S. Lake cemetery to honor military, public safety
This is what the memorial niches will be like at Happy Homestead Cemetery. Rendering/Gabriel Hydrick
By Kathryn Reed
Plans are drawn, permits are being sought and the construction bid process is under way for what will be a memorial at Happy Homestead Cemetery for veterans and public safety.
“We are trying to make it as good as Arlington or better,” cemetery manager Mike Warren told Lake Tahoe News.
It will certainly be smaller. The entire area is about 30 feet by 40 feet.
The new feature will be in front of the office of the South Lake Tahoe cemetery where the annual Memorial Day ceremony is conducted.
The $120,000 project is expected to begin next building season, with completion in the summer.
It will be comprised of three niche banks, with a total of 178 niches. Each niche has enough room for two sets of ashes. There will also be an area for in-ground cremations.
Happy Homestead is already the final resting place for many veterans – about 1,000.
A black granite wall will have engraved badges from the public safety members.
While normally a requirement to be buried at Happy Homestead is to have been a resident of the district – which is roughly the same as the Lake Tahoe Unified School District boundary – Warren said any member of the military, police or fire services who dies in the line of duty will be able to be interred in the new area.
Warren said the district is looking at changing the residency rule for the whole cemetery, but added it is a complex process. It has to do with the state Health and Safety Code. The current rule means people who die on the Nevada side of the South Shore don’t have a local cemetery to use.
To help pay for the upcoming improvements the cemetery district is selling $100 memorial bricks that will be the paving stones at the site. They may be in honor of or in memory of a person in public safety or the military.
A new flagpole will also be erected.
People are already reserving a space in the memorial niche. They are also buying bricks.
For more information, call the cemetery at 530.541.7070.
Just wondering if there was a movement amoung vets to do this? I cannot imagine that they have pushed to be separated in death from the society that they served to protect.
I thinks this smacks of being about business in a time when the business of burying people has almost disappeared.
You are not a vet. I know that by what you have written. We didn’t serve for society in the end, when it came down to it we served to protect our brothers in arms.
Being a Veteran and having lost a son (2010) and daughter (2011) who were veterans of our military reading the statement “We are trying to make it as good as Arlington or better,” kinda makes me cringe a little. I have total respect for our public safety folks but there are none in Arlington. This started out years ago as a military memorial and I am kind of curious as to how it became public safety as well. Over the years I have seen Memorial Day and Veterans Day, which is for our lost military hero’s and Veterans, morph into Military, First Responders, Public Safety and just about anybody walking down the street. Speaking as a Veteran and speaking my opinion only, I would like to see the Military Memorials remain Military Memorials.
Thank you Mr. Curtzwiler, for expressing some of the thoughts I had as well. I rarely refer to myself as a veteran because, although I served stateside, controlling aircraft for NORAD during my Air Force years, and am defined as a Viet Nam veteran by the VA based on the dates of my service, I never faced the dangers, nor was I required to make the commitment, of the folks who actually faced unimaginable horrors in a war that we, as Americans, had no business sending our young men and women into to be sacrificed.
The Vietnam memorial in Washington D.C. is a beautiful representation of the depths to which that war took our country and our soldiers, and the sad sacrifices that we, and our children, made in support of politically doubtful pursuits. It offers a number of lessons that anyone visiting it can’t help but acknowledge.
On a variety of levels, including the fact that, when there, I visit a number of friends on the wall, I’m a huge admirer of the memorial. But the idea of some sort of a small local cemetery throwing up, for no apparent reason, a small memorial for folks who, for the most part, have no real connection to the grounds or the City, seems to me to be one more silly promotional idea that SLT is well known for rather than the genuine memorial the developers might have difficulty explaining.
Build it if you feel so moved, but don’t imagine it to become some sort of “hallowed ground.” Let our heroes whom we sent off to die lie in peace.
I have nothing to do with the building of the memorial. Although the issues you raised were the same issues that we had with our Children’s Memorial Tree.
Thanks for your service and perspective, Moral, copper and Kenny.
And when I die let me die
With a dream in my mind
A smile on my face and no trouble behind
And no cross on my grave
To show my restin’ place
Marshall Tucker Band “Desert Skies”
“Summer soldiers, and sunshine patriots.” Who knew that Thomas Paine, 2 1/2 centuries ago, would foresee the denizens of internet forums with such accuracy and insight.