Vets place flags at gravesites for Memorial Day

A handful of military veterans gathered at the Plains Cemetery to mark the graves of passed veterans in preparation of VFW Post 3596's Memorial Day ceremony.

It took VFW members about an hour to place the 469 American flags on veteran gravesites and at the columbarium last Tuesday morning. Each year, Post 3596 marks the veteran gravesites. They put out six more than last year, including the grave of Dave Tupper, an Army vet and a VFW member who passed away in April.

"I do this out of respect. These people were willing to die for their country," said Bill Beck, a retired Navy senior chief who has helped mark the graves since joining the post in 2004. "This is kinda a dress rehearsal for me," said Beck, who teamed up with Dan Johnson and Joe Wittig, both former Army, and placed 121 flags at the old section where a large group of veterans are buried, including a relative of Johnson, William Johnson, a World War II veteran who passed in 2005. "I usually put a can of Rainier beer on my uncle's grave. Once I emptied one when picking up flags, but I shared it with Uncle Bill by pouring some over his grave," said Johnson, who also put out 26 flags along Railroad Street that morning with Ron Kilbury, the post commander. Wittig and Charles "Ole" Oelschlager, a Navy vet, and his wife, Jan, cleaned up, mowed and placed more than a dozen flags at the Dixon Cemetery the previous Monday. Jan Oelschlager grew up in Dixon and has relatives buried there that had served in the military.

The post has been placing the 12X18 American flags on the graves of veterans since the 1970s with veteran gravesites that go back to the Spanish American War and even the Civil War. Some local veterans have been spending time cleaning the headstones of the older vets. Ed Foste of Plains made more than a thousand PVC pipes in 2019 that were inserted into the ground at the base of the gravesites, which eliminated the need of the volunteers to first make a hole in the ground, although some of the pipes were filled with dirt and the more recently passed vets didn't have the tubes.

"It is always important to remember the veterans who are no longer with us," said Air Force veteran Heather Allen, the quartermaster of Post 3596. Allen took over the flag program three years ago, taking it over from the late Joe Eisenbrandt, who coordinated it for 16 years. Allen said she likes doing it because "honoring my brothers and sisters in arms is a humbling experience and a privilege."

Identifying all the veterans at the cemetery has been an ongoing process. Volunteers used to place the flags at the gravesite using a handwritten list, but former Plains resident Polly Gill, a retired soldier, modernized it and put it on a computer to make the vet graves easier to find. Allen took it a step further and designed a computerized map for the volunteers to follow. A task that sometimes took a dozen vets several hours took only an hour for the volunteers last week, which included Kilbury, Dave Brandon, an Air Force veteran, and Jim Gillibrand, the oldest volunteer vet at age 83. Gillibrand, who served in the Army as a military policeman from 1958-1961, has been helping with the cemetery flags since 1999. "This is for all the veterans and it's an honor to do," said Gillibrand. Brandon's wife, Janet, and Shelby Traslavina, along with her 4-year-old son Daxton, helped.

VFW Post Auxiliary members Nora Verpoorten, Carol Harris, Cindy Gray, Angela Muse, and Barb Kincaid placed auxiliary flags on 52 graves of former auxiliarists.