Kelly Hubbard of Mapleton was surprised to find a note on his windshield when he returned to his pickup in the Walmart parking lot on Veterans Day.
The envelope tucked under the wiper read “Thank you, veterans” with a smiley face and a heart drawn under the words. The note inside read: “Thank you for fighting for freedom for me and my family. Age 6, Emily.” Accompanying the note was a $2 gift card for Tim Horton’s.
“It really made my day,” Hubbard, a Vietnam-era veteran, said this week. “We never got recognition. We were looked down on. People in air and bus terminals spit on us.”
Hubbard was one of 30 veterans with vehicles parked in Presque Isle lots on Nov. 11 who received thank-you notes and either gift cards, lottery tickets or candies from Emily Churchill and Olivia Sanchez of Mapleton.
“They deserve to be recognized,” said 12-year-old Olivia of the veterans she honored that day.
The girls did not have school on Veterans Day and were riding into town with their mother, Jennifer Pyles, behind a car with a veteran license plate. Jennifer took the opportunity to describe why veterans were important enough to merit a school holiday.
“I explained the veteran license plates and why some have a purple heart,” she recalled in a phone conversation from her office at Village Health Care in Easton. “I explained what veterans were, how they fought for our country and why we should be thankful.” That started a conversation about how to say thank you.
Emily, a student at Mapleton Elementary School, and Olivia, a Presque Isle Middle School student, decided they wanted to do something to express their gratitude.
“We bought cards at the dollar store, and lottery tickets and gift cards,” said Emily, explaining that they put either a lottery ticket or a Tim Horton’s gift card into each envelope.
After writing their messages and combining them with the gifts, the girls searched in Presque Isle parking lots for cars with veteran license plates. At the Aroostook Centre Mall they waited to see the first person open his card, watching excitedly from their car parked two rows away from his vehicle.
“He didn’t know,” said Emily. “He was looking around.”
Asked if they identified themselves for him, she said, “No. It was a secret.”
By the time they had delivered the 16 cards in the package, they were having so much fun they went back to the store and bought more cards. Short on time and cash, they bought tape, baggies and Hershey treasures at Kmart.
“We did a ‘math game’ and figured out that we could put four candies in a bag and tape them to the cards,” Jennifer said.
“They really enjoyed it,” she said of her daughters. They covered the entire Aroostook Centre Mall parking lot and those at Lowe’s, Walmart and Graves Shop ’n Save, delivering a total of 30 thank-you notes.
“It was fun. It made me feel good,” said Emily. “Veterans are special.”
“We should be thankful for the things we appreciate,” said Olivia. “We should do this more often.”
Asked if they planned to do it again, she said, “Yes. Mom says next year we’ll do 100.”
For most veterans, the gesture was anonymous, but when the girls were down to their last card, they approached a man getting out of his truck at Graves.
“Happy Veterans Day,” they said as they handed him his card.
Both girls were touched by his response.
“I have never received a gift like this,” he said.
His words echoed the feelings of Kelly Hubbard, who remembered his years of service between 1962 and 1966. Servicemen had to wear their uniforms in order to travel at military rates.
“You didn’t want to wear your uniform,” Hubbard recalled of the days when anti-war protesters met planes to heckle returning service personnel for fighting in Vietnam. “Commercial flights would let soldiers off at a separate hangar so they could change out of their uniforms” before entering the terminal. “It didn’t happen up here, but in the cities — New York, Newark, Boston.”
Hubbard’s thank-you note was a mystery until his wife, Linda, returned from work at Village Health Care following the holiday.
“What did you do on Veterans Day?” she asked her co-worker, Jennifer Pyles.
Her answer solved the mystery.
Kathryn Olmstead is a former University of Maine associate dean and associate professor of journalism living in Aroostook County, where she publishes the quarterly magazine Echoes. Her column appears in this space every other Friday. She can be reached at kathryn.olmstead@umit.maine.edu or P.O. Box 626, Caribou, ME 04736.