"Wentzville Vietnam War Memorial, called first of its kind in the country, turns 50 " Wentzville MO - News Article Locations on Waymarking.com

Wentzville has the honor of having the first Vietnam War Memorial.


"Most people who attended the dedication of the first Wentzville Vietnam War Memorial 50 years ago remember two things.

First: the cold. Some say an honor guard stood at attention in the freezing rain with icicles hanging off their noses. One attendee remembers her glasses splitting in half with the cold.

Second, and more importantly, they remember the history made that day.

The memorial was dedicated in December 1967, and to this day city leaders claim it was the first Vietnam War memorial of its kind in the United States.

It was made at a time when the Vietnam War was unpopular and returning soldiers saw little fanfare.

Still, Wentzville, with a population of only about 3,000 people at the time, would make its monument more than seven years before the end of the war.

This Veterans Day, which falls on Saturday, a group of current and returning Wentzville residents will celebrate the monument’s 50th anniversary.

Relatives of the original planners will speak. Among them will be Amanda Cato, whose mother, Judy Gittemeier, was one of three women who planned the monument.

“Up until the day my mother died she said that that was one of the most important things she’d done with her life,” Cato said. “And I think it was one of the most important things in Wentzville. I think it would have to be a little town where everyone knew each other that could be the first to come together like they did.”

One of the three people that made the Wentzville memorial a reality was not even a supporter of the war.

Betty Doyle, a Democratic chairwoman in Wentzville at the time, thought the U.S. should never have gone into Vietnam, said her daughter Stella Dunavin.

Still, Doyle partnered with two women in the opposite party to make the memorial happen: Judy Cato Gittemeier, a Wentzville Republican committeewoman whose husband was serving in the war, and Naomi Heleine, a librarian and president of the women’s Republican club.

“They came together, I think, as an act of patriotism,” said Dunavin, who was a college freshman at the time. “They were not saying, ‘We agree with the war.’ They were telling the soldiers, ‘You had to leave your home here, but we’re still with you.’ That wasn’t something a lot of people were saying back then.”

The three women first came up with a plan to send care packages over to soldiers after two Wentzville men died in the war within a year, including one killed just two days after he arrived in Vietnam.

They collected donations from across the small city and planned to make three trees of light. Every light on the trees would represent a $5 donation.

“They just lived and breathed this thing for months,” Dunavin said. “I remember there were plans spread out on our dining room table.”

The fundraising effort was so successful, the women had money left over to create a memorial to sit alongside one of the trees.

A plaque was installed with a verse from the Bible — Ruth 1:16, which begins, “Whither thou goest, I will go.”

“I think it’s important to remember that there were no words of great statesmen or the names of the dead,” Cato said. “Their focus was on the living soldiers. They wanted to say, ‘You are part of us, and by extension wherever you go, Wentzville goes.’?”

The next year, Gittemeier donated a 30-foot fir tree from their family farm, and two area artists provided a sculpture surrounding the original plaque.

But over time the tree died, and the site was subjected to repeated vandalism and abandoned by the city. Mosaic pieces that decorated it went missing, and weather crumbled its structure.

In the 1980s, residents once again rallied and collected money to rebuild the memorial as a granite pillar topped by a spread-winged eagle. The new version of the monument was unveiled in October 1985.
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1985 memorial unveilling

A photo from the October 21, 1985 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of the unveiling of the second permanent version of the Wentzville Vietnam War Memorial. The memorial traces its roots back to December 1967. The town considers it the first monument of its kind in the United States. The City of Wentzville will celebrate the memorial's 50th anniversary on November 11, 2017.

President Ronald Reagan sent a telegram for the dedication ceremony.

“When we came back it felt like the world was against us,” Vietnam veteran Rocky Kelly, formerly of Wentzville, told the crowd at the 1985 unveiling, according to a story in the Post-Dispatch. “We received no homecoming welcome. There were no yellow ribbons. This memorial will never cover all of the scars, but we know that it was given in love and that Wentzville is saying, ‘Welcome home.’?”

Today, the memorial is a stop on the annual Run for the Wall, a 3,000-mile motorcycle ride to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. Hundreds of motorcyclists stop there every year.

The memorial was again improved by the city of Wentzville last spring. The expansion included a plaza around the monument with tributes to the U.S. military as well as lighting, landscaping, a rock wall, seating and a ramp for wheelchairs."

Type of publication: Internet Only When was the article reported?: 11/17/2017 Publication: St. Louis Post Dispatch Article Url: [Web Link] Is Registration Required?: no How widespread was the article reported?: national News Category: Politics

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