NORTH ADAMS — In 1943, Henry J. Contois was 27 and working as a thresher tender at the Hoosac Cotton Mill on Union Street when his life changed. He was drafted into the U.S. Army during the peak of World War II. By 1944, he was off to Ile-de-France.

Speaking outside City Hall on Friday morning, Carol Ethier-Kipp remembered how Contois, her father, never said much about his two years and seven months as a medic at station hospitals around Paris — she’d later find that out from the 939 letters he sent her mother while he was away.

But she noticed how he was always the one to rush to help with his army-issued first aid kit when she was hurt.

Carol Ethier-Kipp speaks at the Hometown Heroes ceremony Friday that honored 132 veterans with banners downtown. Ethier-Kipp's father, Henry J. Contois, was among those honored with a banner.

Ethier-Kipp was one of over 300 people who showed up to City Hall’s front lawn to celebrate local living and fallen veterans like her dad — 132 of whom, including Contois, are now honored with Hometown Heroes banners hanging downtown that were revealed at the ceremony.

“Let us never forget that all of these banners are reminders of real people with real names and real families who gave their tomorrow for our todays,” said Ethier-Kipp at the ceremony.

The banners will go up each spring and will be taken down shortly after Veterans Day.

Mayor Jennifer Macksey and family members revealed a veterans banner honoring her father, Edward Macksey, an Army veteran who served during the Korean War.

A project almost a year in the making, Veterans Services Agent Kurtis Durocher organized the banner installation, which came together after months of collaboration with local businesses and high schools.

Drury High School students in Patrick Boulger’s civics class made a website with biographies of each veteran on the banners and students from the class read the name of the veterans before families dispersed to tear the paper off their veteran’s banner.

Over the winter, students from McCann Technical School’s computer-assisted drafting and metal fabrication programs designed and built 100 brackets and poles that now hold the banners on downtown light posts, led by instructors Josh Meczywor, Glenn Andrews, John Kline and Greg King.

Drury High School students and civics teacher Patrick Boulger were honored at North Adams' Hometown Hero Banner celebration. Boulger and his class created a website with corresponding biographies to the veterans on each banner.

Durocher said the majority of brackets that McCann made are holding banners on the Hadley Overpass. He and Superintendent Jim Brosnan found out that they were deployed at the same time in the early 2000s in Iraq and had no idea until embarking on the project.

“Yes I built spreadsheets and collected data, but without the mayor, the city workers, everyone involved, there’s no way I could’ve done it on my own,” Durocher said.

This project is more than banners, he said: It’s honoring local heroes’ lives and their family’s sacrifice.

“We put 173 chairs out this morning and if I had to guess, we’re at 300 people right now,” Durocher said to the crowd. “Clearly, this is something the community really wanted.”

In attendance, and also honored with a banner, is 108-year-old Carlo Domenichini, the city’s oldest veteran. Domenichini, who was front row at the ceremony, was a 1st Lieutenant in the Army in the signal core and deployed to the Philippines during World War II.

Front row at Friday's Hometown Heroes ceremony in North Adams was 108-year-old Carlo Domenichini. The Army veteran was among those honored with a banner downtown.

Mayor Jennifer Macksey, who pulled the paper off the first banner in honor of her father, said the banners were honoring veterans’ service but also who they are when they come back home.

“These men and women are not strangers; they are our neighbors, our classmates, grandparents, the people who worked in the mills, who coached our sports team.”

When Contois arrived back home in 1946, he continued working at the mill before leaving to work for Harry Sutton, who ran an oil burner company. When Sutton retired, Contois took over the company and ran it for almost 30 years. He died at 87 in 2002.

Veterans Services Agent Kurtis Durocher speaks to a crowd outside North Adams City Hall on Friday at the Hometown Heroes ceremony. Durocher organized the installation of 132 banners honoring local veterans that were revealed at the ceremony.

Durocher hoped the banners would be a lasting symbol of gratitude from the community. He also hoped the students involved were proud of the work.

“Thirty years from now, when they drive through the city, they can say they helped with this program,” he said.

Like her father’s story, Ethier-Kipp said every veteran family has sacred memories, like her father’s first aid kit she brought to show and his mini notebook of all the places he went while deployed.

"It has been a true honor to share my father's story,” she said. "You all have stories and each and every one of them is precious.”