GUILDERLAND — Lanny Ladouceur would have turned 70 this year. Instead, he was killed in 1970 in Vietnam, when the Army helicopter he was piloting was shot down.

He left behind a young widow, now named Elaine Falzano, and his mother; both women still mourn him and are pleased to know that the town of Guilderland will honor him on Thursday, Jan. 19 with a road renaming ceremony at Town Hall scheduled for 3 p.m. and open to the public.

Part of Lydius Street, near Falzano’s home, will bear a sign renaming the road the First Lieutenant Lanny G. Ladouceur Memorial Highway.

His mother, Marie Ladouceur, is 94; she is the oldest Gold Star Mother in the organization’s Albany chapter, according to Steve Oliver, the town’s highway superintendent and president of the American Legion Riders, a group that provides a motorcycle escort at patriotic events.

Ladouceur was the president of the Albany chapter of the American Gold Star Mothers for many years, she says. She still lives in Rensselaer, where she and her late husband, Guy Ladouceur, raised three children, of whom Lanny was the oldest.

“It was just a useless loss of lives, to me,” Ladouceur’s mother said recently at her apartment in the Franciscan Heights Senior Community. “The boys that went over there, they thought they were fighting for something. To tell you the truth, I still don’t know what it was all about,” his mother said.

Lanny Ladouceur had been in Vietnam just two months, with the 135th Assault Helicopter Company of the 214th Aviation Battalion of the 164th Aviation Combat Group of the 1st Aviation Brigade of the Bearcat base. He was 23 years old when he and his crew of three were shot down.

He had gotten married a year earlier and left behind a 21-year-old widow.

After meeting and courting for about a year, the couple had gone first to Texas and then to Georgia, while he trained for a year as a helicopter pilot.

Neither Falzano — who would remarry, have two children, and work for the Town of Guilderland until her retirement — or his mother, Marie Ladouceur, ever entertained the idea that he would be killed, even though, Falzano said, the Army “schooled the wives in what they expected,” which was that not all of the men would return.

“It was bright and early in the morning; my mother came to wake me up,” recalled Falzano, now 67. “She said there’s an Army man at the door. I knew what that meant. I said, ‘I don’t want to talk to him.’” The memory of it still makes Falzano start to cry, almost half a century later.

“It was the worst day of my life,” she said.

Both women are proud that Ladouceur will be honored, all these years later.

“The way the military was treated at the time, they were treated terrible,” said Falzano this week. She said of the returning Vietnam veterans, “When the boys came back, they weren’t respected. That’s why I’m so happy to see this happen. He’ll get some of the respect he should have gotten back then.”

Falzano got the idea for a sign after seeing the one that stands on Carman Road and memorializes Lieutenant Colonel Todd Clark, who was killed in Afghanistan in June 2013.  

She asked Oliver how to go about having someone remembered with a sign. “I can’t believe that was in November,” she said. “And now the signs are going to be installed in January. How much faster could it have gone?”

The signs will be placed, Falzano said, on West Lydius Street, one at the intersection of Carman Road and the other at Church Road.

Falzano said of the signs honoring Ladouceur, “He’s going to be right around the corner here, where I can see it when I come and go.”

The man to whom Falzano has been married for about 45 years, Bob Falzano, a retired bricklayer and masonry superintendent, is currently in a nursing home with severe dementia.

The two women take comfort in their friendship, which they rekindled a year or so ago.

Sitting on the couch in her one-bedroom apartment, clasping the hand of her former daughter-in-law, whom she sees three or four times a week when the younger woman comes by to take her to dinner or out shopping, Ladouceur said, “I’m just so thrilled that I can be with his wife here.”

“I’m just as thrilled,” said Falzano. “We help each other.”

“A lot, I’ll tell you,” said Ladouceur.

Corrected on Jan. 9, 2017. The correct number of children of Elaine Falzano is two.