Group enlisting volunteers for Memorial Day parade to help honor fallen Michiganders

It has been nearly three years since America’s longest armed conflict — the so-called Global War on Terrorism — officially ended.

But a group of Michiganders, devoted to annually marching in Ferndale’s Memorial Day Parade on Monday, are seeking to enlist volunteers to help them remember the fathers and mothers, sons and daughters who died in the war’s battles.

The marchers, who call themselves the Michigan Fallen Heroes Foot Float, are part of the spirit and tradition of the holiday parade, which is one of — if not the — state’s oldest, having been held every year for more than 100 years, except a couple during the pandemic.

The group’s members, which call themselves a "foot float" because the marchers — who carry signs and banners and flags to honor the fallen as bagpipes wail and onlookers stand and sometimes salute to recognize the price of freedom — move together, as a unit, through the city, as if they were the float.

They still need 100 more volunteers, at least, to join them, to help hold the signs and banners that include the names and photographs of scores of Americans who died in the military campaign initiated by the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"So much has happened in our world since then and people have shifted their focus to other things," said Larry Saville, who, along with his sister-in-law, Kim Saville, of Lake City, started the group while the war was going on, and soldiers were coming home in body bags. "But our purpose has never changed."

A way to honor the fallen

To put the foot float in context, we must go back to 2006, when the Savilles came up with it. Or perhaps, before that, to 2001, when America was attacked, setting off the military campaign against terrorists that lasted nearly 20 years.

President George W. Bush defined the conflict as a "war on terror" and the enemy as a "radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them." Many Americans, and especially those in Ferndale, never fully got behind it, much less agree on what to call it.

But Memorial Day isn’t really about war, it’s about remembering those who perished in it.

Larry Saville, who recalled that in 2006 he was reading the Free Press when he realized the toll the war was taking in terms of lost American lives, and he decided that he wanted to do something more to memorialize them.

It was too bad, he said, when he saw the faces in the newspaper of those who died in combat, that there wasn’t another way to honor them, to remember them, if not for the dead, but for the living, the families and loved ones who felt that loss the most.

His sister-in-law, who thought he had a good idea, told him maybe there was a way.

Together, Saville said, they dreamed up the foot float.

They got dozens of other people to join them, and they have been recognizing the fallen every year at the parade, in the sunshine or rain, because no matter what you think about the controversial war — or series of wars have been lumped together — everyone deserves to be remembered, somehow.

Decoration Day to Memorial Day

And that’s the idea behind Memorial Day — even though for many it has become one of the busiest days for travel and marks an unofficial start of summer — to honor America’s war dead. It was a way, after the Civil War, for a divided America to cope with the death toll.

Many places claim to be the birthplace of the holiday.

In 1868, John Logan — a soldier, politician and sometimes credited with starting Memorial Day — proclaimed May 30 to be Decoration Day. Logan, the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, sought a way to remember the Union soldiers who died.

It was called Decoration Day, because that’s when relatives would decorate graves with flowers.

States began to recognize the holiday and soon, each one had adopted it.

And in the early part of the 20th Century, after the first World War, a then-popular poem, "In Flanders Fields," referred to the fields of poppies that grew among the soldiers’ graves in Flanders, Belgium. People started wearing the silk poppy as a symbol of remembrance.

World War II inspired more efforts to memorialize the dead.

In 1967, Congress made Memorial Day an official federal holiday — a paid day off — and a few years later, in 1971, lawmakers declared the holiday would be observed on the last Monday in May, which many companies now also recognize as a day off.

A sense of what was lost

Still, Larry Saville, a 70-year-old groundskeeper at Machpelah Cemetery in Ferndale, said that he hopes the foot float – and other emotional experiences – reminds Americans that the day off is more than a moment to forget about work.

Five years after the group’s first parade march, a Free Press editor wrote about the foot float.

“It’s not possible, really, to measure what Michigan has lost to the long years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the 2012 piece began. “A simple count of the dead cannot account for the unrealized potential, the empty chairs at family tables, the holes in the hearts and the dreams forever dashed.”

The foot float, the Free Press piece added, gives you a strong sense of that toll.

Over the years, Saville said, he’s seen — and heard about — how the float has struck an emotional chord with people who did not realize – or consider – the depth of the sacrifice of the men and women whose lives were taken in the conflict.

Saville described a woman who, one year, stood up, covering her mouth in horror, as the foot float passed. She simply could not believe how many lives were lost until she saw the sheer number of them, each sign representing another person.

And another year, Saville said, he heard a story about a man, carrying a little boy, who walked over to one of the signs with a photo of one of the fallen, and he said that he just wanted to introduce his nephew to his father.

The group is asking volunteers — who can sign up and grab a sign between 8:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m., at the corner of West Lewiston and Livernois in Ferndale — to wear red, white or blue clothing, but nothing that promotes a political, commercial or religious theme.

Saville, who fears that much of the holiday’s original meaning is being lost, is inviting you, if you "want to honor those who gave their all," to participate in — or attend — Ferndale’s Memorial Day parade, which starts at 10 a.m.

To volunteer, call or text Seville at 313-413-4521 or email ferndalefootfloat@gmail.com.

Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Want to walk in a Memorial Day parade? Ferndale group needs volunteers