Americans find unique and respectful ways to honor those who served and died for their country.
They build monuments on courthouse lawns and city parks, fly U.S. flags in cemeteries and along boulevards, and display the names and photographs of soldiers proudly in American Legion posts and VFW halls.
Two Palmyra men, Roger Smith and Grant Clough, came up with an innovative idea. They turned a dilapidated building on the town’s main street into a memorial plaza.
“We used to call it the planetarium because you could go into the building, stand inside, and see the night sky,” Smith said.
The old building, one of three Smith bought about 15 years ago, had been a post office, barber and beauty shop and video rental store. It was falling apart when Smith came up with the idea of turning the space into a veterans’ memorial. Palmyra, a town in Otoe County with a population of 546, had never had one.
“I thought it would be something that would make the town look better and honor veterans,” said Smith, a lifelong resident of Palymra.
He enlisted Clough, a 20-year-resident of the town, who he had met through their leadership roles in Boy Scouts. Clough thought it was a great project and was eager to help.
“Grant’s always helping everybody with everything,” Smith said of his good friend.
The two men started the project about a year and a half ago. They cleaned out the space first and then took out the roof, rafters, walls and floor. The demolition permit cost them $1.
Being one of the oldest structures in town, they thought they would find something valuable inside. Except for some shelving from the video store, they came up empty.
“There was nothing antique we found in the building. It made us mad,” Smith said, joking.
Next, they had to level the ground to pour a concrete floor in the 13-by-60-foot space, and that required tearing out some long roots leading to an old mulberry tree stump out back.
“It was an octopus. It grew into the foundation and got tangled into the gas lines,” Clough said.
Once that was done, the two men, with help from friends, built a retaining wall on the back side of the lot. They also put in a 40-foot flagpole and patched the brick walls, including a big hole leading to an adjacent business.
Friends and family helped a great deal. Smith’s mother-in-law, Sue Fenster of Lincoln, painted two heavy, iron benches with a U.S. flag design in her living room. The benches were donated by Todd Rivers of Rivers Metal Products in Lincoln.
Money for the flagpole came from the sale of a golf cart owned by Smith and his friend Dave Hall. They didn’t play golf anymore, so they sold it for $1,500, just enough for the flagpole. Hall also donated the concrete used for the pole base.
The most important contribution came from Clough’s 17-year-old son, Alex, whose research uncovered the names of area veterans to be placed in two display cases mounted on an inside wall. Alex took it on as an Eagle Scout project.
The job wasn’t easy. Alex Clough started looking at cemetery records but soon ran into privacy laws. Wilma Halvorsen with the American Legion Auxiliary had access to more cemetery records. And Harry Chaffin, with the American Legion Post, talked to local veterans, who gave him more names. Alex has 248 names so far and still is searching, especially for veterans who served in recent conflicts.
“We don’t care if there are a thousand names on the wall. We just want to honor veterans,” Smith said.
Kris Pavey of Douglas, who works across the street from the memorial at Decker’s grocery store, likes what the two men have done for veterans and the town.
“They’ve taken a building that was dilapidated and tore it down and made a beautiful spot for people to come and pay their respects to the people who made the ultimate sacrifice to protect us,” Pavey said.
The memorial, known as the Palmyra Veterans Honor Plaza, will be dedicated on Veterans Day on Monday at 6 p.m. Anyone can attend. The Elks Lodge of Nebraska City will bring a 6-by-8-foot U.S. flag, which will be presented to members of Boy Scout Troop 334, who will run it up the pole under lights. They will be joined by the veterans from the local American Legion Post 195.
Before the ceremony, the new veterans memorial will most likely be dark, lit up only by two distant street lights. They will cast shadows on both inside walls from an inscription above the black iron gate, fashioned by Smith. It reads: “God Bless America.”
