Two years ago I pulled away from a happenstance stop at a veterans memorial in the wind-blown wheat country of southeast Washington, and as I did, I quickly felt that I would have to return to learn more about it. Though I learned then of Medal of Honor recipient Reinhardt Keppler, and five other young men who went off to the Pacific during World War II and did not survive it, I needed to know who it was who had so thoughtfully, and apparently recently, created this poignant plot in the middle of a dusty nowhere. Clearly it meant that a community cared, and very much so, out there in Ralston, Wash., named after the Ralston Purina Co., population 200 or so.
After 30 miles of wheat stubble as yellow as gold ingots, an expanse of lapis lazuli sky and not much else, I had braked at an Historic Marker Ahead sign, as I always do. Just over a hill was a grove of trees, and an old building across the road marked Ralston Grange told me where I was. A grain elevator suggested that more than nothing had gone on around there in the past, but probably not lately, other than planting soft white wheat right up to the black strip of pavement I’d driven through the lonely scabland country of the Evergreen State.
A brochure at Keppler Memorial Park told me of its namesake, who was born at his minister father’s parsonage back up the hill. He enlisted in the Navy in 1936 and was aboard the cruiser USS San Francisco in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. No one on the ship was injured in that surprise attack, but on a dark night in October 1942 Keppler’s ship and others engaged Japanese warships off Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. When his ship was struck by shellfire, Keppler was wounded, but as the leading petty officer in his division he fought fires nonetheless and was credited with saving his ship and the lives of many others. Reinhardt Keppler died two days later in a hospital on Espiritu Santo, later to be awarded the Medal of Honor. Only a few months earlier he had been married while on leave in San Francisco.
So what do we say about his sacrifice and of the others memorialized with him? Otto Lund, who grew up just east of Ralston in Benge, Wash., was a Marine gunner, killed on Guadalcanal, age 27. Victor Lund, his brother, volunteered a few months before Pearl Harbor; as a staff sergeant he was killed in the Philippines, in the invasion of Luzon in 1944. Donald Schwerin, a farm boy from Ralston died at 28 when his B-24 bomber was lost over the Philippines just a few months before the end of the war. William Parker’s family moved to Ralston from Alberta in 1939 when his father became agent for the Milwaukee Railroad. His B-17 was shot down off the coast of New Guinea; one crew member survived, he did not. Robert Kent, of Benge, enlisted in the Army in 1941 with his brother so they could serve together. They were captured when the Bataan peninsula at Manila surrendered in 1942. In a prison camp for three years, Robert was put on one of the “hell ships” late in the war for transit to Japan. After being torpedoed by an American submarine, only nine of the nearly 1,800 prisoners aboard survived. His brother Herb, who had watched others die on the Bataan Death March and many other horrors, was not aboard. He returned from the war to the homestead where he had been born. He died at 95, and is remembered by the community as optimistic, kind and generous.
For the rest of the story of how the memorial came to be we turn to Randy Roth, who as a boy in the ’60s asked his mother, “Who is that sailor in the picture at church?” Back in farm country after a career in California, Roth harnessed the rural power of Ralston Grange #943 members to remember and memorialize those who did their duty, but who would never walk among amber waves of grain again.
In the 100-degree heat of a June day in 2002, around 500 people gathered at the new memorial. A bagpiper skirled, the Angus Scot Pipe Band tootled and a Naval Reserve Color Guard stood at attention. When the Navy hymn “Eternal Father” was sung, most became teary, as I did when I first visited there two years ago. No doubt some of them wondered what we can say about their sacrifice, other than to acknowledge it, as the memorial does and as I’m doing here and now.
A final note: Ralston is northwest of Walla Walla and south of Spokane, but not on the way to anywhere, unless you’re on the 285-mile Palouse-Cascade Rail Trail. As Randy Roth advises, ride west to east, downwind. Call him if you plan to camp and he will turn off the sprinkler at the memorial. That way you can sleep under the stars on the deep green grass.
Dick Mackay followed his interest in glacial geology to the scabland of southeastern Washington. He lives in Hanover.