Grand Forks Veterans Memorial Park honors those who have served

GRAND FORKS - As artist Greg Vettel walks along the memorial granite wall at Grand Forks Veterans Memorial Park, he points to images of people, warships and airplanes, telling their stories and emphasizing their significance as if leafing through a scrapbook.

"Here's Elton Ringsack of Grafton, Sue Ellen Bateman's brother," he says. He then points to John Hanson and Roger Westerso, who, along with Don Purpur, hatched the idea for the park.

"Here's Charles Lindbergh," he says. "He was in the first group to raise the flag on Iwo Jima, but he didn't make it into the famous photograph."

Vettel spent a lot of time with these images.

It is the result of countless hours he spent creating a 6-foot-high, 40-foot-long black granite wall in a park located at the intersection of South 24th Avenue and 34th Street.

Vettel, from rural Thompson, North Dakota, said he spent "thousands of hours" working on the project: "This is the biggest work of art I've ever done."

The display is flanked and topped by a border of 50 stars, with a series of wave-like stripes as the background for the laser-etched images. Along the base of the wall is a series of words: Independence, Freedom, Courage, Loyalty, Integrity, Service, Sacrifice, Duty and Honor.

Vettel chose these words, rather than war names and dates, to mount on the wall and draw attention to the paraphernalia that inspires military service.

"According to retired U.S. Air Force Col. Tom Saddler, who was vice chairman of the committee chaired by Gen. Al Palmer, he was a key figure in the design of the memorial's granite wall and interactive kiosk in the visitor center at Veterans Memorial Park. The group oversaw the overall design of the park.

In the process of determining which people and other images should be featured on the wall, Vettel, who also served on the VMP committee and board, collected nominations from area residents. Among the criteria for inclusion on the wall, "the person should be honorably discharged, of course, and we should have a picture of them in uniform, not in a suit," Vettel said.

Early planning

In the early stages of planning the memorial granite wall, VMP committee members - most of whom were Vietnam War veterans - "were inclined to think of the Vietnam Wall in Washington, D.C., or something similar for inspiration," Vettel says. "I, on the other hand, insisted that let's honor our veterans in Grand Forks."

Many of the veterans they were considering grew up in the neighborhood but have moved away.

"It was like pulling teeth to get people to volunteer their bios and photos," Vettel says, but after Dennis Pazderic provided his bio, other veterans followed suit.

Fettel's work included researching images, verifying copyrights and necessary authorization forms; he created a filing system to track documents and correspondence with veterans' families, as well as special fonts required by the U.S. military.

Vettel presented the information to the VMP committee and, after gaining approval of the selected images, focused on how to position them on the wall. As an example of his attention to detail, no image was cut off by gaps between the five granite panels.

Vettel chose to arrange the images in chronological order, according to periods of U.S. military history, beginning with the Revolutionary War on the left and ending with modern times on the right.

He said he also tried to include as many women from the area as possible, including Nora Anderson, a nurse who served in World War I, and Agnes Schurr, who taught at the UND College of Nursing after serving in the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps.

Vettel included a photo of Woodrow Wilson Keeble, a combat veteran and member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Tribe who served in the U.S. Army National Guard in World War II and the Korean War.

Engraved on the wall is a photo of Clifton ("Cliff") Cushman, who was shot down in Vietnam in 1966 and for whom the Grand Forks High School soccer and track and field complex is named. So are retired Judge Kirk Smith and former UND President Tom Clifford, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps.

The book includes historical images including General George Washington crossing the Delaware, Paul Revere on horseback, Francis Scott Key, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, and John Paul Jones, who founded the U.S. Navy.

"About halfway through finalizing the design, I was contacted by a man who told me about a daguerreotype photo he had of a Civil War soldier," says Vettel. "He had a very high-resolution photograph" of Peter Simon in uniform in the 1860s. That image hangs on the wall, and Simon eventually took up farming and ranching in Thompson.

"He died at age 35, in 1879," Vettel said. His great-great-grandson still lives in that neighborhood.

Vettel worked closely with Dale Hughes of Creature Works in Waconia, Minnesota, to finalize his plan and take it to Cold Spring Granite in Cold Spring, Minnesota, to create the panels that park visitors see today.

He said Vettel is not a veteran (a high draft number prevented him from serving during the Vietnam War), but several members of his family are or were veterans, including his uncle Carl Vettel, his father's older brother, who died at age 23 in the Battle of Guadalcanal in the Pacific theater of World War II.

Proud of the possibilities

Vettel, Saddler and others who worked on the park project are proud of how it turned out.

"I see people sitting in shelters," Saddler says. "People are going outside and reading; they're putting flags on rocks."

About 1,450 individual rectangular stones, engraved with veterans' names, years of service and occupation, are lined along sidewalks throughout the park. About 100 more stones will be engraved by Stennes Granite and installed by Opp Construction this summer, Saddler said.

Another 250 stones have been purchased, said Jenelle Swenberger, project administrator for the park district. "We plan to continue selling them as long as there is interest from the community."

Stones for the Walk of Honor can be ordered on the Grand Forks Park District's website, at https://www.gfparks.org or by calling (701) 746-2750.

Interactive kiosk

Vettel was also the creative mastermind behind the design and creation of an interactive touchscreen kiosk at the visitor center. The center is named after Palmer, who died in 2021.

For the kiosk, Vettel wrote biographies of people and background information on military equipment. The on-screen display replicates the Memorial Wall, Saddler said; information can be viewed by clicking on a specific image on the screen. It can also be viewed by anyone living anywhere who visits www.gfvmp.org or the Grand Forks Park District's Web site at www.gfparks.org.

Saddler said the kiosk is very informative, and he enjoys seeing teachers bring groups of students to the park to learn more about U.S. military history, especially as it relates to the area.

Upon completion, the park was turned over to the Grand Forks Park District for maintenance and future development.

Others have contributed

Vettel didn't fail to point out that many people were involved in the project, which brought an attractive and meaningful place to Grand Forks where people can gather and reflect on the service and sacrifices of American veterans.

"I didn't do it alone," Vettel said.

"He's very humble," Saddler said. The number of hours Vettel has worked on this project is "astronomical."

He said other people, including General Palmer, Gary Shields and Mike Hagen, were also instrumental in the creation of Veterans Memorial Park. The park was set to open in 2021.

Dale Bergum of Grand Forks, an employee of Webster, Foster & Weston Consulting Engineers Inc. was instrumental to the park's success because of his extraordinary attention to detail, Saddler said.

"He was the de facto project manager for that whole neighborhood," Saddler says of Bergum, who died last October at the age of 57. "He spent evenings there checking out the lighting system. He had a knack for solving problems and seeing what most people don't see and realizing what needed to be fixed. He offered solutions on how to make things better."

The park not only features a visitor center and memorial granite wall, but also benches and obelisks representing each of the military branches, other benches purchased by donors to honor family members, and military equipment including a Global Hawk, Reaper and an anchor from the naval munitions ship Kiska.

"The park turned out so beautiful," Saddler said, noting several shelters equipped with picnic tables and grills.

"People like to walk there," he said. "I've seen business people meeting there and doing business there."

According to Vettel, the whole project took about 11 years - the last five or six under General Palmer.

Reflecting on his work designing the wall, Vettel says, "I did it for my father, who was in the Navy during World War II, and for my Uncle Carl," he says. "My brother and sister also went into the navy."

Ultimately, "when I think about it," he said, "I think about how I hope it inspires my grandchildren."