For resources and events related to Memorial Day weekend in Gainesville, the following SPOHP media is available to students, researchers, and the general public.
May 24-26, 2014: Memorial Mile with Gainesville Veterans for Peace
- From 7 a.m. on May 24 through dusk on Memorial Day, May 26, Gainesville Veterans for Peace will be displaying 6,781 tombstones to remember those who have died in the wars in Afghanistan since 2001 and in Iraq since 2003. Memorial Mile will line the street along Eighth Avenue just east of 34th Street, where the Solar System Walk is located. Veterans for Peace representatives will be available and have, on site at an information table, a book that directs visitors to specific tombstones.
- This is the eighth year VFP has set up the display, and in 2008 we had to cross over to the North side of Eighth Avenue due to the increased number of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. Every year, people come to the Memorial Mile to place flowers and other expressions of love at the tombstones of their loved ones and friends.To volunteer for set up, clean up, or guard duty, contact Scott Camil at 352-375-2563.
“A Salute to Memorial Day” SPOHP Short Film (2011)
- The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida has many oral histories from veterans. This 12-minute slide show highlights but a few of these amazing stories. We have borrowed images to remember veterans on Memorial Day 2011, and also selected clips of a few of these stories from the oral histories contained within this collection. Though in this slide show most of the stories featured are WWII veterans, the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program has oral histories from veterans of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Bosnia, and even a few Confederate veterans of the Civil War. At 170 interviews plus, the WWII collection is the largest of these, and is still growing..
Samuel Proctor Oral History Program Podcast Series
- Short podcasts from SPOHP students and staff are now available online . The Spring 2013 internship class produced a wide variety of veterans history-related podcasts.
“The Life of Ned Felder, WWI Veteran” Remembered by Grandson Alonzo Felder (2013)
- Read “The Life of Ned Felder, WWI Veteran” in a remembrance from his grandson, Alonzo Felder, for Veterans Day 2013.
- Ned Felder served in the 367th Regiment in World War I, one of the most highly decorated infantry regiments in American history, awarded the distinguished the Croix de Guerre by the French government. He was one of over 370,000 African Americans who served in the war. His experience as an African American serving abroad, returning home to see his service disregarded and disrespected in the segregated United States, and unable to secure adequate treatment for what his family believes to be PTSD, is recounted in a Veterans Day narrative by his grandson, Alonzo Felder.
“I Just Wanted to Live!” (2008)
- Watch “I Just Wanted to Live!” hosted by veteran tribute website Crooked Fences.
- “I Just Wanted to Live!,” produced by Deborah Hendrix and volunteer Diane Fischler, is based on the oral histories of four men who were POWs held for more than three years by the Japanese during World War II. These men, as well as the rest of the U.S.-Filipino forces, had barely survived the three-month Battle of Bataan in the Philippines. They fought with minimal food rations and inadequate ammunition against a well-supplied Japanese army. These men suffered the extreme brutality of the nine-day, 70-mile Bataan Death March, and then the internment camps of O’Donnell and Cabanatuan.
explore more Veterans History Project resources.