County Remembers 9/11 ten years later

The tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks was marked with a solemn but patriotic ceremony at the Palouse Empire Fair Sunday morning.

Dozens filled the seats in front of the Wilbur-Ellis gazebo stage to hear patriotic speeches, songs and accounts from soldiers who have served in the Middle East.

“Let us now and always not just remember, but remember why,” said Capt. Jared Wolfe, an Endicott native, who has served in the Army since enlisting in 2002.

Capt. Wolfe graduated from St. John/Endicott High in 2002 and currently serves with the 25th Infantry.

His mother, Debbie Wolfe, sang the closing hymn on Sunday’s ceremony. She said she was inspired when her son told her he was signing up for the military.

“After my son enlisted, I found a patriotism I didn’t know I had,” she said. “Because it really is families who go to war.”

Sunday’s ceremony was emceed by Whitman County Commissioner Greg Partch and Sheriff’s Chaplain Ron McMurray.

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee,” proclaimed Partch shortly before 10 a.m., and volunteers rang the fair’s main bell 10 times, once for each year since the attacks.

As the flag was lowered to half-staff, the more than 100 in attendance, many of them veterans, fire fighters and law officers remebering their fallen colleagues, joined hands in silence.

“For the first time in many years, our nation had come together. And we were one,” Master Sgt. Wayne Terry, a retired Air Force veteran from Davenport who served 37 years, said shortly thereafter.

Throughout the ceremony, the crowd’s ears were greeted with a number of patriotic songs by Garfield/Palouse music teacher Becky Hemphill’s students Emily Keeney, Libby Akin, Emma Akin and Sarah Bofenkamp, as well as Hemphill’s daughter, Leah Phillips.

Hemphill and Phillips also sang ten years earlier on the courthouse steps in Colfax on the day after the 9/11 attacks.