Volunteers in Sioux City’s Memorial Park Cemetery placed over 4400 wreaths at the gravesides of veterans today.
Rene LaPierre, commander of American Legion Post 697, is the person who lead the effort for the “Wreaths Across America” program to reach his community.
“When I see what happens at Arlington and all of the people that volunteer and all the truckers and all the communities and businesses that come together to lay wreaths together at Arlington, I said: ‘We need to do that in Siouxland,'” LaPierre says. “It was an idea, a wish.”
Some of today’s volunteers were able to lay a wreath on a family member’s gravestone. LaPierre says as each wreath was laid, the volunteer honored the veteran by saying his or her name aloud. “We’re just so blessed to have so many people come out today and organizations that said, ‘Yeah, we can contribute,’ and we had lots of people who just bought one wreath or two wreaths,” he says. “And everything helped and contributed to making this such a successful and memorable event.”
Great West Casualty Company is one of the contributors. Mandy Graham is the company’s chief operating officer. “I don’t think we realized the magnitude of it until all of it started to set in for us,” she says, “to see the truck come, just jam-packed with wreaths, and see the amount of volunteers that came out and the community support.”
The event began with a ceremony at the cemetery, as wreaths were presented for each branch of the military and those missing in action. Similar ceremonies are scheduled December 14th other Iowa cemeteries, including the Iowa Veterans Cemetery near Van Meter and at the Iowa Veterans Home Cemetery in Marshalltown. According to the Wreaths Across America website, about more than a dozen other Iowa cemeteries are having wreath-laying ceremonies.
(By Woody Gottburg, KSCJ, Sioux City)