🍊 Grove Street Headlines
🏛️ HISTORY & HERITAGE | REDLANDS VETERANS
Four Brothers, Four Wars
What I saw when I put my family’s service photos on one page, and the Redlands kids in them.
For Veterans Day, I put a bunch of family photos on a single page.
Some are old enough to have gone brown. A young man in a dress cap, arms crossed. Another one holding a rifle in front of the flag(me). Then the newer ones, in color, with faces I’ve known since the day they were born.
One of them is a photo of a frame. Across the top it says: Four Brothers. Four Wars. With Honor. Under that, four portraits. World War II. Korea. Vietnam. Desert Storm.
I’ve looked at every one of those pictures before. I had never looked at them all at once.
My family has served for five generations. Someone in our family has served in uniform in every conflict since World War II. That’s a sentence. The page is something else. The page has faces.
My dad was a medic in Vietnam. I grew up on his stories, and I joined the Army in the late ’80s to become a medic like him. I wasn’t thinking about legacy. I was a kid who wanted to be like my dad.
Then it kept going without me pushing it.
Here is the Redlands part. My kids are local kids. Andrew and Bella were both born at Redlands Community Hospital, and they grew up right here.
Andrew earned his Eagle Scout with Troop 11 in Redlands. Then he went to the Naval Academy, graduated in 2019, and served as a Surface Warfare Officer. His wife, Kanoe, is currently a Navy officer on active duty. Bella is at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Class of 2029. Liz and I watch her volleyball games on a screen from the other side of the country, which is its own kind of service nobody warns the parents about.
For more than 4 years I’ve also been a Blue and Gold Officer. I sit across from high school kids who want to go to the Naval Academy and ask them why. So I’ve heard a lot of answers to that question.
Here’s what I notice, looking at the page. The uniforms change. The haircuts change. The photo paper changes. The decision doesn’t. Somebody young raises a hand and says, send me.
And around here, that somebody is a local kid. Born at Redlands Community. Raised on these streets. A Scout in a troop you have heard of. That is who a Redlands veteran is before anybody calls them one.
I am so proud of Bella. I am so proud of Kanoe. I don’t have a fancier way to say it.
And if you served, in any branch, in any decade, thank you. For the time you gave up, the distance you put between yourself and home, and whatever you carried back.
🎓 COMMUNITY
There Is a Brown Paper Bag on Your Porch. Here Is What It Is For.
If a brown paper grocery bag showed up at your door last weekend, it was not a mistake. Volunteers spread 20,000 of them across Redlands on November 7 for the Family Service Association’s annual Fall Food Drive. This Saturday, November 14, they come back for them.
The idea is about as simple as helping gets. Fill the bag with canned and boxed food and set it back out. Volunteers carry it to Family Service at 612 Lawton St., where more volunteers sort and pack it. What comes in Saturday helps stock the pantry for the year ahead. Family Service has been catching Redlands families on hard days since 1898. That is 128 years of neighbors looking after neighbors, and a town ought to be proud of a streak like that.
If you have a free morning, they can use your hands too. Sorting starts at 10 AM Saturday and runs into the early afternoon. Sign up at redlandsfamilyservice.org.
Source: Community Forward Redlands and Family Service Association of Redlands
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