NUTLEY, N.J. — Andrea Buccino, a third-semester student at University of Bridgeport College of Chiropractic, recently released the second edition of Nutley Sons Honor Roll – Remembering The Men Who Paid For Our Freedom (250 pages, $20, ISBN 0-962984-6-6), a book she co-authored with her father. The former Scribe columnist and editor, Ms. Buccino was president of the UB Class of 2003. She spent her summer breaks at the local libraries researching microfilm and yellowing newspapers for facts about the men behind the names on her town’s war memorials. The first thing Ms. Buccino had to do was copy the names of the men from six town monuments covering the era from the American Revolution to a nuclear submarine accident in 1963. Fortunately, Nutley lost no men in either the War of Independence or the War Between the States. The small town in northern New Jersey did lose 138 young men in other wars and peacekeeping casualties.
Through her research the authors discovered that her hometown had lost 34 young men in the Normandy Invasion of Fortress Europe. Prior to Ms. Buccino’s research, the war dead were listed alphabetically on the local memorial monuments. Her efforts led to the first compilation of the stories behind the men. With the approval of the local newspaper, The Nutley Sun, published by North Jersey Community Newspapers, the long-lost and long-forgotten biographies of the town’s war dead were compiled in the first edition of Nutley Sons published on June 6, this year, the 60th anniversary of the Allied D-Day landing in France. The second edition, published on Nov. 11, Veterans Day, has been expanded by 80 pages from the original and now includes more than 120 war era photos.
After the first edition went to press, about 20 letters written during WWII by Ms. Buccino’s grandfather, Angelo, who she never met, were discovered. The letters and some of his photos from the Fiji Islands and Guadalcanal in the South Pacific have been included in the second edition. ”Reading my grandfather’s letters gave me an insight to a man I never met,” said Buccino, who was president of the UB Class of 2003. ”He wasn’t much older than I am now when he wrote those letters about giant mosquitoes and seeing the Panama Canal for the first time.” ”I was really glad to help my dad with this project,” she said. ”I put in the daytime hours and he put it all together.” Her dad, Anthony Buccino, is an editor at a financial newswire in Jersey City, N.J. He has published several essay collections and created a web site for the preliminary Nutley Sons information they gathered. ”It’s our way of saying thank you to my grandfather – who everybody tells me would have been crazy about me – and thank the Veterans. And especially the young men who never came home, their spouses and their children,” she said. ”They paid for my freedom.”