RUMFORD — At noon on Saturday, Dec. 11, in Veteran’s Park at the end of Congress Street, Capt. Joseph F. Roberts and members of his Civil Air Patrol “Sundown Squadron” will lay the foundation for a new Wreaths Across America tradition to honor River Valley veterans.
Timed to coincide simultaneously with about 500 other similar ceremonies across the nation and 24 offshore cemeteries, Rumford’s 37th Composite Squadron will place seven specially-designed wreaths for each branch of the military on memorials as part of the annual Wreaths Across America Day.
The wreaths for the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, Merchant Marine, and POW/MIA are placed during the holidays to remember all soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who served, honor their sacrifices, and teach younger generations about the high cost of the nation’s freedoms.
After the 30-minute ceremony, the squadron and volunteers from the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and Cub Scouts will then place additional wreaths on as many veterans graves or sections as possible at St. John’s Cemetery on the Isthmus Road in Rumford where more than 1,000 veterans are buried, Roberts said early Friday evening.
A squadron officer who lives in Bethel is also organizing a Wreaths Across America ceremony and laying of wreaths there at Riverside Cemetery on Airport Road.
Normally, the Sundown Squadron seeks sponsorships in the River Valley for wreaths to be sent to Veteran’s Cemetery in Augusta, where squadron personnel have participated in wreath laying. No wreaths, however, were sponsored for the River Valley area.
As a second-year commander of the Rumford squadron, Roberts and his staff of senior officers and cadets decided to bring Wreaths Across America to Rumford.
“We have so many veterans in this area and we have 1,200 alone in St. John’s, so we thought why send our money off somewhere else when we have got so many hundreds of veterans here,” Roberts said.
“So we decided we would do as many as we possibly could to put wreaths up at St. John’s. Let’s bring it home, so to speak, and that’s what we’re doing.”
To accomplish that, sponsorships must be obtained for each wreath that is placed on the graves. Each wreath sponsorship costs $15. They can be bought by contacting Roberts at 357-3782.
“We’re telling families to buy for specific graves,” Roberts said.
That way, he said the families themselves can place wreaths on their family member’s or members’ graves, because they know the locations. The squadron doesn’t have the manpower or capability to do that.
And even though the squadron gets $5 for every sponsored wreath during its annual fundraiser, he said that’s not why they lay wreaths.
“The reason we do it is to honor our veterans,” said Roberts, a Vietnam War veteran who served in the Air Force at a communications center and on a combat defense team.
He said that in the past, any wreaths sponsored went for wreaths placed on veterans graves elsewhere in Maine or at Arlington.
As a result, Roberts said, “We never were very successful in getting sponsorships for this, because it was always going away from here.”
The wreaths will be purchased in Harrington from the Worcester Wreath Co., which started the Wreaths Across America tradition in 1992 when Morrill Worcester and his family’s company had a lot of excess wreaths toward the end of the holiday season, Roberts said.
With help from Sen. Olympia Snowe and the Maine State Society of Washington, D.C., arrangements were made to take the wreaths to Arlington National Cemetery and place them on the graves of veterans there.
In 2006 in response to thousands of requests, Worcester Wreath expanded its wreath donations nationwide and Wreaths Across America was born, Roberts said.
“With the help of the nationwide Civil Air Patrol, ceremonies were held simultaneously at 230 locations,” he said. “From the snow banks of Alaska to the sands of Iraq, our nation’s heroes were honored.”
Roberts said the new ceremony will be held in Rumford this year at St. John’s Cemetery because it has the most veterans. Next year’s venue will be Mexico’s memorial park.
“We will try to expand it every year as much as we possibly can,” he said.
tkarkos@sunjournal.com
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