Declaration Day
Honoring the Past
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When I was just a little guy playing outside the dairy barn one Saturday, I saw Granddad Frank loading his old lawnmower and a can of gas into the trunk of his niece’s Chevrolet. (Their family always drove Chevys while we were mostly Ford people.) This was not their normal Saturday morning grocery shopping routine.
He told me he and his sister Phenie, and niece Phyllis were going to get ready for “Decoration Day” at the three local cemeteries where they routinely maintained our family’s graves. He seemed to think I should understand what that meant, but I had to ask my Dad about Declaration Day.
Dad said it went back to Civil War times, and today’s Memorial Day national holiday grew out of the original concept of honoring those who had died in war.
This memory played on my mind as our little family watched the official opening of the Clay County Veterans Park at this year’s Memorial Day celebration in Hayesville.
With a standing room only crowd, local dignitaries, Veterans organization commanders, and many local Vets displayed appropriate honors to the folks responsible for making our Veterans Park a beautiful tribute all those who served.
At 100 years old, retired dairy farmer Ralph Myers may be our last Clay County WWII veteran still living.
The memorial is laid out in a circle, reminiscent of the WW II memorial on the national mall in Washington, DC between the Lincoln and Washington monuments. Separate sections are set apart for our nation’s major conflicts going all the way back to the Revolutionary War.
Captain Jack Groves USMCR was on the WW II wall, but this one is probably from his Korean War days.
I had to chuckle when I saw the salty picture of our “Uncle Bob” as he was fondly known to all of us nephews and nieces. “Bob Junior” enlisted in the Army within days of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and served in an artillery battalion as it fought its way across Europe during the coarse of the war.
Thinking of his rapid response to enlist right after the USA declared war in December, 1941, I wondered what he would have thought of the state of affairs in our country today.
This came to mind when I read historian Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Substack post this morning. She covers current events, always with a eye on the historical perspective of the issues of the day. I’m guessing Uncle Bob and a lot of other vets would not be impressed with some events mentioned in the first part of her commentary today:
Jun 8 2025
“In April, John Phelan, the U.S. Secretary of the Navy under President Donald J. Trump, posted that he visited the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial ‘to pay my respects to the service members and civilians we lost at Pearl Harbor on the fateful day of June 7, 1941.’
The Secretary of the Navy is the civilian head of the U.S. Navy, overseeing the readiness and well-being of almost one million Navy personnel. Phelan never served in the military; he was nominated for his post because he was a large donor to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. He told the Senate his experience overseeing and running large companies made him an ideal candidate for leading the Navy.
The U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, is famous in U.S. history as the site of a surprise attack by 353 Japanese aircraft that destroyed or damaged more than 300 aircraft, three destroyers, and all eight of the U.S. battleships in the harbor. Four of those battleships sank, including the U.S.S. Arizona, which remains at the bottom of the harbor as a memorial to the more than 2,400 people who died in the attack, including the 1,177 who died on the Arizona itself.
The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States entered World War II.
Pearl Harbor Day is a landmark in U.S. history. It is observed annually and known by the name President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it: “a date which will live in infamy.”
But that date was not June 7, eighty-four years ago today.
It was December 7, 1941”
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But Larry, surely you understand that this new SECNAV was selected though meritocracy not wokeness so he clearly deserved it even if he doesn't know a damn thing about service and never spent a day of his life in uniform. It's just a little lack of knowledge of military history, right? I am sure his campaign contributions had nothing to do with his selection. May God help us all.
Thank you for sharing the memory of Decoration Day. For me, he was waiting to learn of my genealogy. Growing up, this was a big event for my family as we clean the graves and put the flowers on that we had made days before, and the grays an elderly cousin would explain how I was related to the people on the grave marker in the cemetery in Oliver Springs Tennessee.