Armistice Day

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

When I was a young boy growing up in America’s Midwest back in the 1960s, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents who lived about a mile east of LaSalle, Illinois a town approximately 90 miles southwest of Chicago.

I was there first grandchild and as all grandparents do with their first grandchild they spoiled me a lot. Not just with presents and money, but also getting to spend a lot of time with them. However, one thing that they didn’t spoil me with, as far as all those times I got to spend with them, were many of the values and traditions they instilled in me like remembering Armistice Day, or as it is also called Remembrance Day.

This date on November 11 commemorates the armistice signed by the Allies of World War I and Germany in Rethondes, France for the cessation of the hostilities on the Western Front which took place at 11:00 in the morning-the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. (Although the war might have ended on the western front, fighting still continued in other regions, especially in the former Russian Empire and parts of the Ottoman Empire.

This date was declared a national holiday in many of the allied nations to remember those who had died in “the war to end all wars.”

One of my earliest memories of commemorating Armistice Day-my grandparents always referred to it as Armistice Day-was one of those days when I was visiting them. I must have been six or seven at the time when my grandmother told me about the holiday and what I should do to commemorate it.

A few minutes before 11:00am, my grandmother and I walked outside and then exactly at 11:00, we heard a whistle blowing from the Alpha Cement Mill (it was located just outside of LaSalle) and looked to the east, toward Europe) and observed two minutes of silence for the roughly 20 million people who died in the war. (It wasn’t a holiday for my grandfather who was a refuse collector and worked six days a week.) After two minutes we went back inside and my grandmother did whatever she had been doing before, most likely fixing lunch.