The Plaza, or hanging with George
It’s too bad George Marshall never became president of the United States. If he had, Uniontown today might have a presidential library. Tourists (and scholars) would be knocking themselves silly to get here, clogging the sidewalks, spending money.
Alas, Marshall was never commander-in-chief. He was just the top Army general of World War II, secretary of state, and, as secretary of defense, the civilian temporarily in charge of the Pentagon. As such, we have the plaza in his name at five corners in Uniontown, across West Main Street from where he was born and raised.
The Marshall family home is no longer there, of course. It was torn down way before Marshall became a person of consequence and renown. The West End Theater was built there, and that’s long gone, too. Next, VFW Post 47 converted the shell of the theater into the post’s longtime home. Today, the site is occupied by the Fay-Penn Business Center. (Refurbished though it is, it is still possible to discern the outline of the old theater in this latest iteration. It’s kind of remarkable, in that sense.)
With no family home and no presidential library, Uniontown is left with the plaza – officially, the George C. Marshall Memorial Plaza. It was a long time in coming. Marshall was 79 years old when he died in 1959. The plaza came about after several years of hard planning and difficult and deft maneuvering in the late 1990s.
(Just so the reader knows, yours truly was part of the group that strained to put the plaza together. Others, collectively known as the Friends of Marshall, included Charles Cluss, Sam Davis, Linda Waggoner, Ron Nehls, John Folmar, Ellen Ulmer, George Svokos, as well as other worthies, such as Dorothy Neidley, who lived in Virginia, grew up in Uniontown, and got the ball rolling on the plaza. She wrote letters. Boy, did she write letters.)
As you may know, the plaza was recently in the news, when the flags of nations representative of Marshall’s efforts to make the world more just, prosperous, secure, and democratic were cut down, to satisfy the inadequacies of a (suspected) gent who presumably hated the idea of foreign flags standing tall alongside the Stars and Stripes.
What you probably didn’t know was this: the dozen or so narrative plaques that help tell the Marshall story at the plaza were missing, having been removed earlier for refurbishing. They were put back in place last week.
Late Wednesday afternoon, the columnist took a look. I can report the plaques are in fine shape, the lettering bold and the accompanying photographs clear to the eye.
The stars are in the heavens and all’s right with the world.
Except … well, the plaza was built in part to attract visitors, to entice people to come downtown, to help anchor Uniontown business-district revitalization. It’s not at all clear that it has helped much in this regard.
There surely are several reasons why Marshall Plaza has not worked out exactly as planned. One big reason is that there has been no marketing of the plaza. If a product as well known as Coca-Cola markets itself every day, many, many times a day, across the nation and world, doesn’t it stand to reason that Marshall Plaza needs some marketing?
We dropped the ball on marketing.
Maybe we were just cockeyed optimists in those days. Surely, we were cockeyed optimists. I reckon we labored in the belief that Marshall’s historical reputation would carry the load.
But historical renown only gets you so far, except maybe for presidents, though if you have ever donated money to a presidential library, you’ll know how persistent they can be in hawking their ware.
That said, I think Marshall Plaza is a wonderful place. On Wednesday, after perusing the plaques and looking skyward at the flags, I crossed Main Street and sat down on the bench, next to sculptor Alan Cottrill’s rendering of a sitting Marshall. I guess I never realized before how much the sculpture resembles the general.
By placing him on the bench, we hoped to encourage folks to have their picture taken next to the great man. (This was before selfies.) Here’s hoping that yet works out as planned.
I sat there for a while, taking in the traffic, the flags stirring in the breeze, the flowers, the circular pavement, the plaque stands standing as erect as sentinels. I then walked the short distance up to Cottrill’s depiction of a World War II infantryman, then crossed the street to take in John Pallia’s powerful World War I doughboy soldier, a pedestaled, resolute presence at five corners since 1936.
The scale seemed perfect, all of it. But I’m biased. Maybe you should judge for yourself.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.