Student Spotlight: Sewickley Eighth Grader Wins Memorial Day Contest

A student who won Sewickley's annual contest will have a day to celebrate in her name.

Brooke was among the five middle school students who applied this year for the contest, which requires participants to recite the entire 270-word Gettysburg Address from memory.

"You were chosen this year after a great performance," Mayor Brian Jeffe told Brooke during a ceremony Thursday recognizing the contest winners.

Brooke impressed the four-person judging committee, as did Kyle Hrabovsky, who came in second place.

Jeffe read a proclamation for Brooke, declaring May 24 as Brooke Stanley Day. He said the date was purposefully set apart from the somber tribute to veterans.

As the winners, both Brooke and Kyle received $150 and will participate in the 121st annual Memorial Day Parade on Monday, May 28.

Following the parade and a program at Wolcott Park, the two will head to the Sewickley Cemetery for a memorial service where Kyle will first recite General Logan's Order. Brooke will follow with the Gettysburg Address.

Brooke said it took about a week to learn the entire address before reciting the words before the committee.

"I started practicing about a week before, walking through the halls at school and stuff and kind of reciting it to myself," she said.

Last year's winners were Xan Edmondson, who recited the Gettysburg Address, and Joshua Chamberlain, who recited General Logan's Order.

Sewickley Memorial Day Weekend

Friday, May 25
Wolcott Park, Beaver & Broad Streets

6 p.m. - Flag Retirement Ceremony

7 p.m. - Patriotic Music

9 p.m. - Celebration of Service Fireworks


Saturday, May 26
10:30 a.m. - Memorial Service at the Coast Guard Station

Sunday, May 27
St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 801 Beaver St.
11 a.m. - Veterans Memorial Service

Monday, May 28

10 a.m. - 121st Annual Memorial Day Parade, begins on Broad Street.

Program at Wolcott Park [immediately following the parade]

Program at Sewickley Cemetery [immediately after the Wolcott Park program].

Can You Recite the Gettysburg Address?

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.