Journey to Normandy
A Butler woman left a temporary tribute on Omaha Beach to the men from Butler who took part in the D-Day invasion in 1944.
Leanne Heaton was touring France with a choir when she made her pilgrimage of gratitude to Normandy in July
“We were singing as part of the Normandy Festival,” Heaton said.
She described the festival as a monthlong celebration of the liberation of France.
“I met up with a group organized by Mark Pacoe. He invited any singer friends from his hometown to play with his choir, ” she said.
Pacoe, a 1992 Butler High School graduate, is the director of music for St. Malachi Roman Catholic Church — The Actors' Chapel in the heart of New York's theater district.
“He is currently the organist and choir director for St. Malachi,” Heaton said. “It has Mass after the theaters are closed so that the actors can attend.”
Heaton said she knew Pacoe from performing with him in the defunct Blazing Star Chorale Society and at St. Paul Roman Catholic Church in Butler.
“The majority of the choir (on this trip) was from St. Malachi's, Connecticut, New Jersey. It was an ad hoc choir,” Heaton said.
She said there were 56 members, but with nonsinging husbands and wives and chaperones for high school members added in, the group numbered 80.
Heaton flew from Pittsburgh to Paris' Charles deGaulle Airport where she met up with the rest of the group.
I got to experience Bastille Day (July 14) and attend a fireworks show the first night there,” she said. “The French are very polite. They don't ooh and aah and point and yell. They just sit and watch, and when it is over they applaud and go home.”From there, the group traveled to Rouen on the Normandy peninsula where, Heaton said, the choir spent the next three days rehearsing four hours each morning and touring Rouen each afternoon.“Rouen was the city where Monet of the Impressionists did most of his work. After the concert, we had a reception in his former studio,” Heaton said.“The Notre Dame de Rouen church faced his studio, and he painted the facade of that church many times,” she said.“We also had time to ourselves to just wander around,” Heaton said. “The old town center is all medieval, wonderful half-timbered buildings that had been horribly bombed during World War II.”She said Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in Rouen, and visited the historic site.“It was partially destroyed in the war,” said Heaton. “A new church was built on the site.”After playing a concert at the Eglise Saint-Maclou Church in Rouen the group visited Mont Saint-Michel at the mouth of the Couesnon River.“It's an island part of the time,” Heaton said, “When the tide goes out, you can walk to it over a causeway. It's two miles from the mainland, and you walk across tidal flats.“It has been a fortress, a prison and it's now a monastery,” she said. “It's basically a pyramid shape and all built up with the monastery at the top.”
“It has very narrow streets with very steep hills. I didn't make it to the top,” Heaton said. “But others did and sang 'Ubi Caritas' in the monastery as a flash mob.”On July 18, the group visited Omaha Beach.“It was part of the Normandy Festival,” Heaton said. “The Normandy peninsula was, of course, the first part where the Allies managed to push the Germans back. It was very, very difficult.”“The French are very cognizant of this,” she said. “We were there a month after D-Day and they still were observing this.”“Once there, we sang the national anthem at the statue 'Spirit of American Youth Rising From the Waves' at the American Cemetery facing 9,000 white crosses,” Heaton said.“I wept and people gathered, it's almost a pilgrimage area. They applauded when we were done, but I wish they hadn't. I understand why they did it,” she said.“I promised myself I would go to the water,” Heaton said.“You go down this 80-foot cliff by stairs. It was ebb tide, the beach was as wide as it gets,” she said. “It's the distance of 2.5 football fields from the cliff to the water.“The Germans had mined the beach and placed hedgehogs — two pieces of I beam welded together designed to rip out the bottoms of boats if the Allies had invaded at high tide,” she said.“All of that is gone,” Heaton said. “But the whole beach, four miles long and two football fields wide was a killing field.”On a flat space on the beach, Heaton wrote in the sand “'46 from Butler PA USA Thanks Men.”Heaton said she had done research and determined 46 men from Butler had taken part in the D-Day landings. As best as she can determine, four are still alive.“I went in the water up to my ankles, looked at the deep beach and that escarpment and realized that it was a miracle that we won that day,” she said.She also had three poppies that she had brought from the American Legion post in Lyndora placed on the graves of three fallen Americans.The choir traveled to Paris to perform July 20 at the Eglise de la Madeleine church.“There is lots of history at that church. It was built by Napoleon. Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI are buried there. Hitler visited it during his three-hour trip to Paris. It became the church of preference for Nazi weddings,” Heaton said.While in Paris, the choir toured the Montmartre district.“It was here where Gene Kelly was selling paintings in 'An American in Paris,'” Heaton said, of the area that is also known for the Moulin Rouge club.Members also visited the base of the Eiffel Tower (“You need to make a reservation three to five days in advance to go to the top,” Heaton said) and took a boat ride on the Seine.Heaton wasn't impressed with the palace of Versailles.“It was too hot; there were too many people,” she said. “You couldn't see anything. The palace was excessively opulent.”Following the concert, choir members had a tour-ending dinner at La Coupole, a restaurant in the Montparnasse district.“Picasso and all those guys had hung out there,” Heaton said. “It had murals and tiles and paintings.”“Whatever they served, I would try. It's part of the reason to travel,” she said of the dishes.Heaton did note that she didn't care for the beef she had in France.“It's Normandy beef. There's so much salt from the English Channel in the grass the cows eat, the meat was unnaturally salty,” she said.And she didn't have much of France's national drink — wine — because of her singing duties.“I don't drink alcohol because it dries my throat out, so I was away from the wine,” Heaton said.She noted the French, despite their reputation for being difficult, were friendly, even complimenting her on her “40-year-old schoolgirl French.”
