Memorial Day

Memorial Day has never been a day of celebration for me. It's always been a day of rememberance. Maybe it's because I lived in a small town in the midwest where we took Memorial Day seriously. We always had a parade where the flag was flown and the veterans marched to the cemetary. The graves were marked with new flags and speeches were given. When I was in high school and a member of the band, I marched too...all the way out to the cemetary on the outskirts of town. I stayed to hear the speeches. I deliberately made myself aware of the sacrifices others who were called to serve. That's the way it was in the years following the second World War and before the quagmire of Vietnam.

I was a good kid, a pretty good student, and oh so terribly naive. I lived a pretty sheltered life in the north woods. So sheltered that current events all seemed to happen somewhere else...in some far away place like California, or New York, or Washington D.C. Nothing ever happened in our isolated corner of the country. Our lives pretty much revolved around the iron ore that was mined by our fathers...that is until the young folks in our neck of the woods started getting draft notices or were bussed to Milwaukee to enlist.

Still things didn't change much. Folks pretty much believed the government knew what they were doing and trusted them to be smarter than the average Yooper. We accepted them at their word. If it was on the Channel 6 news, then it must be true.

Even when the Ishpeming High School class of 1968 graduated, we still believed that the war was necessary to hold back the tide of communism. Our yearbook attests to that. Such innocents we were. Things didn't really start to change until the fall of 1968, when Bobby Polkinghorne died, then Earl Seablom..on his first day in country (Can you believe that!)

But on July 9 1969, everything changed. Pete Ulrickson was killed by a sniper. We the class of 1968 had lost one of our own...our star quarterback. No more would the black and white 1957 Chevy "buzz the gut" around town. Pete was the third and thankfully last that our small town would give to that unholy war.

A month later we watched the news reports of Woodstock. They weren't the long haired freaks our parents talked about. They were kids...like us. We were the same. They were us. And we joined them in their frustration. Dissent which before had been simply unthinkable became inevitable. We joined the tide sweeping the nation.

Every Memorial Day, I visit the virtual wall, and pay my respects to Bobby, and Earl, and especially to Pete. This day though, I happened to tune into a program on PBS based on a book titled "They Marched into Sunlight". It was informing and moving...and all just so sad. I haven't been able to get past the sadness. Two days in 1967. Two days...before Bobby , before Earl, before Pete. If we had only known then what we knew later.

How can this happen twice in one lifetime? What didn't we learn.? We should have known better. What good is remembering if we don't learn? It's all just so heartbreakinly sad.