http://www.thebattlecreekshopper.com BATTLE CREEK SHOPPER NEWS Thursday, September 19, 2024 25
ATHENS
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EVERYONE WILL GET A GIFT BAG, NO MATTER WHAT!VFW and Auxiliary members lined up along the sidewalk for the Athens
Veterans Memorial re-dedication ceremony on Saturday, September 14.
(Shopper News photo by Leila Wood)
Community Foundation, and Mr. and
Mrs. JR and Kacie Brunner.
“It’s what Athens does best,” said
Kacie Brunner, who is the manager
of the Athens Area Community
Foundation. “We work together to
get big projects done.
“You don’t see little communities
like this pull off a project like this,”
she continued, and she said they are
“really, really grateful to be a part of
it.”
On top of her work with the
Community Foundation, she and her
husband, Athens Village Council
Trustee JR Brunner gave a lot of
their time to help bring the project to
fruition.
Their family has a personal con-
nection to the monument, as Kacie
Brunner said her father, an Athens
graduate and Vietnam veteran, is one
of the names on the monument.
“It’s really, really close to home forus, so we’re really proud of it,” she
said. “We’re proud of what our com-
munity can do.”
JR Brunner and Department
of Public Works Superintendent
Dorman Snyder spearheaded most
of the manual labor to complete the
renovation.
Before, on the lawn beside the
library, there was a plaque commem-
orating local World War I veterans
mounted to the base of a flagpole
and two separate stone monuments
commemorating those who served
more recently.
The old cement had become
cracked.
A step down to from the sidewalk
made the monuments relatively inac-
cessible to the elderly or disabled,
and JR Brunner said the newer of the
two stone monuments “looked like
an afterthought,” sitting on its own,
behind the flagpole and the other
monument.
They paved a larger area beside
the library, where the old flagpole
and plaque and one of
the stone monuments had
been, put the two stone
monuments together in the
middle of the pavement,
with seven new flagpoles
for the US flag and the
flags of the branches of
the US military behind
them, and cleaned,
repainted, and mounted
the plaque on another