Flag Retirement Picnic
The Boy Scouts will be holding their annual Flag Retirement Ceremony at the Nile Country Club on August 6th. In conjunction with that ceremony, Post 1040, our Post, American Legion Posts 66. 37, and 234 will be attending. It will be held in Nile Area C (the same place as last year if you attended). While lunch is at 1200 hours, we need volunteers to arrive at 1030 to assist in the setup. If you can’t make it to the early shift, we need folks to assist in serving food and in the cleanup and tear down following the picnic. This is a lot of fun and hopefully summer will have arrived by then. If not, bring your Gortex and enjoy a hotdog or hamburger and the camaraderie of your fellow veterans.
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.