The group will also visit veteran oaks on Wrexham Industrial Estate, which survived the area's use as a wartime munitions factory, despite having their trunks filled with concrete.
By April 2004, my second visit, veteran park concessionaire Xanterra had taken over the lodge, but it was still closed for the winter.
Colleagues said he relished marching in Veterans Day parades and visiting veterans halls, where he would chat about their tours of duty.
"Would you like to go to North Korea, sir?" a military guide asked visiting veterans, as they stepped across to take pictures.
"I finally said, 'Hey, I've seen worse than this,'" said Mr. Meyer, who as a member of the Floyd Bennett American Legion Post in nearby Old Mill Basin, has spent decades visiting veterans in hospitals.
There was a rather unseemly sideshow at the memorial to the Second World War, where Republican representatives turned up to personally inform elderly visiting veterans that it was President Obama's fault that the memorial was closed.
"In Iowa, this band of brothers was out in the snow chasing down one vote at a time," said former Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, a disabled veteran, who was playing host to a raucous Super Bowl party on Sunday for nearly 100 local and visiting "Veterans for Kerry" at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post here.
As first lady, Reagan visited veterans, the elderly, and the handicapped, and worked with a number of charities.
During my visit, the veterans were considering the candidacy of a young woman who'd bottom-lined a few projects.
"It's almost like slow death," said the superintendent, Douglas Killian, during a visit to Veterans' Hill, where the classrooms are now used by adults as part of a higher education center run by Temple College and Texas State Technical College.
