Tinsmill group can't agree over proposed monument to local WWII veterans

The tiny coal-patch village of Tinsmill, in Bell Township, made an outsized contribution to World War II, sending a great many of its sons abroad to fight.

Nearly all of them came back, including relatives of Salem resident Ray Machulsky. In 2023, Machulsky approached a local nonprofit, the Tinsmill Citizen Community Association, with a proposal to place a monument to those veterans on association property at the intersection of Route 981 and Third Avenue. Thousands of cars pass by the spot each day.

Machulsky said that since then, the association not only stopped meeting regularly, but had its attorney send him a cease-and-desist letter regarding his efforts to raise money for the monument.

“All we wanted to do was honor these veterans,” Machulsky said. “There were 70 row houses in Tinsmill, and 45 of them sent veterans overseas.”

Machulsky said he proposed the monument at a July 2023 association meeting.

“I explained it and told them I was going to raise my own money to pay for it,” he said. “We started sending out letters to organizations and elected officials, and we held a polka concert as our first fundraiser. And CNX (the natural gas company), offered to put in the flagpole. They were going to install a flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol.”

CNX officials told TribLive they had indeed planned to support the monument, and still are interested in doing so.

Machulsky continued his efforts into fall 2023, where he attended an association meeting to ask why the project was being held up.

“The treasurer just stood up and said the meeting was adjourned,” Machulsky said. “One of the women attending the meeting stood up and said, ‘No no no, we came here to vote on this, we’re not going to adjourn this meeting.’ Everyone at the meeting except for two people voted to honor our vets, and we were told at the next meeting, we’d determine exactly how that would happen.”

Machulsky was planning to introduce his idea for a small park with the flagpole.

“But there was no meeting the next month, or the month after that,” he said.

Machulsky said over the past couple of years, the association has only met sporadically. In October 2023, he received a cease-and-desist letter claiming he was acting on behalf of the association, and that donor checks they’d received for the monument project had been returned.

“You are hereby directed to cease and desist any attempt to collect money for any project unless you are doing so on behalf of another non-profit association,” Greensburg attorney James Antoniono wrote.

“They accused me of running a scam and threatened to take me to district court,” Machulsky said. “Our sole purpose is to honor these boys in uniform.”

During a Sunday afternoon meeting, Machulsky sparred with members of the organization’s board, claiming they had held “secret” meetings and stalled his efforts.

In the tense meeting — punctuated by screaming and cursing among about 20 residents in attendance — Tinsmill Citizen Community Association President Jim Perfetta resigned and walked out, along with about five others.

“I am done. I resign,” Perfetta said as he left mid-meeting. “Yinz can do as you wish.”

Vice President Euverla Lane continued the meeting. She said Perfetta had walked out of meetings before but returned later.

She said she had tried to work with Machulsky, but said he had made no progress in creating a committee to further explore his plans for a memorial.

She said the organization has struggled in recent years to attract attendance at meetings. She struggled to produce meeting minutes from prior meetings as residents argued back-and-forth about whether the organization had held meetings or properly advertised them.

Lane indicated the group may not have been able to support the exact memorial plans Machulsky had initially proposed, but suggested there could be room for compromise.

“We couldn’t do the big thing that you wanted, but we would try to do as much as we could,” she said.

Lane said the group in the past has struggled to maintain other memorials it had put together, raising questions of whether a similar issue could arise with the memorial Machulsky proposed.

Machulsky said he was not asking the association for money. He argued the group’s leadership was stalling his efforts, which he had first pitched years ago.

“We wanted nothing from these people but a piece of land nobody does nothing with,” Machulsky said, surrounded by several other residents who supported his efforts and echoed his concerns.

Lane said the way forward would be to create a committee to further explore the proposal for the veterans’ memorial and to elect new leadership next year.

“For some reason, I became an adversary here because I wanted to honor the combat veterans of this town,” Machulsky said.

Patrick Varine and Julia Burdelski are TribLive staff writers. Patrick can be reached at pvarine@triblive.com, Julia at jburdelski@triblive.com.