Veterans and community members paid reverence to the fallen as "Taps" was played during the Memorial Day Ceremony at the Seeley Lake Memorial Gardens Monday, May 31.
Jodi Stierwalt, who served as a Navy Seabee, points to her late husband's plaque in the new Memorial Kiosk - Danny Charles Stierwalt, 1943-2018, Navy 1961.
Veterans and Families of Seeley Lake honored the fallen May 31. Many with the group commented that this was the largest turn out they have had in many years.
SEELEY LAKE – Nearly 100 members of the community joined together Monday, May 31 to remember and honor those veterans who sacrificed and gave their lives in service to our country. People looked through the name plaques that were recently mounted to the new kiosk to find those they loved and remember others from the community who served.
"Our presence here is in solemn commemoration of all these men and women, an expression of their tribute to their devotion to duty, to their courage and patriotism," said Barbara Knopp, president of Veterans and Families of Seeley Lake. "By their services on land, on sea and in the air they have made us their debtors with the flag of our nation still flies over the land of the free people."
Knopp said Memorial Day is exclusively for honoring those who died in uniform serving during wartime. Established May 30, 1868 by General John A. Logan, Decoration Day, as it was originally called, was designated for the purpose of decorating the graves of comrades who died while defending their country.
For decades, Memorial Day continued to be observed on May 30, a day Knopp said is sacred to all veterans. In 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which established Memorial Day as the last Monday in May in order to create a three-day weekend for federal employees. The change went into effect in 1971. The same law also declared Memorial Day a federal holiday.
To ensure the true meaning and original intent of Memorial Day is not lost in the long holiday weekend, Knopp said Veterans and Families of Seeley Lake hopes to draw attention to and remember those service men and women that died during war time that sacrificed everything.
"All too often the nation as a whole takes for granted the freedom all Americans enjoy. Those freedoms were paid for by the lives of others few of us actually knew," Knopp said. "That is why they are all collectively remembered on one special day. By honoring the Nation's war dead, we preserve their memory and thus their service and sacrifice."
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