Hawthorne Vets Break Ground for Memorial

In a struggle that has lasted longer than many of the wars they fought in, a group of Hawthorne veterans finally broke ground Saturday on a long-awaited armed services memorial.

For the last five years, the Hawthorne Veterans Council has held garage sales and raffles, cashed in empty aluminum cans and even charged a quarter a scoop for food at fund-raising suppers.

“It’s been a real struggle,” said Robbie Herron, a Navy veteran and member of American Legion Post 314. “People are bombarded for donations for everything--tuberculosis, Red Cross. They’re pretty burned out on donations.”

Despite the groundbreaking, the veterans council--which includes American Legion Post 314, Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2075 and World War I Barracks 2615--has not won total victory yet.

During the next six months, the group will use about $31,000 to install flagpoles and concrete slabs at the memorial site outside the Hawthorne Memorial Center, the city’s community center, at El Segundo Boulevard and Cordary Avenue. But the grand memorial the veterans have in mind will have to wait.

“We don’t have enough to complete the thing like we want to,” said Ben Ainsworth, a member of the veterans council.

The city already has a memorial wall outside the community center, but John Devine, vice president of the veterans council, said it is so difficult to find that “people can walk past it and not even know it’s there.”

The new memorial, as the veterans see it, will be a grand structure with 10-foot-high marble slabs surrounding three towering flagpoles. It will honor “any man or woman that served in the armed forces in the past, the present and the future,” said Devine.

But before that happens, the veterans figure, they’ll have to put on a lot more potluck suppers and aluminum-can drives.