Penn Township woman spearheads Veterans Day dinner at Lamplighter

Army veterans Donald Rauscher and Rich Marshall attended a Veterans Day dinner near Delmont clad in military uniforms and armed with fliers for their honor guard group.

As they spread the news about the Armbrust Veterans Association, the pair gained some new friends among the more than 200 veterans and guests who attended the Honoring Our Veterans dinner at The Lamplighter Restaurant.

Invited to the meal by organizer Marianne Caruso of Penn Township, “We figured we’d do a little recruiting while we’re here,” said Rauscher, of Mt. Pleasant Township, who is vice president of the Armbrust veterans group.

During his Army career, from 1968 to 1989, Rauscher served two tours in Vietnam, participated in the invasion of Grenada and completed a stint along the demilitarized zone in Korea. Marshall served from 1965 to 1972, working on military vehicles stateside.

Though Rauscher and Marshall knew few others when they arrived at the dinner, their dress uniforms, which are a requirement for members of their organization, attracted plenty of attention and started several conversations.

“We’ve got members from all over Westmoreland County,” said Rauscher. In addition to educational programs for school groups, he said, “We do funerals in Westmoreland County and some in Allegheny County. We do several a week.”

Among the benefits of serving in the group, he said, is the camaraderie: “It gives us a chance to get together with other veterans and compare stories.”

Caruso’s dinners, as she intended, offer a similar appeal for attending veterans and their families.

Not limited to Veterans Day, she’s arranged 23 of the dinners since March 2017, when about 70 attended the initial meal.

Admission to the Lamplighter event cost $15, which included a menu featuring wiener schnitzel and entertainment by the Magic Moments classic rock, pop and doo-wop cover band.

The dinners, Caruso said, are not part of any fundraising effort but simply are meant to honor veterans for their service.

“Our veterans are so deserving of it,” she writes. “Without them, we wouldn’t be the freedom-loving United States of America.”

“I’ve always been patriotic,” she said. Her outreach to veterans was inspired in part by her father, a World War II Army veteran who served during the liberation of France and of Nazi concentration camps, and her husband, Ron, who served with the Marines in Lebanon in the 1950s.

She started by setting up gatherings of veterans at Weatherwood Manor, an assisted-living facility in Greensburg where her mother had stayed.

She’s also taken veterans on outings and driven them in parades in her 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible.

“I wanted to do something for somebody else,” she said. “I feel that our vets have been overlooked, and this is my little contribution to them.”

Murrysville Army veterans Bob Reed and Bob Tepke have been regular attendees at Caruso’s dinners.

Reed, who served a year in Vietnam, doesn’t like to speak about his experiences there.

“I had some good friends over there,” he said. “Most of my friends came home, but some didn’t.”

He appreciates the opportunity to get together with other veterans at the dinners.

“It’s nice where you get to see other veterans and they honor the veterans,” he said.

Tepke was stationed in Germany while serving from 1961 to 1963.

At the dinners, he said, “You get to see people who have a background in the service. You get to mix with your peers.”

Both men attend the Murrysville Alliance Church, where Reed is among the 30 some members of the Alliance Veterans, a group that meets monthly.

Its projects aimed at helping fellow veterans and active service members include sending Christmas care packages to local military personnel who are serving overseas.

“We got a car for a guy one time, and they helped somebody with their house in Jeannette,” Reed said of the group. “We get work parties together.”

As their ranks have succumbed to the passing years, Caruso has seen fewer World War II veterans at her events. There were none present at the Lamplighter, but Korean War veterans were represented by Southwest Greensburg residents Ron Kowach and Donna Fike.

Both served in the Navy, Kowach as a torpedoman and Fike as a corpsman stationed at a hospital on Long Island, N.Y.

“We’ve been coming a couple years,” Kowach said of the dinners. “We’ve got entertainment, good food and good camaraderie.”

Her stint in the Navy marked a coming of age for Fike.

“I loved it, being away from home for the first time,” she said. “I think everybody should spend a year in the service. I think it’s good for everybody.”