Portraits of Honor: Marine sees memorial to completion
The work is finally done.
Four years and more than $200,000 after then-Mayor Erv Hodges and a small group of Lawrence residents began their efforts, the Douglas County Memorial of Honor will be dedicated this morning at the Lawrence Visitor Center, 402 N. Second St.
photo by: Journal-World Photo
Erv Hodges is pictured at the Douglas County Memorial of Honor at the Lawrence Visitor Center, 402 N. Second St., in this photo from 2004.
“It’s a great memorial,” Hodges said recently. “Everybody should go see it.”
The memorial honors more than 400 Douglas County soldiers, sailors, Marines, police officers and firefighters who died in the line of duty, going back to the Civil War. But it also honors those who served and returned to help build a growing community, Hodges said.
The centerpiece is a 19-foot sculpture created by Lawrence artist Jim Brothers. Called “From the Ashes,” the sculpture depicts a half-man, half-phoenix rising from flames. It is at the center of a circle of concrete benches, before an American flag.
The Visitors Center is the proper site, promoters have said, because the old Union Pacific Depot is where hundreds of Douglas County soldiers boarded trains to report for duty.
The memorial, Hodges said, captures the “extraordinary sacrifices by ordinary citizens, friends and neighbors, who said, ‘We need to do this.’ Stepped forward without question and did it.”
Hodges himself served in the Marine Corps between 1948 and 1971. His first commanding officer was the legendary “Chesty” Puller, who earned more awards than any Marine in history.
‘Old Corps’
“He was very rigid,” Hodges said. “Those days you still worked six-and-a-half days a week. And Saturday, the half-day was always an inspection of some sort. … It really took you back to what we referred to as the ‘Old Corps.'”
At one point, Hodges said, Puller put a young Marine on a plane and had him flown off the base rather than allow what he thought to be an ill-considered marriage.
“Today, what would happen in a situation like that?” Hodges said.
After a stint in Korea toward the end of the war there, Hodges ended up in a unit that developed operations manuals for then-new helicopter forces. Through the next decade, he served in embassy security at Paris and cruised the Mediterranean and Caribbean seas as part of a Marine “ready force.”
In 1967, he was sent to Vietnam, where he spent time in Chu Lai, Danang and Khe Sanh.
At Khe Sanh, Hodges said, “We always said you may have gone in a slow Marine, but you went out a fast Marine, because when it was your turn, you had to run pretty quick to catch the aircraft. It created a bunch of dash men.”
He left Vietnam in 1968, and retired from the Marines in 1971.
A memorial
It was in 2000 that Hodges and the Douglas County Patriots Memorial Committee began their efforts.
| The Douglas County Memorial of Honor will be dedicated today at 10:30 a.m. at the Lawrence Visitor Center, 402 N. Second St. |
“As I looked around the city, and was involved with the city, I realized that the city in my opinion … had not properly recognized the hundreds of people who have given their lives for this community, as well as the country,” Hodges said.
“We all recognize Quantrill’s Raid, but how many people recognize the 20th Kansas Volunteers of the Spanish-American War — who didn’t serve in Cuba with the Rough Riders, but were in the Philippines?” he asked.
“The Korean servicemen who went to that forgotten war, who served in Vietnam, there was really no place where they could be recognized,” Hodges said. “We felt it was time that we did something.”
To help preserve that history, the memorial will include a computer kiosk with access to biographies of Douglas Countians who died in service.
Getting that information was complicated by the 1973 fire in the national archives at St. Louis, which destroyed thousands of records of military service.
“All of us have been doing some digging,” Hodges said. “We found some Web sites we didn’t know existed. It seems like every time we find one, we find some more people we didn’t know about.”
Hodges said he didn’t want the memorial to glorify war.
“War is something we should do every effort not to engage in one, in my opinion,” he said. “It’s not nice; it’s filthy, dirty, violent. But we need to recognize those who are willing to do that filthy, dirty, horrible job.”
 The Douglas County Memorial of Honor will be dedicated at 10:30 a.m. Saturday at the Lawrence Visitor Center, 402 N. Second. The memorial is a tribute to Lawrence area soldiers, sailors, police and firefighters. To commemorate the event, the Journal-World, 6News and World Online are telling the stories of veterans in the “Portraits of Honor” series.Thursday: See the 6News reports about Walter Wettstein, a Navy veteran of the World War II battle of Iwo Jima.Friday: In the J-W and on LJWorld.com, read about Wettstein and Bernard Kennedy, who was shot at the Battle of the BulgeFriday night: See the 6News report on Virginia Visser reminiscing about her experiences as an Army nurse in World War II Europe.Saturday: In the J-W and on LWJorld.com, read about former Lawrence Mayor Erv Hodges, a retired Marine and the man who spearheaded the Memorial of Honor project.Sunday:In the J-W and on LJWorld.com, find coverage of Saturday’s memorial dedication, as well as a profile of Ken Pine, a World War II veteran.Through the week:On LJWorld.com and 6NewsLawrence.com, find stories and video reports from the series, plus audio clips and archived stories about the building of the memorial and past stories and video reports about Douglas County’s veterans. |
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