here are a couple of memorial day stories. memorial day had a rocky start, because half the country didn't care for the union soldiers, and even had their own day to memorialize their own. there was a movement to make memorial days, and "keep" them, but it was different in different places and they even picked different days until they could all settle on the one we have now.

i lived in a small town in southern illinois that claimed to have the first one, but apparently there are a lot of towns like that, and its memorial day was clouded by the fact that there were lots of southern sympathizers in the area and people felt like john a logan was trying to lead them in a direction they didn't feel unified in going. he held his ceremony in this one cemetery practically doowntown. today there are one-way streets on either side of it and it's kind of lost in modern-world traffic. but that there, we used to say, was where they had the first memorial day service.

i had a great grandmother who was big on keeping memorial day. they wouldn't let her speak at her college (hillsdale college) because she was a woman, but she wanted to be a public speaker, so she made a living reciting civil war poetry at veterans' encampments. it helped that she was quite beautiful, but she would recite this poetry and all the drunk veterans would start hooting and hollering like crazy. she became attached to the veterans and when she needed a serious topic to expound on she would start in on keeping memorial day. we should always remember what we fought and died for, she would say, and in this case it was equality and freedom for everyone. she'd get wound up but would always have perfect elocution.

her biggest performance was one night in minneapolis where she recited without a mic in a crowded venue, and stole the show. she wss good at public speaking and knew how to get a crowd wound up. she commanded respect and spoke strongly but plainly. the fact that she was beautiful, and the veterans were generally a little drunk, usually worked in her favor. when it didn't she knew how to handle it.

one thing about civil war veteran encampments was that because a huge number of people had died, they always took time to remember some of those. we didn't have too many big wars for about fifty years, but in world war one (the great war) everyone went, and again lots of them died. now it was the whole country. now when they wanted to remember those who died, everyone was behind it, and they had no trouble making it a national holiday. everyone had long ago forgotten those services where. they tried to remember the civil war vets, way back when the country was just trying to forget the whole thing.