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Holiday schedule today. I'll do a roundup later of items that are piling up.
Saturday morning was the annual planting of the flags at the Los Angeles National Cemetery. Boy and girl scouts from across Southern California show up at Wilshire and Sepulveda and in a couple of hours place a flag at all 85,000-plus headstones and markers. I blathered on about the place last Memorial Day, so I won't smother you with sentiment. Indulge me one historical aside, though, considering that the cemetery founded in 1889 and adjoining VA campus is the oldest place on Wilshire Boulevard. Residents include fourteen recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor, among them James Sweeney, a Vermont private who captured the state flag of a North Carolina regiment in the Civil War. Six earned their medals during the Indian wars, among them Griffin Seward, a 5-foot-three, 113-pound wagoner with gray eyes from Delaware who engaged Cochise in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona in 1869. Two years later, Navy landsman William F. Lukes picked up his Medal of Honor while being injured fighting in Korea in a war I didn't even know we had.
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