experience affected his life so much that when he left the service he found a job with the state's Children's Medical Services Department, working mostly with cocaine-addicted babies.

I met Hughey around fifteen years ago. He came to me looking for some publicity to help get his parade off the ground. He had watched as the city and the county couldn't come up with much. I recall watching his face actually change colors as he went on about how we could have pirate parades and events like Guavaween but couldn't put together anything to honor our veterans.

And it has always been a struggle. Hughey belonged to American Legion Post 152, which took up the cause. It was never easy rounding up high school marching bands or even getting the sheriff's department to help with the logistics.

A Breakthrough

For years the crowds weren't really crowds, more like knots of people standing around on Saturday mornings. He felt like the breakthrough was that November morning in 2001, just two months after the terrorist attacks on America. I remembered that parade and its huge crowd, largely because they honored my old Plant High classmate Frank "Tink'' McNutt, who had fallen on a grenade in Vietnam and sacrificed his life for his fellow soldiers:

I would frequently see Hughey during the year when he would volunteer his Purple Heart honor guard to act as color guards at various functions.

The Town 'N Country parade has now reached a point that it has become a community event and is something to be proud of.

My guess is that come Tuesday, when they hold their ceremonies out at the Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell, where Hughey is buried, he and thousands of his comrades will be looking on in approval as we pause to honor veterans at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month once again.