Ensuring Veteran remembrance

COSTA MESA —

It took Harold “Bud” Hohl 22 years in the Marines, nearly 40 years leading a remembrance ceremony, and seven years working on plans for a memorial to get to this day.

For some time, he’s wanted to get the city a more substantial monument to veterans than the cannon that was installed at Harbor Lawn-Mount Olive Memorial Park in 1954. Today he’s closer to his goal, but Hohl isn’t finished.

As a young man, after four and a half years working in the copper mines of Bisbee, Ariz., Hohl decided he needed to see daylight.

He entered the U.S. Navy’s flight school, finished in 1944 and got a commission in the Marine Corps. Hohl spent most of 1945 flying as a fighter pilot based on Okinawa.

“That was when the atom bomb went off and we were lucky enough to come home instead of having to invade Japan,” he recalled. Hohl spent the next 19-and-a-half years as an enlisted pilot flying missions out of El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

He first got a place in Costa Mesa with his brother in 1945, and in 1948 Hohl bought the home he still lives in today.

For the past seven years he’s been trying to build a memorial, but the project was fraught with problems. One design was too tall for city standards, and the cost was an issue, said Victor Bakkila, a Costa Mesa police officer and a veteran of the Marines who served in Iraq.

Hohl was having trouble getting the memorial project moving, so Bakkila stepped in to help out.

“I think people gave him a lot of lip service, but he never had any donations or anything,” Bakkila said.

Not so this time — local contractor Shaw and Sons donated the concrete work to put up a circular memorial with columns and a walkway.

Bakkila’s involvement seems to have removed a logjam. The Costa Mesa Community Foundation and the city are helping collect donations and selling personalized bricks to line the walkway leading to the monument. The City Council agreed to waive building fees associated with the project.

The memorial will include flags representing all five branches of the service and a soldier’s cross — a pair of boots, an upright rifle and a helmet on top. Bakkila estimated the cost at about $135,000, which will be paid for by private donations.

For Hohl, the memorial will be “a place to rally around and a place to remember, because I lost a lot of good friends during the service.”

He intends the memorial to honor all veterans, especially those who never came back from deployment.

Many of those who stormed the beaches of Normandy died before they even got to fight, died when they got off the boats and were buried on foreign soil — and Hohl wants to make sure their sacrifice is remembered too.

“The idea is to remember those people that we forget about. When we get up at Memorial Day and we speak about things, we say, ‘Here are our comrades, lying right here,’” he said. “These are the guys that were lucky enough to come home.”

He’s happy to see progress on the memorial, but Hohl isn’t finished yet. His original vision included a large bronze eagle. He wants it to sit atop a granite pedestal at the opposite end of the walkway from the newly-built segment of the memorial.

Around the six-sided pedestal will be statements from each branch of the service honoring its veterans.

Bakkila said maybe when people see what’s been done so far, they’ll donate toward the rest of Hohl’s dream.

“That’s the only reason I was doing this, to put a smile on this old guy’s face,” Bakkila said. “The bottom line is, we’re going to have a permanent memorial to the war dead.”

As he has for more than three decades, Hohl expects to lead today’s ceremony at Harbor Lawn. The new memorial will perhaps make this one especially noteworthy.

“I’ve been conducting the Memorial Day service for about 30-something years and we always mentioned, ‘Lest we forget,’” Hohl said. “In my heart’s always been, ‘Remember those who made it possible for us to do this.’”