Pelzer Kicks Off Inaugural Memorial Day Bash
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The weather, it turned out, was cool and overcast Sunday, much than it would have been on the actual holiday, which is how Pelzer's first Memorial Day celebration came to be held a week after the holiday.
Mayor Chase Smithwick, who is a veteran and who ran for office in part on a promise to give his small mill-town community an event every month if he could manage it, had planned the gathering for Memorial Day proper. Rain or scheduling intervened — the details of the postponement matter less than the outcome, which was a the last Sunday in May with near-perfect weather, a crowd of neighbors, and a band playing Eagle tribute songs, country music, and beach music on a stage in the kind of modest civic space that Pelzer has been working, under Smithwick's tenure, to use more deliberately.
"Every day you should remember our veterans," Smithwick said, "and every day you should remember those that died for our country. Having it a week later kind of carries that message out: we need to memorialize our veterans every day."
The event was a full-court press of free activities. The Village Co-op offered patriotic temporary tattoos, free popsicles, and games. Pelzer First Baptist Church made bracelets and keychains for children at no charge. The Vine ran a patriotic craft station. There was a popcorn stand. There was a trackless train. There was an inflatable. Behind the band, a chalk station invited children to make their own contributions to the afternoon's aesthetic, which tended toward the red, white, and blue.
Tiffany McElhannon, the town's director of community outreach and, by her own cheerful account, the person who takes the mayor's ideas and makes them happen, coordinated the collection of organizations that came together to put on the event.
"All the ideas are Mayor Smithwick's," she said. "I'm just a director." Smithwick, for his part, deflected in the other direction, crediting the community organizations whose participation gave the afternoon its texture.
Both Smithwick and McElhannon are veterans, a fact that gave the occasion a personal weight that distinguished it from the generic civic-event category it might otherwise occupy. Pelzer has a long relationship with military service — many of its residents have served, and some who grew up in the town did not come back from overseas.
"Our community was built off the military," Smithwick said. The celebration was designed as a formal acknowledgment of that history, the kind of acknowledgment that a community sometimes has to invent an event to deliver.
Smithwick said it will happen again next year. Given the weather, the turnout, and the evident enthusiasm of the organizations that showed up to participate, that seems like a commitment the town is prepared to keep.
