Elliott Ruoff, a 15-year-old soon-to-be sophomore at New Canaan High School, wanted to do something special for veterans for his Eagle Scout project.
Elliott Ruoff standing next to a veteran’s grave at Lakeview Cemetery. Credit: Sarah Maddox
Standing near one veteran’s marker on a recent, hot and humid morning at Lakeview Cemetery, Ruoff gave his reasons for taking on the cleaning all of the veterans’ gravestones there.
“There’s not enough being done to help them, in my opinion,” Ruoff said.
“One of the main problems with this is that when we’re trying to find the stones, we can never find them because some of them are just so dirty that they’re unreadable.”
There are about 900 veterans buried in Lakeview Cemetery, according to Ruoff. Troop 70, the Boy Scouts troop to which he belongs, is responsible for marking those veterans’ stones with U.S. flags for Memorial Day and wreaths for Christmas every year.
Ruoff—son of a U.S. Armed Forces veteran who delivered a stirring keynote address during this year’s Memorial Day ceremony in New Canaan—was careful in planning out his strategy for fixing this problem before actually beginning his work in the cemetery in April. According to his mother, Holly Ruoff, “He spent at least eight months talking to people and trying to get the right method.”
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The teen marks each grave with an orange or a white flag, which determines how each headstone should be cleaned. An orange flag means that the grave will be cleaned with a solution, while a white flag indicates that the gravestone is made of bronze and therefore cannot be washed with solution. These stones are simply rinsed with water, according to Ruoff.
Peter Langenus, the commander of VFW Post 653 and former scout master for Troop 70 who Langenus served in both the Vietnam War and Desert Storm, said he has helped oversee Ruoff’s project.
“I was the scoutmaster for two years, and I’m still involved with the troop even though my son has been out for 20 years now,” Langenus said.
He added: “The kids knew how important veterans were to me, and now they have this incredible project going.”
The project is expected to be completed very soon, Ruoff said. He expressed a wish that future Eagle Scouts perform the same important task in other private cemeteries in town.
Kudos Elliott. You are an excellent role model.