|
Memorial Bricks
Behind the real park in the foreground, the mural depicts two massive square stone structures celebrating local agriculture and industry. They're spanned by an iron bridge.
Our eyes are drawn through the archway to a vision of the city in the early 20th century. Among the people pictured are industrialists Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and Henry Ford, who stayed at the local Elberson Hotel on the occasion of President Harding's funeral.
A block to the north, Grohe transformed another three-story blank wall on the side of Edward Jones Investments into a veterans monument, "Liberty Remembers."
The imagined statue combines iconic images to show Liberty carrying into heaven a dying soldier, draped in a flag, still wearing dog tags and Army boots. |
|
On the square columns and on the back wall of the faux shrine, hundreds of soldiers appear in a frieze. The images are of actual veterans from the Bucyrus area. Their families paid for their pictures to be included. Usually, funds for such memorials are raised by selling not mural space but pavement bricks. My late father, Vernon M. Thomas, who served in India during World War II, has his name engraved in two villages: his first and last hometowns.
The bricks are arranged randomly, and it took me quite a while to find the one with my father's name. In the process, I found bricks for many of his friends and learned for the first time where these members of the "Greatest Generation" had served. And I found bricks for many of my schoolmates from the era of the Vietnam War. The inscription on the central monument reminds us:
|