Lest we forget: Mantua honoring those who gave lives for their country with new memorial

Bonnie Zoller Collier remembers the day in 1970 when Army representatives came to her Mantua home two days after her brother had been killed in Vietnam.

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“I wasn’t home when they arrived at the house on the Fourth of July to share the news with my parents,” Collier said. “He was killed July 2. I was actually at a parade in honor of veterans and such and it was just horrible. You know, you didn’t want to believe it. I just remember the people from the community being so supportive. A loss to everybody because he was a friend to everybody.”

And now the community has come together again, this time in a tribute to five men including Spc. 4 Robert W. Zoller II. A monument to honor service members who lived in the village and were killed in action, paid for with donations, has been installed at Hillside Cemetery.

“The people just started sending us checks so we set up the fund for it and ordered the headstone and it was set in [early] November,” said Mayor Linda Clark. “We were hoping it would be sooner than that because we want to have a dedication for it. If we would have known the weather would still be holding pretty much for it, we probably would have gone ahead and done it. But the cemetery board is going to be working on doing something, hopefully in May before Memorial Day.”

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The monument has five names on it, three servicemen from World War II and two from the Vietnam War. Besides Zoller, they include: Air Force Cpl. Ellis L. Marsh Jr., killed July 21, 1944; Navy Reserve AMM Jack R. Van Benschoten, killed Feb. 17, 1945; Army Capt. Claude H. Crafts, killed Aug. 30, 1945; and Marine Lance Cpl. Kenneth R. Keefer; killed June 7, 1967.

Above the names, it says, “In memory of those who died while serving their country” and below, “Lest we forget.”

The memorial was the brainchild of Tim Benner, a firefighter with the Mantua-Shalersville Fire Department.

“I presented it to the mayor,” said Benner. “She liked it, so she had me present it to the cemetery board [of trustees]. They liked it, so it went to [Village] Council. We made a presentation there and they liked it and agreed to move forward with it.”

Clark said that when Benner brought the idea to her, she was immediately supportive, but funding of nearly $5,000 from village coffers was unavailable.

“He’s kind of one of the historians in the area in Mantua and he has been working on [the KIA memorial],” Clark said of Benner. “He’s worked on ours and he’s also working on, they’re going to be doing one in Mantua Township, too, which is going to be much larger because it’s a much larger cemetery. He brought it to us and wanted to know if we could fund it and I told him the village didn’t have the extra funds to do something like that.”

But after the cemetery board and Village Council expressed support, said Clark, Council approved publicizing for donations this past spring. Benner said it was uncertain whether the effort would be successful, but he and Clark said support exceeded hopes. Clark said the the monument cost $4,767 and as of November, $7,940 has been donated.

“We’re going to do a little bit of landscaping around it, some type of plantings that can be maintained easily,” she said. “And then on the back of the stone we also left room — God forbid in my lifetime — if we have to add any more names to it. But there’s space to add names in the future. The money is all earmarked to take care of that kind of thing.”

One of those donors is Collier, who Benner said made a significant donation early on and was therefore key in the effort.

“This was very important to me when I saw that Tim had put this together and I really wanted to see it move forward,” said Collier, who did not want to go public with the amount she donated because, “It’s not just my brother.”

“It was just like, you know what, we must not forget them and their sacrifice and it just meant the world to me to see this taken care of,” she said.

Benner was treasurer of a group planning the Mantua Township War Memorial in Mantua Center around 2013 and that was the impetus for the KIA memorial.

“We started doing research on just collecting the names of the Mantua Village and Mantua Township veterans that had served in all the wars and that was a massive project in itself,” he said. “During the research in that, every now and then we would come up with a KIA. At that time, we didn’t have the time to do the [KIA] research. There’s a lot of research involved with the KIAs, especially when you get back to the Civil War. So anyhow, that took two years to do that [veterans] project.”

Benner said he thought it would be nice to have a list of KIAs for both the village and township. Problem was, no such list existed.

“As I had time, I would do research,” he said. “There’s different websites that are conducive to that and I actually walked cemeteries, looked at the cemetery sextons records, newspaper articles around Memorial Day. The information came from a lot of different sources. Mantua Village wasn’t too hard. It was pretty easy to do Mantua Village because it’s fairly recent.”

Benner said Hillside Cemetery in the village was only platted in 1901, but the township cemeteries are older. A KIA monument has been ordered for Mantua Township, Benner said, but he does not know when it will be placed. He added the monument only covers World War I and later wars. A second stone is expected to be purchased by the township because continuing research, with the help of Linda Ehlert and Lynn Harvey, is being done on a dozen more people from the township who were killed in action during the Civil War.

Collier, who has another brother and a sister, was 13 when 20-year-old “Bobby” died while serving in Charlie Company. Their parents ran a well-known pharmacy in town.

“Everybody came in the drugstore,” she said. “There was a soda fountain and the whole nine yards back in the day. That’s kind of how everybody in town knew the family.”

She said her brother was well thought of.

“At the time, Mantua was a small community and everybody knew everybody and Bobby was loved and he loved everybody here,” she said. “He was just such a great guy and involved in sports and everything at the [Crestwood] high school. You know, it’s just kind of very sad and the community all came together to show their love and support.”

Clark said the village is showing with the memorial that it continues to support veterans, “especially those who gave their life for their country.”

“It’s been a wonderful support,” said Clark, adding that those who served have been “treated poorly at times.”

“Here in Mantua, we respect them,” she said.

Reporter Jeff Saunders can be reached at jsaunders@recordpub.com.

This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: Mantua village and township honoring those who gave lives for country