BARRHEAD - It is a Barrhead tradition. Every year for the last 35 years, in early October, a small group of volunteers from the Barrhead Royal Canadian Legion place Canadian flags on the graves of local veterans who served with the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), the Army, the Royal Canadian Air Force, the merchant navy and the RCMP.
This year, on Oct. 17, Herman Barkemeyer, his wife Inga, Chuck Mortimer and his son Ed, along with former Town of Barrhead councillor Shelley Oswald, planted about 240 flags at the graves of veterans at Barrhead's Field of Honour. The Anglican Church donated the cemetery in 1925 for the sole purpose of honouring Barrhead's veterans.
Other volunteers plant flags at veterans' graves in adjacent cemeteries and throughout the County of Barrhead. In total, the Legion plants about 500 flags annually.
"[The flags] look so much better than the wreaths that we used to lay, especially the winter," Barkemeyer said, who himself is a 10-year veteran who served in both the Royal Canadian Airforce and the Canadian Army with the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, including a rotation during the Korean War.
Prior to planting the Canadian flags (donated this year by Osborne), the Legion used the wreaths from the cenotaph following the Remembrance Day ceremony.
Barkemeyer said the problem was that the wreaths did not weather well and that more were usually needed if they were to place one on each of the veterans' graves.
In about 2006, the Legion switched to Canadian flags.
Most veterans in the Field of Honour are veterans of the First or Second World Wars.
However, Barkemeyer said there is one grave of a veteran from the Boer War and one from the Korean War, "Curly Lahma".
"Six of us were in Korea from Barrhead and, thankfully, were all fortunate to return home," he said.
"Of the six, I'm the only one left."
As for how the Legion knows who and where a Barrhead veteran is, they have developed a fairly comprehensive list, created mainly through reading the gravestones and word of mouth.
"It is a difficult task as the government does not have a list we can use. We do our best," Mortimer said, who, like Barkemeyer, is a veteran, joining the Canadian Reserve Force, then called the militia in 1949, as part of the King's Own Calgary Regiment. "Unfortunately, every once in a while, we miss someone, and if there is any doubt, we plant a flag."
Barry Kerton, TownandCountryToday.com
