Minneapolis — Several thousand Minnesotans will spend the long holiday weekend placing American flags on 195,000 headstones at Fort Snelling National Cemetery.
Volunteering has become such a tradition for so many people that it has become one of the most difficult tickets to obtain in recent years in the Twin Cities.
“This year they filled up within like 37 minutes,” said Joanne Malmstedt, the nonprofit’s founder and president. “It’s very validating that this is what we needed to do, this needed to happen.”
Validating… because Joanne established the tradition ten years ago, following a difficult realization as a parent.
“My kids didn’t understand the meaning of this weekend,” she told me.
“We were in line at the grocery store and my sister Tiara had asked, ‘So whose party are we going to this year?'” Alannah Silva, one of Joanne’s three children, is in her early twenties. “My mom was like, ‘That’s not what it’s really about.”
Joanne contacted Fort Snelling in 2014, hoping to teach her children the true meaning of the holiday, and discovered that there was a significant need.
“When I called the cemetery to inquire about volunteering, they told me they no longer put flags out,” she recalled.
Joanne spoke with KARE11 in 2015, when she and her children arrived with 20,000 flags and dozens of volunteers to help as much as possible.
“We started in our garage,” Alannah explained. “We started waterproofing in our garage and we had tarps in our garage and we’d lay them out in our driveway.”
A decade later, the family garage cannot contain all of those flags.
“This would easily fill like a four or five car garage to the brim,” said Joanne, standing in front of stacks of storage bins containing tens of thousands of new flags added for this year’s effort.
Although all flag planting shifts are full this weekend, volunteers are still needed to pick up flags from the cemetery next weekend. To register for a shift.