Once-forgotten veterans buried in Oregon

[Woodmonkey]

EAGLE POINT, Ore. — Harry Fish was born in Ohio and served in the Army during World War I.

He married Mima Fish and died in Grants Pass on April 18, 1974 — 10 days after Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record.

Little else is known about Fish, except that his ashes sat unclaimed for the past 34 years in a locker at a Grants Pass funeral home.

On Thursday, the remains of Fish and seven other forgotten servicemen were buried with full military honors at the Eagle Point National Cemetery.

The remains were discovered as part of the Missing in America Project, a 2-year-old group that finds, verifies and arranges burials with full military honors for veterans whose remains lie unclaimed in funeral homes.

Project volunteers have found and buried 175 veterans and are searching funeral homes in 44 states.

Though the project was born in Oregon, Thursday’s service was the first in the state.

The group’s president is Fred Salanti, disabled from the Vietnam War. He was volunteering on veterans issues in Grants Pass when his chapter of the Oregon Veterans Motorcycle Association started attending monthly services for forgotten veterans at Eagle Point National Cemetery.

Then he heard of unclaimed ashes at a funeral home in Idaho and a man there who found the veterans among them and arranged a proper burial. Then more forgotten veterans were found in a Nevada funeral home. That’s when Salanti got the idea for the Missing in America Project.

“No country abandons its dead,” said Salanti, who moved to Redding, Calif., last year. “You even let the enemy bury its dead on the battlefield.”

Fish’s remains were found by Bud Thieme, a Vietnam veteran who started visiting southern Oregon funeral homes in January 2007, informing funeral directors of the project and trying to persuade them to open their storage units and files.

Fish’s remains were at Hull & Hull Funeral Directors in Grants Pass, which has cared for the dead in that city since the 1920s and has dozens of unclaimed cremains in basement lockers.

It took Thieme about a year to get permission to inspect the cremains; once inside, he painstakingly recorded the name, date of death and identification number from a cremain’s cardboard box and checked each with the funeral home’s file for clues to service records. If there was a hint that the cremains belonged to a veteran, Thieme would send a query to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs records office in St. Louis.

“It’s interesting because you form an identity for that person; it becomes very personal,” Thieme said.

His effort was honored when he was chosen Thursday to read the names of the 20 veterans who were buried in the past 30 days at Eagle Point. Each name was followed by a single ringing of a bell.

Besides Fish, the veterans whose unclaimed remains were buried Thursday included Carroll Pope, Bruce King, Robert Herr, Albert Lester, Herbert Heyer, Carl Reinhardt and Jack Hodges.

The Source