During Memorial Day weekend last month, hundreds of people gathered at the Colorado Freedom Memorial in Aurora to honor the 80th anniversary of World War II. At the annual celebration that’s been happening for more than a decade, six WWII vets came out and received thanks from the crowd.
Now that the “Colorado Remembers” celebration in Memorial Park has ended, the memorial’s creator is planning some additions for future celebrations and regular visitors – a visitor’s center, and a classroom for students who might come on fieldtrips. There will also be displays of memorabilia, and a conference room for vets to get help with benefits. The building will also give people somewhere to sit within what’s now a standing-only park with just a few park benches for seating.
After raising $1.2 million starting in 2002, overseeing the creation of three diverse monuments for the Memorial and launching it 12 years ago, Rick Crandalls, the Colorado Freedom Memorial founder, executive director and foundation CEO, wants to add some permanent features that will provide learning and seating spaces.
“We’re excited about the future, and have begun the process of raising money and have designed a new facility called the Colorado Freedom Memorial Visitor and Education Center, which will be located on the opposite end of the park from the Colorado Freedom Memorial,” said Crandall, who served in American Forces Radio in Guam and later in Colorado Springs at the Air Force Academy. Along with his wife, he’s the main steward of the memorial, he said in a recent interview at the Memorial.
What’s coming up
Crandall said he anticipates the additional components — the visitor’s center and classroom — will happen as quickly as he can raise the $8 million it will cost to erect the building, projected to be about 7,000 square feet. So far, he’s about 25 percent there. He has engaged the same architect that made part of the memorial and has what Crandall calls “rudimentary” renderings for a two-story building.
“The facility will contain a classroom for when students come out on field trips,” he said. “We can take them inside and have worksheets built to their grade level that will have laptops in the classroom for each of the students, and they can learn a little bit in the classroom and then come out and learn a little bit more out at the memorial,” he said.
It will also have a museum-like component.
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“We’ll have an exhibit space there where we have some memorabilia from veterans who have served – that’ll be on display. And then up on the second floor, we’ll have an observation deck that will look north up towards the Colorado Freedom Memorial from this building,” said Crandall.
Inside the same building, the memorial will also become a meeting point for veterans, especially those seeking services.
“We’ll also have a conference room that will be available to folks like the Arapahoe County Veteran Service Officer, who will use it one day a month as kind of a drop-in place for veterans who are seeking veterans benefits and assistance with obtaining those,” he said.
Fundraising is going well, he said. “We’re over the moon excited about the opportunities that present themselves with this facility, and now it’s just all about raising money,” he said. “We’ve got between five and six million ahead of us to raise to bring this building out of the ground. We feel like we’re talking to a bunch of good folks in the community about the possibility of being donors to the cause,” he said.
What’s there now
Already, there’s a lot to get sentimental about when visiting the Memorial, but the park having no physical building makes it easy to overlook. Right now, it looks like an unassuming park ground in Aurora, at which flags are at half-staff at all times, as a way to honor those who died in combat. The memorial has three specific components, which collectively cost $1.2 million. Funds came from Lockheed Martin, veterans, and everyday folks responding to their fundraising efforts, according to Crandall.
Probably the most well-known component is the Colorado Freedom Memorial Glass Monument, which has the names of 6,200 Colorado veterans killed in military action. Crandall said they were collected from a list from the State Archives that contained about 5,200 names, supplemented with names of people they’ve come across doing their own research, including almost 150 names added this year.
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The panels are three layers of glass, with the names on the middle wafer-thin panel and glass supports on either side of it. About 20 years ago, they were designed by Kristoffer Kenton, who had recently graduated from Kansas State University, and is now a director of architecture at the Greenwood Village-based firm, Galloway & Company – the same company that’s designing the new building.
Kenton created the look of peaked mountaintops, some waving a bit inward, others outward, by contouring the tops of the glass at angles similar to those of mountain peaks, which fit Crandall’s vision.
During a visit in late May, one of the panels had been shattered by a projectile that got caught up in a lawn mower. Grass around it was cordoned off and it was being carefully replaced with a duplicate.
The second component at the memorial, called Homes Embrace, consists of eight Colorado red rose granite pillars, angled in an L shape, and located about 50 feet from the names engraved in glass. These are to honor those whose bodies never came home – estimated to be at least half of the 6,200.
In front of each of the eight pillars are small containers with bronze lids. Inside the containers are spoonfuls of earth brought from cemeteries in countries where their bodies are believed to be buried. “Almost 4,000 of their remains never came back to Colorado. So those families never had a gravesite to go to to grieve,” Crandall said. He worked with the American Battle Monuments Commission, which manages more than two dozen cemeteries overseas, most of them WWI and WWII cemeteries.
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“And I thought, what if we could bring soil from the graves where Coloradans are buried in those cemeteries overseas? What if we could return some soil from those here, and symbolically return them to Colorado?”
The 27 cemeteries are located in eight countries, hence the eight pillars, and the bronze-capped containers, engraved with an upside-down torch (symbolic of a life extinguished), were placed in front of each pillar, containing the soil gathered from those cemeteries.
“We poured some of the soil from the graves on top of the Colorado soil to symbolically return them home, and then we capped them,” he said, getting emotional about the cooperation from other countries that made his idea a reality.
Cemetery staff in Italy made the collection of the soil a solemn event, flying a drone overhead to record it, and sending the video along with the spoonfuls of earth as a way to join in from abroad on honoring those Coloradans lost.
Luxembourg cemetery staffers leaned in as well. “Luxembourg went to every Colorado grave site in their cemetery, which I believe is 51, and they got a small scoop of soil from all of them. So they were returning all of them home to us.”
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The third portion of the memorial is called the Gold Star Families Memorial Monument, designed by World War II Medal of Honor recipient Hershel “Woody” James, and duplicated in other states, to honor the families left behind stateside who lost a loved one. Installed in 2021, it is a stand-up statue with a cut-out silhouette in the middle in the shape of a soldier in the process of saluting. Looking through the cut-out, one can see both of the other memorials.
The placement of that statue, about 100 feet from the other two, closer to where the flags hang at half-staff, was intentional: “I wanted to have it positioned with the silhouette of the soldier saluting the fallen members on the Colorado Freedom Memorial,” he said.
In coming years, people visiting the monument will have somewhere to regroup after seeing the eight pillars, the glass mountains inscribed with names, and the silhouette soldier saluting them – something visitors can’t do now.
“Being out there with us, there’s no building,” Crandall said. “If the elements change, there’s no place to go hide. This building will provide us that resource as well.”
