Gold Star mother works to revive Columbia’s Memorial Day parade
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
After a six-year hiatus, a Gold Star mother is hoping to resurrect a decades-old tradition of hosting a Memorial Day parade in Columbia.
Sherry Wyatt says her heart sank when her son, Sterling, told her he wanted to enlist in the U.S. Army. A Rock Bridge graduate, Sterling was also an Eagle Scout and a black belt in Taekwondo. However, it was his love of travel that initially drew him to the Army.
“Oh, my gosh. My heart just dropped because he said the recruiter had said that, ‘Oh, we could go to Germany or Japan.’ And he had done a study abroad in Japan, and he thought that would be cool. And I'm like, ‘You know, we have two shooting wars going on. We have Iraq and Afghanistan, and that's where you're going to end up,’” Sherry Wyatt said.
Friends say that he regularly stood up for marginalized people in high school.
“We didn't know how much until after we lost him,” Sherry Wyatt said. “We had a lot of people that would say, ‘You know, people picked on me but not once Sterling was around.’ He was a protector of people.”
On July 11, 2012, Sterling Wyatt was killed at the age of 21, when a vehicle he was driving in was struck by an IED in Afghanistan. Sherry Wyatt said at that moment, patriotism took on a whole new meaning for her family.
The Wyatts regularly attended Columbia’s “Salute to Veterans Parade” and Air Show every Memorial Day, an event put on for 31 years that was organized by Mary Posner. Sherry Wyatt said she has fond memories of waving American flags at the parade with her two sons. However, following Posner’s death in 2019, the tradition seemingly died with her.
After four years without recognition from the community, Wyatt decided to take action.
“There's eight or nine families here in Boone County just since 9/11 that have lost their, happen to be all men, of all their sons,” she said. “Last year I thought, I am not going to let another Memorial Day go by and not have a parade. It may be me and my family in a car, right, waving a flag, but we're going to have a parade.”
After making inquiries, she met with the Columbia Visitors and Business Bureau, who told her it had been waiting for someone to “step up to the plate.” Wyatt pitched the idea of changing the parade name to the Gold Star Memorial Parade.
The parade, which is scheduled for 10 a.m. Monday, May 26, will travel right down Broadway from First Baptist Church near Waugh Street to Second Baptist Church near Fourth Street. Fellow Gold Star families will be the grand marshals for the parade, which will be followed by a wreath-laying ceremony at the Boone County courthouse.
“Our children are gone. Their life here has ended. But we remain. And so, we bear that burden of those memories and that loss,” Wyatt said. “It is a way to say our sons and our daughters are not forgotten. We're going to honor them.”
Due to the high volume of commercial flights at Columbia Regional Airport, the Air Show will no longer take place.
However, Wyatt hopes the event will serve as a way to unite the community.
“At this point in time, there's a lot of divisiveness. There's a lot of separation, and we may not all agree, but this is a time that we can come together. We can take pride in our country,” she said.
She added that she wants the parade to be an opportunity to thank the community that supported her family after her son's passing. During Sterling’s funeral, thousands of people lined the streets of Columbia, waving flags and wearing red after learning that Kansas’ Westboro Baptist Church planned to protest.
“I think this is an important community event where we can forget for a time—if you're right, left, middle, purple, pink, polka-dotted, whatever. We are Americans,” Sherry Wyatt said. “And we can come and honor what our soldiers, our airmen, our Marines, our Coasties, what those people died for.”
