Making sure to 'Remember – Honor – Teach'

The rows of silent, gray headstones on the wind-swept grasses of the Washington State Veterans Cemetery west of Medical Lake have a little more color this Christmas season, thanks to a nationwide observance that began with a boyhood impression and a surplus of holiday product.

Last Saturday after a brief ceremony, family members of veterans laid to rest in the cemetery fanned out over the quiet, mist-shrouded grounds to waiting stacks of boxes of wreaths to select a ribbon-decorated symbol of the season and place it at their loved one's marker. Members of the military were on hand to make sure veterans without family were also honored.

The wreaths are part of the annual Wreaths Across America program, started in 1992 when the Worcester Wreath Company of Harrington, Maine found itself with a surplus of wreaths at the end of the holiday season. According to a Wreaths Across America history of the program, company owner Morrill Worcester remembered the impression a trip to Arlington National Cemetery in Washington D.C. had made on him as a young boy and realized he had an opportunity to honor the service of the veterans laid there.

With the assistance of Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, arrangements were made that year to deliver and place the wreaths in an older section of Arlington that had been receiving fewer visitors each year. Organizations and individuals stepped up to help in future years to make the event a quiet, annual tradition until 2005 when photos of Arlington stones adorned with wreaths received national attention via the Internet.

Requests from other national and state cemeteries across the country began to come in to Worcester. Realizing he couldn't donate thousands of wreaths, he began by shipping seven wreaths to each cemetery in honor of the seven military branches.

In 2007, the Worcester family along with other individuals, veterans and families who worked on the program at Arlington, formed the non-profit Wreaths Across America, whose motto is "Remember – Honor – Teach," to expand the annual observance. In 2010, the Ladies and Gentlemen of the Washington State Veterans Cemetery chapter of the recently constructed Medical Lake facility, with help from a local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, joined Wreaths Across America to honor veterans in Eastern Washington.

Joyce Durrant, chapter coordinator, Wreaths Across America, said they were able to raise enough money that first year to purchase 300 wreathes. Like the national effort, the Eastern Washington observance has grown every year since then.

In 2014, over 700,000 wreaths were laid on veterans' headstones and at mausoleums at over 1,000 locations nationally, thanks to fundraising from 2,047 organizations. These include corporations along with individuals, and trucking and shipping supplies who donated their services.

At Medical Lake, 1,000 wreaths were laid last year. This past Thursday, the cemetery took delivery of 135 boxes, nine-plus pallets, totaling 1,200 wreaths.

"That was our goal," Durrant said while watching the semi-truck containing the wreathes enter the facility's unloading area.

"Every year it grows, so next year we'll be looking for more," she added.

The Ladies and Gentlemen of the Washington State Veterans Cemetery sold the wreaths for $15 each, with the Wreaths Across America organization donating one wreath for every two sold. Durrant's husband, Doug Durrant, said they received donations from all over the region, including as far away as Newport and Wellpinit.

"The word is getting around," he added.

First-year volunteer truck driver Fred Fossett was honored for his service in a brief ceremony prior to unloading by Durrant and other members of the veteran's cemetery organization along with representatives from Fairchild Air Force Base and cemetery director Rudy Lopez. Fossett had his semi specially painted for the trip, with members of all seven military branches depicted on the passenger's side and the World War II-era battleship U.S.S. Missouri on the driver's side.

With a brisk wind whipping through overhead power lines and building openings providing a melodic while somber musical backdrop to the unloading process, Fossett - who was also headed to the Western Washington cemetery to drop off wreaths - recounted his trip, which took him from his home in Sedona, Ariz. to Maine to pick up wreaths and then to the cold and gray cemetery along Espanola Road.

"Truly wreaths across the country," he said.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].