Boston Globe

Berge Avadanian; hero kept fellow soldiers in his heart

By Tom Long, Globe Staff | June 9, 2005

Berge Avadanian was a World War II hero who threw out the opening ball for
the Red Sox fifth-game victory over the Yankees in last year’s American
League Championship Series. He was 86.

Mr. Avadanian, who was born on Flag Day 1918, the year of the Red Sox World
Series victory, died in his Watertown home on June 6, the 61st anniversary
of the day he parachuted into France during the D-day invasion of France.

”I wonder if he was just waiting for the anniversary of D-day. It was a
wonderful thing in some ways,” Mr. Avadanian’s daughter, Sandra A. Starck of
Watertown, said yesterday.

Although he worked for the Coast Guard and later dealt in antiques, Mr.
Avadanian never forgot his fellow soldiers. Each year in the days before
Memorial Day he would visit cemeteries in Belmont, Newton, Watertown, and
Waltham and place a flag and a personal letter on the graves of about 150
veterans.

”Dear old friend Tom,” read one of the notes, according to American Veteran
magazine. ”I will always remember you. Your great-grandchildren visited me
last week. They are beautiful.”

A native of Lynn, who grew up on a farm in Bellingham, Mr. Avadanian joined
the Army shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As a sergeant in
the 82d Airborne Division, he participated in seven major campaigns,
including the invasion of Italy, the Battle of the Bulge, and the D-day
invasion of France.

Mr. Avadanian remembered D-day in a story published in the spring 2003 issue
of American Veteran: ”Enemy antiaircraft fire was intense,” he said of his
jump into France with 150 pounds of equipment strapped to his body. ”And I
could see cows but at first, no people and no Germans. That changed in a
hurry. I can recall a fine young lieutenant who had gotten a haircut from
our company barber a couple of days prior to D-day, just as I had done. The
next time I saw him he was still in his parachute hanging from a tree near
the churchyard at St. Mere Eglise with his throat cut. The Germans who had
bivouacked in and around the town were merciless.”

During the 34 days of intense combat that followed, the 82d Airborne
suffered heavy casualties. ”Wherever we fought, those once-quiet little
Norman towns became intense rubble within days, sometime hours,” Mr.
Avadanian recalled. ”The airborne division spearheaded inland of those
beaches with almost 13,000 men and returned to England with only 5,800 —
all the rest were missing, wounded, or dead.”

Mr. Avadanian was wounded twice. He was awarded a number of decorations,
including the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Croix de Guerre.

After the war he was a procurement officer for the Veterans Administration
in Boston for several years and principal contracting officer of the US
Coast Guard’s North Atlantic Region for decades.

Mr. Avadanian held a number of posts in AMVETS and was the national
commander of the service organization in 1973 and 1974.

He never regretted his military service and said he would be happy to do it
all over again.

”If God would allow me to be born again, I would pray to God to put me on
that same road to Normandy,” Mr. Avadanian said in a story published in the
Boston Herald in 2004. ”It was the most gratifying thing I have ever done.
I was so proud to be fighting for my country.”

Mr. Avadanian was also a lifelong Red Sox fan.

”I listened to them on one of those homemade radios on the farm when I was
a little boy,” he said in a story published in The New York Times in 2004.
”I was in Paris listening to them on a shortwave radio when they played the
World Series in 1946. And when I jumped out of a plane in Normandy, one of
the last things I said before I went out the door was, ‘I wonder what the
Red Sox are doing,’ and a wise guy from New York said, ‘They probably lost
as usual.’ ”

When Mr. Avadanian threw out the first ball for the fifth game of the
championship series last October at Fenway Park, it was like a dream come
true. ”He had a wonderful time,” said his daughter. ”They picked him up in
a limousine.”

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Avadanian leaves his wife, Rose Marie
(Bazarian); a son, Paul B. of Waltham; a sister, Mary Kachichian of
Stoneham; and two grandchildren.

A funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. tomorrow in St. James Armenian
Apostolic Church in Watertown. Burial will be in Mount Auburn Cemetery in
Cambridge.