Commander of VFW Post 1210, Mark Gelhar, spoke with KDWA about this year’s Memorial Day observance,
highlighting the 11 a.m. main ceremony at the Veterans Levee in Hastings.
“I think our most exciting part this year is having a cannon down there. We’ve partnered with Spencer Johnson and his historian group, and we’re going to have some information on the Civil War because it’s, I believe, it’s 165 years since Minnesota’s first regiment shipped out from the Hastings levee. So we have a cannon, and we will have two shots of the cannon, one at the beginning of the 11am program and towards the end, and when I talk to people about that, they seem pretty excited about that.”
For the public, they’re all welcome to attend and join in on the ceremony.
“Yep, it’s the program we do every year. So, it’ll be 11am, and we always try and finish by noon. We don’t like to keep people more than an hour, and we’ll have some speakers. Spencer Johnson will be our guest speaker. We’ll have our Patriot… and Voice of Democracy authors reading their essays, and we can also do military honors at the end with the VFW Honor Guard, and then we have a couple high school students who will perform TAPS; they do an Echo Taps version of Taps, which is pretty cool if you’ve never heard it before. Hopefully everybody prays for good weather. We always like good weather out these days.”
So, smooth sailing from here on out.
“You got it.”
Full program details are available at VFW1210.org or in this report on the KDWA website.
[Click the soundbite to listen to the full report.]