Comfortable temperatures made for a pleasant ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday afternoon at the new Waukee Veterans Memorial in G. E. Davis Park near the Waukee Community Center.
With the Waukee High School Band playing incidental music, Waukee Mayor Pro Tem Anna Bergman honored the 50 veterans and first responders attending the event by pinning a ceremonial boutonniere on their lapels.
Bergman is also one of the 12 members of the Waukee Leadership Institute Class of 2017, which made the Waukee Veterans Memorial its class project.
“The event went very well,” Bergman said. “We’d prepared for about 75 people, and we had about 220, so the turnout was great.”
She said the project began last November when the Leadership Institute students began drawing up designs for the veterans memorial.
“First you find a location and a design that works,” Bergman said. “In January we started fundraising. We had a $25,000 goal for fundraising for the whole project, and we actually met that in the last week of April.”
The memorial consists of eight pillars, one for each branch of the U.S. military — Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Coast Guard — along with pillars honoring the Waukee Fire and Police Departments.
Bergman said the leadership class was “trying to find a way to visualize how each military branch and our local first responders have built up the community and act as a bolster to the community, so each pillar has the emblem or the seal of one military branch, and then two are designated for Waukee Police and Waukee Fire.”
The Des Moines offices of McCall Monument then turned the vision into a reality in stone.
“We went to them,” Bergman said, “and said, ‘We have this design. We don’t know whether it’s possible or practical but if you could help us, then we’ll work with you.’ And they took exactly what we wanted and just made it . . . appear, like magic. It was wonderful. They knew just what they were doing and made our idea come to fruition.”
The pinning ceremony was followed by a flag raising by the honor guard, with the Waukee High School Band playing the National Anthem — “They did a phenomenal job,” Bergman said — with a brief reception following the ribbon cutting.
