Cheyenne
The motorcycle gleams under the midafternoon sun, a patriotic trophy in metal-flake red, white and blue set on titanium rims.
Donn Edmunds tows the bike on a trailer. He’s never started the 2005 Harley- Davidson VROD in which he has invested thousands of his own dollars.
Edmunds sells $100 chances to win the motorcycle. Proceeds will help build the Wyoming Patriots Memorial Park.
Despite the glamorous title, the project boils down to a father’s tireless attempt to deal with his son’s death.
Jonn J. Edmunds was one of the first two casualties of the post-Sept. 11 military fighting. The 20-year-old Army Ranger died along with a colleague in a helicopter crash in Pakistan on Oct. 20, 2001.
Since then, Donn Edmunds, a 28-year career military police officer, has devoted himself to making sure no one forgets those who fight for their country.
At this moment, Edmunds, 56, stands amid 5.5 acres of scrub-grass and cactus covered ground adjacent to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center. This is the public land the Cheyenne City Council made available to him in February. This is where he swears to build a multimillion- dollar soldiers’ memorial using fundraising techniques better suited to the PTA or the Boy Scouts.
“Hey,” Edmunds said, “you’ve got to have big dreams.”
They don’t come much larger than thinking you can gather a million bucks raffling a motorcycle and selling “Support the Troops” keepsakes.
Edmunds, whose current bank account is “about $12,000,” reaches into his truck and pulls out a selection of magnetic memorabilia that would rival a military post exchange.
There is the classic stick-on “Support Our Troops” ribbon in camouflage and red, white and blue. There are “Support the 153rd Airlift Wing” and “Support the 1022nd Air Ambulance Company,” Cheyenne’s National Guard units serving in Iraq. Here are a half-dozen other messages in a rainbow of colors. It’s all available from Edmunds, along with dog tags imprinted “Never Forget 9/11.”
Every last one of these patriotic pieces is American-made, Edmunds said.
The fact that he’ll have to sell more of them than there are people in Wyoming doesn’t seem to faze him.
“He doesn’t know what the word ‘no’ means,” Cheyenne Mayor Jack Spiker said. Spiker said he and his council colleagues have “bought into the dream” of the memorial park. The mayor recently made a trip to Washington seeking money for a drainage project that will be built next to the park site and will share some landscaping and site work.
But the money for the memorial itself must come from private sources. And that leaves much of the work to a man possessed by the memory of the son who followed in his father’s footsteps and enlisted in the Army straight out of Cheyenne’s East High School.
Edmunds was too old to re-enlist to fight terrorists in his son’s place once the boy was killed.
Neither he nor his wife of 28 years wants their surviving children to join the military. So the family will try to honor those who have served and sacrificed.
“I’ve been to 42 funerals,” Edmunds said.
He’s also been to businesses and professionals seeking help. Cheyenne architect Randy Byers donated a conceptual design. A Denver company has informally agreed to cut-rate prices on black granite. Other businesses have promised similar discounts and in-kind donations.
None of it will happen without a serious infusion of cash. So Edmunds will haul his specially painted Harley to Sturgis, S.D., in August to sell $100 raffle tickets at the country’s largest motorcycle rally and draw a winner two weeks later.
This may only make a little dent in the seven-figure fundraising task. But Donn Edmunds swears he’ll be at it as long as it takes.
“This is not,” he said, “something I’m going to let go of.”
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com. David Harsanyi’s column will appear Tuesday.
