SHAWNEE, Kan. — Despite cold temperatures Saturday, Shawnee community members traveled back in time to pay their respects while learning about the lives of veterans returning home from World War I.
Volunteers donned costumes and took on identities of characters to share stories. For some in attendance, it was personal.
“Getting the public to understand the world that the doughboys came back to with the end of WWI is important,” said veteran Dr. Richard Faulker, who was also a history professor at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.
Like Faulker, Shawnee Town 1929's curator of education Hannah Howard hopes preservation of the past lights a path to the future — while keeping warm, of course.
“They feel the chill when they walk into a building that’s being heated by a wood stove — you can smell it, you can smell the kerosene in the lamps,” Howard said. "Coming into the parlor of a home that had a loss of somebody in the Great War, and that’s an experience that really hits home when you’re in their living room, when you’re in their house."
Over 100 years later, Faulker says history is more relevant today than most realize.
“The world that the doughboys came back to in 1919 and 1920s, some of the same challenges that we are dealing with today — issues of violence, politics, and racial tension and economic problems — they were faced by generations before us," Faulker said. "Sometimes it's good to put the problems that we have today into that context.”
He says communicating such messages is a priority, no matter the weather.
“If I've got to get a little cold to remind the public of what veterans have done, I don't have any problem with that at all,” he said.
