Electra Glide In Blue

I can’t remember where I picked this up, but it’s worth sharing with everyone you know this Memorial Day.
The author is unknown;

When They Were Young, They Saved The World

They’re not getting any younger and every day there are fewer of America’s World War II generation.

They may seem like any other group of old people-retirees, now just old men and women sitting on porches, living in nursing homes, parents and grandparents- but they’re not.

When they were young, they saved the world. Remarkable how completely ordinary it seems. No other generation in history can make that claim.

But isn’t it fitting that victory in the most intense, deadly and important struggle in human history should seem sort of ordinary to those who won it, and those who benefited?

America’s WWII generation saved the world because it had to be done, and no one else was available to do it.

It isn’t that America’s Viet-nam generation, for example, both pro and con, couldn’t or wouldn’t have saved the world. They didn’t get the chance.

It isn’t that the Russians, who actually broke the Wehrmacht, or the Chinese, who held Japan’s best troops in a death grip, or the British or the French, or any of the rest of the world’s peoples, didn’t win the war. But they didn’t save the world from an unspeakable global evil.

That was the Americans when, as Winston Churchill said, the “New World came to the rescue of the Old”.

They were ordinary people; Like my uncle Condon, and maybe your mom and dad who lived in an extraordinary time. So they did what had to be done.

There will be lots of anniversaries of V-E and V-J Day, maybe some prayerful ceremonies honoring liberation of the death camps. The ex-Soviet Republics might pause to remember that there was once a place called Stalingrad, and it was very important. There will be fewer alive then who actually did those things, though.
So what that  66 years ago next week, or last week, or next year, a lot of people killed and died for famous victories ?  This isn’t about anniversaries, or the all World War II newsreel channel that every cable TV system seems to have.

It’s about the old guy you see on the street with a little poppy in his lapel, or the blue-haired woman on the bus who forgets things. Lets take a long, last look at these people now, while we still have a chance. No one has ever done anything like what they achieved before and, God willing, no one will ever have to do anything like it again.

Anonymous

On this day back in 1777, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia adopted the Stars and Stripes as the national flag.

Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, delivered a 1914 Flag Day address in which he repeated words he said the flag had spoken to him that morning

“I am what you make me; nothing more. I swing before your eyes as a bright gleam of color, a symbol of yourself.”

It was not until 1949, that President Truman signed an Act of Congress designating June 14th of each year as National Flag Day.
So today, we members of The Sons of the American Legion met at 0600 this morning, and posted 34 sets of flags along 4th street, downtown Loveland.

We then retired the flags at 1800.

This is something we have done for the last nine years. We just don’t do this on Flag Day, but on Memorial Day, 4th of July, and Veterans Day. Four times a year we take to the downtown street and post Old Glory to the left, and the Colorado State flag to the right. Some people stop to ask “why?” most folks give us a warm “thank you”.
I hope you enjoyed Flag Day this year,
and if you did, thank a veteran.
Ride safe.

My earliest memories of this day go back with my Grandparents…. Decoration Day is what this day was called. We would load up their 57 Chevy with fresh garden flowers and head out to the cemetery on the 29th, the day before Memorial Day. Back then Memorial Day or Decoration Day as my Grandma always called it, was always observed on May 30th.

At the cemetery we would place the freshly cut flowers on the graves of my Grandparents father’s, both Civil War veterans, members of the Grand Army of the Republic.

My Grandfathers Dad was with Company G, 12th Indiana Volunteer Cavalry, which is all the Civil War history I have on him. He is in the photo below, bottom row standing 5th one on the right.

My Grandmothers Dad served three years in Company E, 50th Illinois Inf. According to his obituary dated 1909, he was in all the great battles about Chattanooga, and the Atlanta campaign, where he was under fire for a hundred days. He was also on Sherman’s great raid through Georgia and North and South Carolina. He was at Altoona Pass on the October day when Gen. Sherman signaled his famous order to Gen. Corse, to “Hold The Fort, For I Am Coming”. He then marched with his regiment from Goldsboro, NC, through Richmond, and Virginia, then marched on to Washington City, and took part in the Grand Review on the 24th of May, 1865. He is in the photo below, holding the Flag.

This picture was taken around 1906 of the Civil War veterans from the Morocco, Indiana area.

Standing, back row from left- Sam Thomas, Capt. Dan Graves, John Brown, Jonathan Bell, Niel Shue, Finley Shafer, Jacob Hosier, Fred Bartholomew, George Clark, George Weber, William Handley, F. Flemming, James Shafer.
Bottom row, standing- John Don, Andrew Flowers, Rev.George Musson, Rev. Greenway, Fred Mashino, Sitting- Henry G. Sayler, Andrew Ellis, John Vayette, John Grant, Frank Roadruck, George Baker, Cal Sarver, Cyrus Brunton, George Benjamin, David Dexter, John Garrard.

However you celebrate Memorial Day this year, however solemn or happy the occasion, spare a thought and a moment of silence in memory of all those who paid for your freedom with their lives, and of all those who defend it still.