Fourth of July Parade
When Martin Spani, Post 1040’s Commander and I attended the Convention in Yakima, the meeting hall, hallways, and dining room were draped with the pictures of our young KIA’s from this state. It was a sober reminder why we need to be here for the next generation of veterans. Martin borrowed five of the banners shown following the convention. These young men were all from this area. The project is the creation of a Gold Star mother from Spokane who has created a banner for each KIA from the state of Washington and we were honored to carry them and show the crowd the face of sacrifice—not just some name published in the newspaper. I wasn’t sure of the impact these had until a fellow in my office building popped into my office and told me his wife who attended the parade, was brought to tears when she saw these banners.
We had a great turnout for the parade and even a bigger turnout for the BBQ at the Legion Hall afterwards. Of course, there were a few faces in there eating our food we didn’t recognize, but what the heck, it was a great BBQ thanks to Tom Hallums of our Post who put the entire event together by himself. He is now permanently in charge of it.
On June 24th, the Post made a presentation to the Nisei Veterans Committee (NVC) a framed poster of the 21 Medal of Honor recipients from the 442nd Regimental Combat Team comprised of Americans from Japanese descent with a number of them from the Puget Sound area. Mike had drawn the individual portraits and presented them to the Hawaii branch of the NVC earlier in the year. Before he did so, he made the poster to the left and donated it to the Post to present to the local NVC in Seattle. As some of you will recall, we have had several members of their organization speak to us and we were invited to a tour of their facility. The presentation was made at their monthly meeting and Mike was invited to be the guest speaker. Unlike our Post meetings, the widows and wives of members are invited to attend their meetings and they extended that invitation to our spouses. As Commander Jim Traner was out of town attending the Annual Department Conference in Yakima, Senior Vice Commander Rock Roth made the presentation to a packed house of both their members and ours. After I took this picture in my office, we had a brass plate attached to the frame saying that this was “A gift to the Nisei Veterans Committee from VFW Post 8870, Edmonds, WA”.
Fred Apgar is shown here explaining the White Table to the audience estimated to be between 400 to 500 folks, by far the largest in history. In addition, Mike Reagan was the honored speaker and moved the audience with his story of how he became involved in the Fallen Heroes Project. The Boy and Girl Scouts carried and displayed posters of many of 2,600 portraits he has drawn to date. Of course, our Post and the American Legion presented the colors. Our Voice of Democracy winner, Katarina Nguyen, read her essay and did a fine job. It was more or less a ceremony presented by Post 8870 and it was a day in which we remembered our fallen comrades with reverence.