HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

World War II Honor Roll

New York, Queens County, New York

Marker Inscription

1941---1945 WORLD WAR II JOHN ADIKES JR. --- NORMAN H. PUFF SIGMUND GILLMORE --- PETER P. RENZO KENNETH S. KINNES --- JOSEPH A. SCHIEBEL JOHN B. LOVELY --- DONALD J. SCHNEIDER PAUL W. OLSON --- CHARLES J. YODICE

The Story

This honor roll records the names of ten local men who served during World War II, the conflict that spanned 1941 to 1945 for the United States. Neighborhood memorials like this one appeared throughout Queens and across the country, listing the young men a community sent to war. Each name marks a family and a block touched by the global struggle.

Why it matters

It grounds the sweeping story of World War II in a single New York neighborhood, preserving the individual servicemen behind the nation's collective effort.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

When the United States entered the Second World War at the end of 1941, the fighting was oceans away — but the war reached into every neighborhood in the country, and few places felt it more directly than the tightly knit communities of Queens. Across this stretch of New York City, blocks of modest homes emptied of their young men as the draft and volunteer enlistments pulled a whole generation into uniform.

The years 1941 to 1945 reshaped daily life at home as much as abroad. Families followed the news of distant campaigns, scanned casualty lists, rationed sugar and gasoline, and waited for letters. In a borough like Queens, where neighbors knew one another and the parish or the local hall was the center of things, the war was measured not in grand strategy but in familiar names.

This honor roll grew out of that experience. Communities all over the country put up boards and monuments listing the local men in service — a way of keeping absent sons present, and of binding a neighborhood together around the people it had sent away.

People & events

The heart of this memorial is its list of names: John Adikes Jr., Sigmund Gillmore, Kenneth S. Kinnes, John B. Lovely, Paul W. Olson, Norman H. Puff, Peter P. Renzo, Joseph A. Schiebel, Donald J. Schneider, and Charles J. Yodice. Ten men, ten families, one small piece of a city at war.

We should be careful about what the marker tells us and what it does not. It records these men under the years 1941–1945 as neighbors who served — it does not spell out where each went or what became of them. What we can say with confidence is human and local: behind every name was a household on one of these blocks, a familiar face at the corner store or the front stoop, now scattered across the theaters of a global war.

That mix of names — Adikes, Gillmore, Renzo, Schiebel, Yodice — is itself a portrait of the neighborhood. It reflects the immigrant streams that built Queens, and the way a shared American emergency drew together families of every background onto the same honor roll.

Its place in the American story

The Second World War is usually told in enormous numbers — millions in uniform, whole nations mobilized, a struggle that spanned the globe. But those numbers are made of exactly the kind of list carved here. Sixteen million Americans served; every one of them was somebody's neighbor, and monuments like this are where the abstraction becomes flesh.

Neighborhood honor rolls appeared by the thousands, in Queens and across the country, because communities needed a way to hold onto their own. They turned a world war into something a person could stand in front of and read — ten names you could say aloud, belonging to streets you could walk.

That is the quiet significance of this memorial. It preserves the individual servicemen behind the national effort, insisting that the war was won not by a faceless mass but by particular people from particular blocks — and that their community chose to remember them by name.

If you visit

Approach this one the way its neighbors intended: read the names slowly. That is really the whole of the experience — ten names, set down together, meant to be spoken and remembered rather than rushed past. Give each one a beat.

Look at the setting, too. Memorials like this were placed where a community would pass them in the ordinary course of the day, and part of their power is how modest and local they are — no grand plaza, just a neighborhood keeping faith with its own. Standing there, you get a sense of the block as it was in the 1940s, and of the families who put the marker up.

If you're exploring this part of Queens, a stop here adds a human, ground-level layer to the sweeping story of the war. It asks nothing of you but a moment's attention, and it rewards that moment with ten reminders that the war was fought by people from streets like these.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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Related people

  • · John Adikes Jr.
  • · Sigmund Gillmore
  • · Kenneth S. Kinnes
  • · John B. Lovely
  • · Paul W. Olson
  • · Norman H. Puff
  • · Peter P. Renzo
  • · Joseph A. Schiebel
  • · Donald J. Schneider
  • · Charles J. Yodice

Related events

  • · World War II

Themes & tags

World War IIMonument

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