Busy Veterans Day weekend

The cold south wind made the flags put out for Veterans Day along Bunkum Road display nicely.

The crowd at the ceremony was bundled up and, because it was cold, the speakers kept the program short.

 After the ceremony, some of the people stopped by Flat Iron Park for a dedication of the new flag pole. Flat Iron Park was established to commemorate those who served during WWI.

Veterans Day was originally Armistice Day, celebrating the end of hostilities in WWI on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. After WWII the U.S. changed the name to Veterans Day to honor those who fought in all the wars.

 I can find six people buried in the local cemeteries who died in service during WWI, though none of them died in combat. In Weston are Lonnie Davisson, John Knox, George Gratner, and Dewey Biggs for whom the Rensselaer American Legion is named. In Mount Calvary are John Stein and Clarence Messman. Are there more?

To the east of Mount Calvary Cemetery, work is being done to move the gas pipeline to the east. Next year this bit of highway is scheduled to be moved a bit to the east as well so that the intersection with Mt Calvary Road will be less dangerous.

 The entrance to the cemetery was originally on the east. I suspect that the hill was partially cut away to make way for the highway.

We have had some very cold nights with temperatures dipping into the low 20s. Late on Friday morning the fountain at SJC still had ice on it.

 Despite the very cold weather, there were lots of blossoms on the decorative crab apple trees around the pond. These late blooms are apparently caused by a drought in the summer followed by moisture in the fall.

 The Prairie Arts Council had its annual gift sale over the weekend and there was another craft/gift sale at the Fairground called Mistletoe Magic. A number of Rensselaer businesses have had or are having open houses and special sales.  On Thursday St. Augustine Parish had its annual Bazaar. In its early years the Bazaar would raffle off live turkeys and older people remember that. I doubt if anyone is old enough to remember a festival that came before the Bazaar, the annual fête champêtre. Apparently the typesetters did not have an e-circumflex in their type drawer.

And they probably did not have  é è ë ē ĕ ė ę ě either. Aren't you glad we do not have to deal with graves, acutes, circumflexes, umlauts or diereses, macrons, breves, dot accents, ogoneks, carons, not to mention tildes, slashes, and various other weird accent characters? They are all used in various European languages.

Update: Another man who died in service during WWI is William Caster in Crockett Cemetery.