At sunset on Friday, Sept. 13, Phil Mazzara ’70 will join a select group of dignitaries, major donors, and other VIPs for the “First Illumination” of the National World War I Memorial’s centerpiece sculpture, “A Soldier’s Journey.”
The 60-foot-long sculpture, said to be the “largest free-standing, high-relief bronze in the Western Hemisphere,” will be unveiled at Pershing Park, which sits at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue NW and 14th Street NW in Washington, D.C.
It was created by renowned sculptor Sabin Howard and cast at a foundry in England. The tableau consists of 38 bigger-than-life figures and tells the beginning-to-end story of an Everyman’s WWI experience.
“A Soldier’s Journey” is the centerpiece of the new National World War I Memorial. It was designed by architect Joe Weishaar and represents a collaboration between the National Park Service, the American Battle Monuments Commission, and the World War One Centennial Commission, established in 2013 by President Barack Obama.
The WWI Centennial Commission was initially tasked with “planning, developing, and executing programs, projects, activities to commemorate” the American World War I centennial in 2018.
The upcoming “First Illumination” represents the culmination of a multiyear, $50-million fundraising effort, which Mazzara helped lead while he was director of development of the Doughboy Foundation — the fundraising arm of the WWI Centennial Commission.
Mazzara started working with the Doughboy Foundation in 2014 as a volunteer.
“They somehow found out that I was a professional fundraiser working in Washington and I had a long-term interest in World War I,” he said. “I began … helping consult on how to hire a consulting firm, working with them on the [request for proposals], how to do prospect research, and things like that.”
On Nov. 11, 2018, Mazzara and his wife, Dee Daly, attended a WWI centennial commemoration service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. “It was magnificent, a stunner,” Mazzara said, adding that “everyone was wearing poppies,” a well-known symbol of WWI remembrance.
During the service, U.S. Sen. John Warner, who died in 2021, recited “In Flanders Field” from memory. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the church,” Mazzara said. “It was unbelievable.”
Afterward, Mazzara was invited to come onboard as the Doughboy Foundation’s director of development. He started in January 2019, after retiring from a 40-year career in professional fundraising.
Mazzara’s career, which was largely spent in the health care industry, also included leading a large endowment campaign for President Jimmy Carter and First Lady Rosalynn Carter’s Atlanta nonprofit.
“Working as chief development officer for The Carter Center … gave me a unique opportunity to work with President and Mrs. Carter on planning and implementing a $150 million endowment campaign,” Mazzara said.
“Not many fundraising professionals get the opportunity to work with a living former president and first lady. It was an amazing experience.”
Mazzara served as the Doughboy Foundation’s development director for about a year and a half. He then served as president, a position he held until his retirement in 2021. He is currently president emeritus and a member of its board of directors.
“Heading the Doughboy Foundation was the perfect job for me,” he said. “My initial work was to help complete the capital campaign. Later, I became president and began planning for the fundraising change to annual giving and planned giving, so the work could continue after the park and its sculpture were funded and completed.
“I retired and my wife and I moved back to Atlanta. The work is continuing with a younger group of professionals, and I continue to serve on the board.”
Mazzara’s passion for World War I history and literature began when he was a student at Lynchburg College. It was 1968, the 50th anniversary of the end of the “war to end all wars,” and Mazzara, an English literature major, was studying the British war poets.
A lot of literature was “starting to come out about the significance and impact of the war in general on civilization, literature, music, etc.,” Mazzara said, adding that he found the work of Wilfred Owen — hailed as WWI’s “greatest poet” — especially compelling.
A British soldier who was just 25 when he died a week before Armistice Day, Owen is known for his harrowing depictions of trench warfare, including “Dulce et Decorum Est” — Latin for “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.”
Mazzara, whose Vietnam War draft deferment would end with his graduation from Lynchburg, started looking at Owen’s poetry and that of other WWI soldiers through the lens of a young man contemplating war.
“I started doing research in the context of Vietnam and the anti-war protests, on a theme of incompetent generals wasting human lives and politicians needlessly prolonging the war,” he said. “That was … Vietnam in my view. It really struck a chord and I’ve been with it ever since.”
After graduating from Lynchburg, Mazzara — like his father and later his son — served in the U.S. Navy. He was stationed in Germany. En route back to the States, he stopped at London’s British Museum to examine Owen’s original work.
He went to the collections desk, said, “I’m an Owen scholar,” and was granted access to all of Owen’s original manuscripts, including poems written from the trenches on scraps of paper.
“It was amazing,” Mazzara said, “including that they took my word that I was an Owen scholar!”
Mazzara started collecting World War I literature while at Lynchburg. He would eventually amass more than 300 books, including first editions by Owen and a contemporary, the British soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon.
In 2011, Mazzara and his wife, who died in 2023, donated the Mazzara-Daly Great War Collection to Lynchburg’s Knight-Capron Library. It was the first of several donations and many of the books are housed with other rare books in the library’s Saxon Room. “The College had a reception for us over at the library and they had some students read … from different poems,” Mazzara said. “It was great.”
To date, Mazzara has made three donations to Knight-Capron and he alluded to a fourth. “I feel like I’m retired now and [I] still collect, but I collect now to just give away,” he said.
The Mazzara-Daly Great War Collection includes hundreds of books — novels, histories, memoirs, and poetry — by French, American, English, Canadian, and German writers. Many are first editions.
In addition to books by Owen and Sassoon, highlights of the collection include first editions of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” by Erich Maria Remarque, and “A Farewell to Arms,” by Ernest Hemingway.
“We made these donations and created an endowed fund for special collections so the library can continue to purchase books and other material in this area,” Mazzara said. “It’s amazing how the study of the war and its literature has grown in the past 20 years.”
For more information about the First Illumination, including how to attend and view, visit the WWI Centennial Commission’s website.
