CONWAY -- Bob Fogner and six or seven or his military veteran buddies have worked diligently for the past five years to build a day of veteran appreciation and recognition in Conway that's got enough oomph to attract those looking for more than flag-raising and saluting.
The Veterans Celebration scheduled for Saturday will have that, but it will also offer free breakfast and lunch, live music, remembrance ceremonies, military equipment displays and booths for organizations that offer services to veterans.
The city used to honor veterans with a parade, Fogner said, adding "We get more bang for buck if we do a celebration instead of a parade."
Saturday's festivities, scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. on the grounds of the historic Horry County Courthouse at the corner of Third Avenue and Beaty Street, will feature the raising of a new Missing In Action flag and an Open Chair Ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and a posting of the colors and speech at the new Veterans Memorial on the courthouse grounds.
The Open Chair Ceremony, Fogner explained, is to remember Vietnam service men and women who are still missing from the Vietnam war.
Fogner, an Air Force veteran, jokingly describes his service-related duties as being the pilot of an LSD, which stands for large steel desk. He was also a military chaplain with a state veterans' service organization.
Fogner said his small group starts working on the celebration in midsummer, and credits area businesses with helping to make the day a success. About 400 attended last year, and Fogner said the group hopes to make it bigger still.
A walk on the historic side
Transplanted Southern Californian Joe Rosati likely knows a thing or two about Conway that few town residents can pull from their mental encyclopedias.
Rosati has begun his three-nights-a-week walking tours and had to pass a 200-question exam before the city would give him a license to do so.
The first of two nightly tours sets out at 6 p.m. from Third Avenue and Main Street, wending its way for 90 minutes through the town's historic business and residential areas. The price is $17 if booked ahead, $20 when tickets are purchased at the beginning of a tour and $12 for students anytime. Advance tickets may be purchased online at www.rivertownhistoryandhaunts.com.
Rosati said he will take up to a maximum of 20 people on a single tour, but thinks a group of 10 to 12 is ideal. At stops along the tour, Rosati will entertain and educate his customers with stories about the history that took place at the very spots where they're standing.
The tour concludes at the well-known clock in front of City Hall and that strange, rusty pipe sticking out of the sidewalk near one of its corners.
It's there because it has historic significance to Conway, Rosati says during his tours. It's really the unburied end of a cannon barrel originally buried there as a surveying marker. No one's sure of the date of the barrel, Rosati said, but most likely it's from the Revolutionary War.
Conway conversation: A failure to fathers
Editor's note: This is the first in what will be an intermittent series of stories based on conversations with Conway residents, who are asked to talk with The Sun News on any topic they choose. If you have something you'd like to talk about, call staff writer Steve Jones at 444-1765.
The Rev. Dawn Rider says American society began losing some of the inherent knowledge of what a good father should be when the nation started building a public school education network in the early part of the 20th century.
The decline has continued in fits and starts, with some jolts, until you get the dilemma some fathers encounter now when they are jailed for not paying child support.
It's an ironic situation, she said, particularly in today's economy. As they cool their heels in a court-imposed incarceration, they get further behind in their payments.
Undoubtedly, it is the only way courts can get the attention of some that there are legal responsibilities to fathering children, but Rider believes that more taking of responsibility by others as well could head off the situation in the first place.
"You have a large proportion of [fathers] who are trying to do everything they can," said Rider, vocational deacon and director of faith formation at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Conway.
She would know better than many who claim that miscreant fathers are just lazy, at best.
Since 2004, Rider has journeyed regularly to the juvenile detention facilities at the state Department of Juvenile Justice in Columbia, where she has sat across the table from young men and noticed how they bond more easily and quickly with women than men. That reaction had to come from an absence of a consistent, loving man in their lives, she deduced.
Rider also works with A Father's Place in Conway and has seen how men respond to its program of education and encouragement in becoming good parents to their children.
Nearly every group of people and every institution, including the church, shares the blame for every man sitting in jail for not paying child support, Rider said.
"It becomes very messy," she said in explaining how widespread society's shortcomings to fathers are.
St. Paul's is trying to plug a part of the gap through its FLO (Faith Lived Out) 24/7 program. The church has fortified the pre-baptism counseling and education new parents must attend before their children can be formally inducted into a Christian life. There are now three, rather than one, pre-baptism sessions in which the church clearly lays out its expectations of the parents, including their active study of the Bible and their children's attendance at Sunday school.
The church also has new parents designate accountability godparents and sets specific expectations of them, as well.
If there's straying, there will be conversations about it, Rider said.
Correcting the situation could take as long as it has for society to dig the current hole in fatherhood, Rider said, and it will likely be impossible to get rid of the problems altogether.
But each one that's fixed, each lax father reinvigorated, makes the effort worthwhile, she said.
Ultimately, society will benefit not just from having better fathers, Rider said. Better fathers mean better children, for the most part, and more kids staying in school, less crime and fewer drug problems.
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