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WILKES-BARRE — For years the Parsons Lions Club has held a Memorial Day parade, but it will have a different ending on Monday.
The parade will stop at the club’s monument, about a block from the granite monument honoring service members outside the former No. 9 firehouse on Scott Street that’s been the end point and the scene of the post-parade ceremonies.
The move has been in the works for a while, club president Tom Rogan said Thursday.
“We just wanted a spot that was our own,” Rogan said.
The parade starts at 10 a.m. near the Anthracite Cafe on Scott Street, proceeds onto Mill Street to George Avenue and back onto Scott Street to the club’s memorial.
Last year the club installed a new flag pole at its monument on property owned by benefactor Butch Novak, Rogan said. “It’s a bigger area,” he added.
The longer-standing granite monument also has a flagpole and is on private property. Chairs were set up on the driveway of the former firehouse for the ceremonies after the parade.
Rick Lombardo, who bought the vacant firehouse from the city in 2010, said he provided the chairs from his tent rental business.
But Lombardo stressed he’s not raining on the club’s parade and isn’t keeping them off his property.
“In fact I even put a new flag up,” Lombardo said.
But the club made the decision to move, and “that’s on them,” Lombardo said.
It might not be set in stone, however.
City council vice chairman Bill Barrett, whose District D includes Parsons, has talked to Lombardo about the possibility of selling the monument back to the city.
“We are in discussions about correcting the situation,” Barrett said.
The granite monument, erected by the people of Parsons after the firehouse was built in 1931, honored “the memory of all who served” especially “those who gave their lives that freedom and justice shall not perish from the earth.”
Barrett earlier brought up the parade at city council’s work session on Monday night.
“We made a mistake when we let him get ownership of that,” Barrett said of the granite monument. It was unintentionally included in the sale of the firehouse, he said.