79 years later, finally ‘I got to hug my father’ who is buried at Normandy

By Cathy DeDe, Chronicle Managing Editor

David La Point of Queensbury tells The Chronicle he waited 79 years to finally hug his father.
This was two months ago, a bittersweet moment that took place in the American Cemetery at Normandy, France, when David embraced the cross marking where his father Leon C. La Point is buried.

Leon was a Private First Class in the U.S Army, 38th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division. He died when David was just nine months old, from wounds sustained on Omaha Beach in the D-Day invasion of World War II.

“Wounded on June 6, and died June 9, 1944,” David recounts. David’s wife Theresa planned the trip as part of a Viking River Cruise to France for her husband’s 75th birthday, in 2018.

The trip was the couple’s first-ever such outing, with the visit to Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery at Normandy the main objective and purpose.

Visiting his father’s grave at Normandy, “It was always bucket list,” David says.

The trip was delayed four years — first, because David took a serious fall and needed time to recover, and then, when Covid struck.

They finally got there in October.

“I’m 79. It’s my last chance,” David said. “It was everything I hoped,” David tells The Chronicle. “It was my chance to have closure, and to finally hug my father, for the first time ever in my life.”

He shows a black and white photo of his father in uniform with his mother, Ann, holding infant David together.
“Probably the only time he ever got to hug me,” David says, and pauses to collect himself.

He’s a man of not many words. These were demonstrably hard for him to speak.

Wife Theresa contacted The Chronicle first and David agreed, it’s a story worth telling: “I hope other people will be inspired to go and find their loved ones who are buried there, too.”

It wasn’t entirely smooth sailing.

Their first effort to find Leon’s grave, working with the cruise director while still on board the boat, came up empty.

“We had the exact location, the row and number,” where his father was buried. But they couldn’t find him.

Officials at Normandy worried Leon was buried in a different cemetery, but David and Theresa insisted: Check again.
It turned out, they were searching the computer for “Leon LaPoint,” when he’s “La Point.”

David says, “I knew nothing about my father.” He said his mother didn’t talk much about him. “Probably, out of respect for her new husband,” David suggests. “Maybe because people just didn’t talk about it. And I didn’t really ask.”

His step-father was Gerald Hammond; his mother the former Ann Lanzo.

David’s step-sisters — “my sisters,” he affirms — are Jane Gibbs and Rene Clements. Step-brother Gerald “Buddy” Hammond, “my roommate all my life,” died in Vietnam.

Once they found Leon’s records, the staff at the American Cemetery prepared a packet about David’s father, including a biography. “I learned he was a carpenter; I never knew that,” says David.

The French cemetery staff member who helped was “very emotional,” David recalls. “She said, if the Americans hadn’t done what they did in the war, she wouldn’t have been in existence.”

They held a ceremony at Omaha Beach for the cruiseship guests, and David was invited to lay the wreath.

Cemetery staff brought David and Theresa for a private visit to Leon’s grave site, one among the thousands of crosses famously dotting the American Cemetery landscape at Colleville-sur-Mer, France, overlooking Omaha beach.

One ceremonial tradition: They rubbed sand from the beach into the carved letters of Leon’s cross. Like magic, “they don’t know why,” David says, “the sand turns gold.”

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