2014 in Review: 250,000 Vets in Tin Cans on Shelves

As we look back on 2014, there are several stories that stand out.

Today, as many of us are still swaddled by family, we remind you of some of the people whose sacrifices have ensured our freedoms to celebrate the season however we wish.

Here are three stories worth another look:

Final Resting Place for 250,000 Vets is a Tin Can on a Shelf

This story about the a quarter of a million forgotten veterans ran across the Patch network on Memorial Day Weekend, when a few of them were buried with full military honors as part of Dearborn’s annual Memorial Day celebrations. The story begins:

For 35 years, the cremated remains of Sgt. Russell A. Shumway sat in a sterile metal can collecting dust at a Michigan funeral home.

A North Dakota native, Shumway served with the Army’s 14th Cavalry in World War I, from May 1917 to September 1919. He was 86 when he died March 31, 1980, in Grand Rapids, MI, forgotten and alone. With no close family to claim his remains, Shumway’s ashes were placed on a shelf in the Matthysse-Kuiper-DeGraaf Funeral Home in Wyoming, MI, where they sat undisturbed and all but unnoticed for three and a half decades.

On May 26, Shumway’s cremains – along with those of four other Michigan soldiers – will be led through downtown Dearborn, MI, in a horse-drawn carriage as part of that city’s Memorial Day observance. They will be given the full dignity of a military burial; they will lie in state at a special remembrance ceremony, receive a 21-gun salute and be serenaded by a bugler playing “Taps” before they are laid to their eternal rest.

When that happens, Fred Salanti, founder of the Missing in America Project, will check five names off a list he estimates is 250,000 names long: veterans whose remains sit on shelves around America, unclaimed and forgotten. Read the rest of the story.

Army Officer Given Odd Reason for Being Kicked Out of Daughter’s School

A Rochester Hills dad, still in his military fatigues, stopped by his daughter’s school. What happened next surprised him and outraged Patch readers, who made more than 200 hundred comments on the story.

Army Lt. Col. Sherwood Baker, who called his fatigues “my suit and tie,” was topped at the door of Rochester Adams High School by private-contract security guards, who refused to let him enter. One of them reportedly said “special ed students would go crazy when they saw me in uniform.”

World War II Veteran Finally Laid to Rest

New DNA testing technologies led to the identification of a soldier from Detroit who left home at 17 to fight with the Greatest Generation.