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Memorial Bricks
Written October 22, 2007

In 1998, the downtown square in Bucyrus, Ohio, was flanked by a blank gray wall, three stories high.

But then the Bucyrus Area Community Foundation brought in artist Eric Grohe to paint a giant trompe l’oeil mural, "Great American Crossroads."

(The image on the right is from MarionOnline.com.  I took the pictures below, in October 2007 in Ohio and October 2001 in Kentucky.)

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.

bucyrus

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.

His birthplace was Livermore, Kentucky.  At the pier of the 1871 railroad bridge over the Green River, a tank guards this plaza.  The names include my father and his brothers.

And beside the lake in Richwood, Ohio, the North Union District Veterans' Memorial Monument was dedicated in 2007 "to our veterans who served on land, sea, and air."

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:

ALL VETERANS GAVE SOME.
MANY VETERANS ENDURED MORE.
SOME VETERANS SACRIFICED ALL.



YOU STOOD READY
TO DEFEND OUR COUNTRY
IN TIME OF PEACE.

IN WAR
YOU SUFFERED ITS HORRORS,
WERE WOUNDED,
WERE PRISONERS OF WAR,
ARE MISSING IN ACTION,
OR PERISHED.


WE SALUTE YOU ALL
FOR PROTECTING OUR FREEDOM
AT HOME AND AROUND THE WORLD.

MAY ALL GENERATIONS
REMEMBER YOUR STRENGTH,
COURAGE, DEVOTION TO DUTY,
AND LOVE OF COUNTRY.

 

TBT

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