Veterans Day Parade Rumbles Through Downtown Chehalis

Posted

The air was chilly, but not unpleasant, and the breeze was consistent, but not biting, as the Lewis County Veterans Day Parade came rolling through downtown Chehalis Sunday afternoon.

People dotted the sidewalk in some places, and lined it in others watching the procession consisting largely of refurbished military vehicles thunder down the street.

Dotting the crowd were the unmistakable hats denoting service in one of the branches of the United States military. It’s a dead giveaway of a person’s military service for most, but others don’t need to see a hat to deduce a person’s a vet.

“You see sometimes the expression on their face. You might not even see a hat, you spot something about them that tells you they’re a veteran. You have to look and understand,” said Dale Newcomer, a Mossyrock resident who served as a marine from 1962 to 1966.

It was his first time to the Lewis County Veterans Day Parade. Normally, he said, his tradition is to head to the one in Auburn. But this year, another obligation barred that, so he made the trip to Chehalis instead.

“I’ve been to a lot of reunions over the years, and … out of 216 men, I’ve got 19 men left,” he said. Newcomer sat on the corner of a trailer where Pat Swanson took the mic as announcer.

The parade kicked off with a Lewis County Sheriff’s Office SUV and was followed close behind with the impossible-to-miss revving of motorcycles.

What followed was a procession consisting of heavily of restored military vehicles. Some tossed candy out the open windows.

It wrapped up quickly, something Swanson attributed in part to area military vehicles being used for protests in Olympia against a potential discontinuation of licenses that allow military vehicles to operate on public roads.

Among the vehicles were two bearing the names of more than 40 World War I veterans — results of a recent push between the Veterans Museum and Genealogical Society to honor the service of WWI vets on the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day.

The crowd dispersed quickly after the parade, leaving little evidence of their gathering, but the veterans museum still had a lively amount of activity. Soon, said Swanson, the museum will house a P-51 Mustang from WWII, suspended above the gallery, banked as though it were in action.

When the museum was designed, the beams on the ceiling were built to hold some sort of flying machine of war. Early plans were to suspend a helicopter, but the price wasn’t right at the time.

Now, efforts will start after Thanksgiving, of brining in plane parts, assembling them, and then suspending the final product from the ceiling. The gallery section of the museum will be closed during that time.



A number of people trickled through the museum in the hours after the parade. David Honcoop, and his brother Brian, looked through a large collection of patches for the ones Honcoop would have worn during his service in Vietnam.

Since then, Honcoop said, he’s lost contact with most of the people he served with.

“I have no names. I have some names that float around in my mind — it’s 50 years ago now — of people that I might have served with, and I do have a few pictures. But as a young guy, I never wrote their names, first and last,” he said.

It’s different for his son, who serves as a marine who trained and was deployed with the same crew of guys, Honcoop said. He didn’t have it that way.

Walking through the place, he pointed out a couple items or displays that hit close to home.

“We had to learn how to do what these guys did,” he said, pointing at a mannequin, decked out in gear, rappelling from an imaginary helicopter high above the ceiling.

“It’s good for kids to come down here … and somebody to come along with them sometime and explain what all this is about,” he said.