Hebron Crossroads 5-30-04
By Jeff Gill

There is so much to keep up with around these busy crossroads; your correspondent missed the spring Choral concert, and heard too late about the Economics Fair (which had an incredible turnout, where much learning was had by all) and the Renaissance Day last weekend where everything from jousting to trebuchets was on view, but not by me.
Whatever day you get this, there will be elements of the Hebron Crossroads Festival going on, from Canal Park’s amusements Friday through Saturday until 10 pm, the Gazebo entertainment Saturday afternoon, or the Symphonic Band Pops Concert at the basketball courts near the entrance to Evans Park on Refugee Road at 3 pm on Sunday.
For Saturday afternoon at Canal Park and Sunday 3 pm at Evans, bring your lawn chairs!
Karaoke is still planned for the evening of Saturday after some jazz, Christian contemporary, and other music from 2 pm on. I will be taking donations to Hebron PTO, our sponsor for the festival, to not sing. Pay up now (he threatened).
Last year we dedicated the Evans Park veterans’ monument, and this festival year we still focus Monday, Memorial Day, on the parade down Main Street along the old National Road from Basin Street and the former Ohio & Erie Canal turnaround spot to the east edge of town.
There facing the sunrise is our village cemetery, and the parade will end there with solemn ceremonies marking this day of remembrance going back to the Civil War. There are veterans of that war taking their final rest in the Hebron Cemetery, along with those of conflicts since.
For many of us, our thoughts will also be with a number from the community who have made the long ride to Washington DC as part of the annual “Rolling Thunder” of motorcycles past the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. They will see this year the newly dedicated World War II memorial just around the corner, at the foot of the Washington Monument and facing the Reflecting Pool leading to the Lincoln Memorial.
A great plaza about a pool with fountains, bracketed by low towers marked Atlantic and Pacific, with a wall of Gold Stars symbolize the gold stars marking those who died in service, 4,000 each standing in for a hundred, representing the 400,000 who died from this country of the 50 million who perished worldwide in the war. Bas relief tablets line the entry, showing everything from the home front on the farm to many other forms of service along with combat itself.
I look forward to seeing this marvel for myself. Along with growing up seemingly surrounded by those who fought and worked and served in each of the branches of our armed forces, my dad’s two older brothers served overseas, one in the infantry fighting across Europe to Berlin itself, the other in the Army Air Corps keeping bombers in the air over enemy naval bases. My dad’s nickname as the child he was then, “Butch,” even graced the nose of a bomber over the Pacific theater. Just among my two uncles, the lesson of those two towers is made real. One is gone, the other still with us.
This long overdue memorial already prefigured by salutes in marble, granite, and bronze all around the country in towns large and small, is a tribute to those 16 million veterans of an ocean and globe spanning conflict that still marks our modern civilization, not the least among the hundreds of thousands of WWII vets still helping shape our world.
May our thanks to them endure longer than carvings or sculpture.

Jeff Gill is pastor of Hebron Christian Church and a nephew of veterans of the Atlantic and Pacific theaters of WWII. If you have a story from your family to share or news of local interest, call 928-4066 or e-mail disciple@voyager.net.