By ED PECK | Special to the HT
On Friday, May 24 at 9 a.m. the Meeker VFW will be placing flags on veterans’ graves. They will finish at 10:30 SHARP. On Monday, Memorial Day there will be ceremonies at the Circle Park bridge at 9:30 a.m. and immediately after at the Highland Cemetery.
There will be four new stones to decorate this year. They belong to Charles Perrine Arnold, (Judge) Lyman B. Mow, (Doctor) William Harrison Young and Lewis Worthington Boutwell (CSA) These men served in the Civil War and previously had no grave markers or had a stone that was eroded. Through the combined efforts of the Rio Blanco Historical, RBC local Veterans Administration, the Meeker Cemetery District board and staff, these men were researched to find their military records and granite markers provided. A special thanks to Carlson Memorial in Grand Junction for their expertise and compassion. We will be continuing efforts to locate unmarked veteran graves in RBC. If you know of any candidates, please let us know. They deserve our respect.
My own childhood memories of Memorial Day are blurred a bit. My small town of Lafayette, Colorado, went all out for celebrating. As a post WWII Baby Boomer, I watched as the adults who served in WWII and associated families put aside the tragic part of war to honor those who didn’t come back and those who did. Lafayette had more than their fair share of Gold Star families. I am sure Rio Blanco County did, too. For you millennials reading this article on your phone, a small cloth banner/flag with gold star was a way to show your patriotism. Families would display the Gold Star in their window signifying that a member of the family had made the ultimate sacrifice defending his country.
Memorial Day began more than a century ago as Decoration Day. It was a day set aside when G.A.R. members (Union veterans of the Civil War) went out to cemeteries to decorate the graves of fallen comrades. My memory of Memorial Day contains flashes of holding bunches of small artificial poppies. They didn’t resemble real poppies much. They were small, red, kind of lacquered finish with a black seed pod in the center. I think the VFW gave them out one at a time to people for a donation. It was fun as boy to collect a bunch. Everyone had at least one flag on the porch post. The town would gather for a parade with lots of red, white and blue fringed floats. The VFW always had a big float. The Daughters of the American Revolution had a small one. They were mostly pulled by local farmers driving red or green tractors.
We kids would hop up and down waiting for someone on the float to throw some rock hard candy in clear plastic wrappers. If you were lucky, you might snag a Firestix. Years later, I figured it was a candy conspiracy by our local dentist. Those candies were great at removing loose teeth and loose fillings.
The adults would gather at our one and only cemetery and stand among the graves adorned with mini flags stappled to wood dowels. Speeches were made and rifles loaded with blanks that would make noise that bothered my young ears. Men would cluster together in ill-fitting old uniforms. The afternoon and evenings were filled with families cooking hot dogs and hamburgers over charcoal brickettes. Ahhh, the smell of lighter fluid and burnt hot dogs! As a kid, I had no sense of loss or sadness. It was the first holiday of the summer warm enough to be outside with the family. It meant school summer vacation was just around the corner.
