Future Army Museum To Salute Service Groups
The National Army Museum will be
the first museum dedicated to telling the entire storied history of the U.S. Army. (NAPS)—A foundation tha honors the U.S. Army has found a new way to salute the efforts of organizations that serve veterans.
The Army Historical Foundation, the nonprofit designated to lead the campaign to build the National Museum of the United States Army, has created an exclusive opportunity for veterans service organizations. The National Army Museum will be the first museum to tell the entire storied history of the nation’s oldest and largest military service. Interactive galleries will educate visitors on the Army’s role in times of war and peace, the relationship between the Army and the nation it serves, and the Army’s contributions to geography, science, technology, engineering and math. By supporting the museum, Army units, alumni groups, and military and veteran associations of all kinds can have their efforts permanently honored in the Veterans’ Hall, a space within the museum that will host official functions and showcase pieces of the Army’s collection of combat artwork and artifacts. Sponsoring organizations will have their names permanently displayed in the Veterans’ Hall. Groups offering higher levels of support will have enhanced access to the Hall, receive invitations to campaign events, and get personalized tours of the museum. In addition, the Foundation collects stories of soldiers and veterans through the Registry of the American Soldier. This electronic database is open to anyone who served in the U.S. Army. It will be accessible via computer kiosks in the museum and online. The Registry is free and ensures a soldier’s story is forever told in the future home of Army history. To learn more, visit the website at www.armyhistory.org. |
Liz traces her love of reading, writing and learning, which are all wound up together in her constant curiosity to her mother.
“My mother educated herself,” Lynch said. “We had a library at our church. Holy Family, back then and every Sunday, she’d come home from Mass with two or three books. She reserved her Sunday afternoons for reading, and God bless any of us who interrupted her!” Lynch liked writing immediately when she started doing assignments in the country school she attended. And, she fell in love with it when she was 10 years old in 1918 when one of her stories was published in The Witness, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Dubuque. She also was inspired by life on the farm. “I loved the farm - every inch of it,” she said. “We had the most ideal childhood you can imagine. We roamed the woods and went trapping, hunting and fishing all the time. I was pretty good with the animals on the farm. It was a great way to grow up.” She started teaching in the same country school she’d attended immediately after she graduated from high school at the old Immaculate Conception boarding school in Dubuque. She continued teaching for 38 years, 25 of them in country schools, then going to Sageville and finishing her career teaching special education students in the Western Dubuque Schools. The country school experience was especially challenging and fun. “You were the only teacher for all the grades,” she said. “And you had to do everything else. You had to bring your own water, be the janitor, the psychiatrist and the psychologist. You even pulled teeth now and then.” After Iowa mandated that teachers who’d started with only high school diplomas had to have college degrees, she took classes at the University of Dubuque and graduated in English. Liz Lynch moved to Dubuque 21 years ago, and she began devoting much more time to her writing and oil paintings, too. She has taken creative writing classes for senior citizens from Sister Rosemary Sage at Mount Carmel for the last four years. ‘The nun says I write ‘with ease’, but I don’t know about that,” said Lynch. “Another thing she’s told us that has helped is, ‘Easy writing is darn poor reading!’ In other words, you really have to work hard on it to make it good. Liz said she works on her stories constantly, writing in longhand while she sits in a comfy chair in the living room. If I don’t write every day, I’m thinking about it, making some notes or looking things up. It gives me the biggest satisfaction. I think things out, write them down, work them over and over. Most of the time I write about the things I know about in my past. When I write those stories, I can get a lot of feeling into them. 
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