Leo Parent still fighting for veterans, even on vacation

Leo Parent still fighting for veterans
The Recorder
By DIANE BRONCACCIO
Recorder Staff
Monday, December 1, 2014

SHELBURNE FALLS — Ask Leo Parent Jr. when he plans to retire, and he’ll tell you he retired two years ago.

But sitting in the Shelburne town offices, as he has done for years, on an early Tuesday morning, he doesn’t seem to have stopped doing for veterans and widows what he’s been doing for the last 30 years.

Since 1984, Parent, a Vietnam War-era Army veteran, has been helping military veterans in 24 towns by counseling them, steering them through the maze of paperwork required to sign up for Veterans Affairs benefits and sometimes even driving a very distressed veteran to the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Leeds.

When asked how many veterans he’s helped, Parent shrugs. “I was trying to think about that,” he said. “Just say hundreds. It may be thousands.”

They include veterans from every war since World War I. One of those World War I veterans, Homer Gamelin of Turners Falls, called Parent in 1984, to see if he was interested in taking over as the region’s veterans agent, when the agent at that time was retiring.

“There was never a day that I didn’t want to go to work,” he says. “I love helping people.”

Parent has sometimes met with a distraught veteran and his wife on an emergency basis, arranged for the veteran to see a VA doctor, and even driven him there, if need be. Parent said his wife of 37 years, Susan, has been very understanding of the middle-of-the-night and emergency weekend calls.

“She never complains about the house phone calls,” he said. Parent said he could never have done what he has done without her support.

Leo Parent’s father, a World War II veteran, died several years ago, but Parent keeps the “Jr.” in his name to honor his father.

Besides his direct work with veterans, Parent is proud of his role in bringing dramatic tributes to veterans from area towns. The best known is perhaps the profusion of American flags on the slope in front of the Carnegie Library a few years ago — one flag for every American veteran killed or wounded in Iraq.

For the past 15 years, Parent and his wife have been vacationing in Yauco, Puerto Rico. While there, Parent files VA forms for veterans living in that U.S. territory. “There’s no VA guys over there,” he said. “I love doing that.”
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