Oxford groups take planting flags to higher level

With several American flags in his hands and a slight limp in his step, Steve Crow made his way up and down the hills of Oxford Cemetery.

A couple of dozen other people joined him Wednesday at the graveyard northwest of this small Johnson County town, and the adjoining Mount Calvary Cemetery, carrying on the Oxford American Legion tradition of planting flags at the graves of military veterans shortly before Memorial Day.

It's a ritual that dates to well before the 62-year-old Crow, a Navy veteran who served during the Vietnam War, joined what is officially known as Frank Vercherka Post 537 more than 40 years ago. They now cover more than 300 graves in six cemeteries, and keeping track of which graves get flags has always been a low-tech affair.

“For a while, it was just done on memory,” said Crow, who lives near Marengo. “And then over the years they finally just started writing stuff down. And some of the fellas, they knew where everything was and they'd just call it out and away we'd go.”

The process is getting a 21st-century update. In addition to placing flags Wednesday, the post and its affiliated Sons of the American Legion chapter - for male descendants of veterans who were eligible for American Legion membership - recorded the latitude and longitude of each military grave using a Global Positioning System device.

Often associated with vehicle navigation systems, GPS devices link with satellites to determine location with nearly pinpoint accuracy.

When the Sons of the American Legion Squadron 537 was chartered two years ago, members like Bob Tandy wanted a better way to track the cemetery records.

They started by combining grave information obtained from the Legion, the cemeteries and the Johnson County Veterans Affairs Department. Each had some “gaping holes,” Tandy said, but the three sets helped them fill many of those.

The next step, which started Wednesday, is to verify the information on each tombstone and then record its location with a GPS receiver.

“If we didn't remember them, it's possible no one would,” said Tandy, 41, of Walford.

That is not an infrequent occurrence. In fact, the group at Oxford Cemetery found a veteran's grave Wednesday not in their records.

At Des Moines' oldest cemetery, Woodland Cemetery, an effort is under way to compile records of Civil War graves, some marked with only a rock and no name, said John Derner, department adjutant for the American Legion of Iowa.

American Legion posts nationwide are known for placing U.S. flags in cemeteries for Memorial Day, and Derner said various organizations have been taking inventories of gravestones. The Oxford American Legion post is the only one he's aware of using GPS technology, and he's excited about it.

“That's really one of our primary responsibilities, to preserve the memory of those who served before us,” he said.

Leigh Ann Randak, curator at the Johnson County Historical Society, said it also would be a great service for historians and people documenting family trees.

“Something like that is very time consuming, so anytime a group is interested in documenting graves or something else ... is fantastic,” she said.

Tandy said they hope to be finished by July 4 and want the information publicly available online.

The GPS data would have been helpful Wednesday.

“Organized chaos,” is how the work was described by Richard Bryant, 59, who lives south of Oxford and is an Army National Guard veteran.

His group of a dozen people started on Oxford Cemetery's north end.

Walking row to row and reading names off the paper records relied upon for now, the work was part search mission. When a vet's grave was found, a 12-by-18-inch U.S. flag on a yard-long stick was placed in a flag holder. For the sites without a holder, Bryant would bend over and punch a hole in the hard ground with a large flat-head screwdriver.

Once in, a 20-mph south wind caused the flags to wave at attention.

Bringing up the rear were Tandy, Jonas Borntreger and Shane Williams, a 17-year-old from Oxford who is a past commander of the Oxford Sons of the American Legion.

Borntreger, 70, of Oxford, has no affiliation with the Legion, but he enjoys geocaching, an activity in which GPS devices are used to find hidden objects.

The three went grave to grave, with Tandy and Williams verifying the Legion's records with what was on the tombstone. Borntreger, using his handheld GPS receiver, read off the coordinates for Tandy to write down.

“3890, 8273,” Borntreger gave for an abbreviated latitude and longitude at the grave of John A. Klenk, who died in 1894 and was a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization for Union Army veterans after the Civil War.

Earlier, the group placing flags were several rows off as they looked for Klenk's tombstone before realizing they'd already passed it.

Everyone thought the GPS data would make the job easier next year. But no matter how this long-standing mission is accomplished, they said their goal is the same.

“Just to say thank you,” Crow said.