About That Photo At the Top of this Blog

Over the past few months I’ve had several readers email me questioning about the photo at the top of my blog. It was taken by my wife on 6/28/09 at the Iowa Firefighter Memorial in Coralville, IA. The kilt I’m wearing in the photo is of Leith tartan--my wife’s “clan” (her great-grandparents came from the Orkney Islands) which I felt had great colors for the service--reds and blues! 

Every year, on the second Sunday in June, there is a memorial service held here for the entire state of Iowa. I was first asked to play for the ceremony in 2000, leading the color/honor guard up to the front to post the colors and then lead them back, and this became an anual event for me. In 2006 they asked me to play Amazing Grace, replacing the keyboard player for this part of the service. To retrieve the colors at the end I would again lead the guard up and back. It’s quite a long service honoring all firefighters who passed during the previous year. Those who served at least 10 years get their names on the one set of walls, while those who die in the line of duty have a special wall. 

In 2010 the Iowa Firefighters Association voted to award me the title of Honorary Firefighter— a really great honor! This was the year we had our first cancellation—about 20 minutes into the service severe storms arrived and, by checking weather, it was plain the storms would last for a very long time. But that’s when the IFA president came to me and said, “This isn’t how we wanted to do this” as he presented me with the trophy award—they had wanted to do it up front during the service! 

In 2014 a student piper friend from a town an hour west, and who is a firefighter in that town, asked if he could play with me, so he came over and we played Amazing Grace together—he didn’t know the other tunes I used. The next year he joined me again and knew the tunes.

In 2016 there was a new man in charge of the color/honor guard and we for the first time had a “long blue line” of the guard marching almost a block along the side of the memorial park. He had pipers he knew from two different towns (2hrs NE and 2 hrs SW) come to join me. I then became the pipe major for the whole group and play solo on Amazing Grace. This was when my wife also joined with her snare drum. Sometimes we’ve had about 15 pipers and 6-7 drummers and other times, as this year, we had five pipers (including me) and one drummer—Jill!

In 2020 the service was cancelled because of the COVID scare. In 2023 I was asked to play a memorial tune for the candlelight service the night prior to the memorial service so I’m doing that solo from now on (they’ve had that service almost from the beginning but didn’t think about asking me until last year!)

So that’s the story behind the cover photo.  The photo associated with this post was taken by local media on 6/13/21 as I’m leading the color/honor guard to our starting point.