The issue was brought before the town board during their October meeting, as Town Supervisor Brian Willink said he and town board member, Levi Swanson, attended a meeting that the town board was invited to at the school regarding the future of the wall.

“The Veterans’ Memorial Wall was placed I believe around 10 years ago,” Willink said. “A group of community leaders and basically school employees were a big part of it. They got together and put together basically what you see now, which is two big boards up there with all of the names of the local service members that attended Clymer School.”

As the years went on, Willink said the original group moved on or passed on, and the wall has since fallen into disrepair. Specifically, the panels where the names are at are leaking water leading to the name placards in the board starting to curl up and turn brown because of moisture that is getting in there. Willink said the discussion turned to who the wall actually belongs to, saying that the way the school sees it is that they offered the space to host it but did not want to be in charge of the maintenance.

“They have mowed and kept up with the greenery around there, but as far as maintenance for any of the bricks, any of the names, the sign boards, that’s beyond their scope,” Willink said. “So that started a discussion of, what do we do? Beth Olson, the school superintendent, would just as soon get it off of school property, and she’d be the first to admit that.”

The Clymer town board discussed the possibility of moving the Veterans’ Memorial Wall in front of the school to somewhere else in town like the town park. P-J photo by Sara Holthouse

Willink said if it was taken off of school property, the question would then be where to put it. He added the Historical Society was also in attendance and that both he and the Historical Society agreed to take it in front of their prospective boards for discussion. A possibility would be having something around the Historical Society’s flagpole.

“The Historical Society went back, and they started looking at the area around their flagpole that currently sits down there,” Willink said. “There’s already four placards around their pole to commemorate service members, so it’s already kind of a memorial. But, they would just as soon bow out, so that leaves us.”

Willink said this meeting was just a brainstorming session to toss around ideas and nothing was decided at that meeting. He said his thoughts were that keeping track of the names is exceedingly difficult, as the names have to include past and present members, no matter how long they served, and includes a little bit of other communities like Sherman as well, compiling together to have already over 1200 names on the board. Additionally, he said Lisa Perry, teacher and FBLA advisor at the school, is in charge of the names, which are also listed alphabetically, but the boards are out of room.

“So I said if the town is going to take on something like this, we’re not offering our services or land for any type of name recognition,” Willink said. “It will be a generic ‘thanks to the local service members’ type thing. There’s five granite signs on the flagpole down there; army, navy, airforce, marines and coast guard. … The thought was they could get those unglued off of that podium and move them some place and we would erect a flag and maybe a stone of some sort and use that as a starting point.”

There was a question if there was some sort of electronic database that could be put together to recognize the names, and Willink said the school has one that it was discussed taking to the county to add to the county database. But, he said, in order to be on the wall someone had to have been honorably discharged with paperwork to prove it and some paperwork is there and some is not. Mostly, he said, the question will be who is going to maintain it if it is moved somewhere, and noted that Perry is probably going to be ready to retire soon, so she is looking to hand over the name part to someone else and there appears to be little to no interest.

Willink added that the school will most likely take the names down and replace it with some sort of vinyl covering so the boards do not just sit blank, but wanted to know if the town would be interested in giving up a spot in the park for it. It would not be a specific names memorial but rather a veterans appreciation. Willink said if they decided to do something they would most likely assign a few board members to a committee along with the school and any members of the original committee that are left, to come up with a design.

The town board decided to take time to think about it some more and tabled the decision until next month’s meeting.