Below The Beltway

Marc Fisher writes in today’s Washington Post about the man responsible for the Christmas wreaths at Arlington National Cemetary:

Every year for more than a decade, at the height of the season, Morrill Worcester would pack up a truckload of his Christmas wreaths and head down from Maine to Arlington National Cemetery. Without fanfare, he and a dozen or so volunteers would lay red-bowed wreaths on a few thousand headstones of fallen Americans.

There was no publicity. No crowds gathered. The gesture was one man’s private duty, born of a trip to Washington he won as a 12-year-old paperboy. Of all the monuments and memorials he saw, it was the visit to Arlington that stuck with him — the majesty and mystery, the sadness and the pride, the sight of all those neat rows of government-issue white headstones.

Years later, after he had started his Christmas products business, at the crunch point of one season Worcester asked some men who were building his new factory to find some wreaths and buy them for him.

They went a bit overboard: When Worcester heard that he was the proud owner of 4,000 wreaths that couldn’t possibly be sold by Christmas, he called a friend who owned a trucking company, contacted his senator in Washington and, two weeks before Christmas 1992, was at Arlington, laying wreaths.

It seemed like the right thing to do. So he continued the ritual each year, honoring those who had died so that he and other Americans might live as they saw fit.

For years, Worcester did this privately with little publicity. Then, the emails started. I got more than one, you probably did too. Worcester’s quiet memorial was now a nationwide sensation. And, this Christmas, things have changed:

A week from today, Worcester will leave Columbia Falls, Maine, to lead the trailer full of wreaths down the coast. This time, it won’t be just the trucker, Worcester and his wife, Karen. This time, there’ll be an escort of a couple hundred Patriot Guard Riders, a national group of motorcyclists who take it upon themselves to display their respect for fallen service members.

This time, Worcester and friends won’t barrel down the interstate; they’re taking the slow road, Route 1, so that more motorcyclists — perhaps thousands more — might join the caravan.

This time, the wreath-laying won’t be a private affair. Instead of the 10 or 12 volunteers who had been rounded up in past years by Wayne Hanson, a retired federal law enforcement officer who lives in Springfield, at least 500 people will be ready to help lay the wreaths Dec. 14 — and maybe many more.

On some level, it’s too bad that Worcester’s private memorial and his anonymity to anyone outside of the cemetery weren’t preserved. He obviously wasn’t doing it for the publicity, and in today’s era, publicity tends to ruin everything it touches.

But I don’t think Worcester will let that happen:

Even as his personal ritual morphs into something much larger, Worcester, 56, wants to ensure that its original purpose remains. “It’s just my way to say thank you,” he says. “I’ve got a lot to be thankful for.” When he started Worcester Wreaths in 1971, he sold 500 wreaths. This year, that number will top 500,000, mostly to the Maine-based retailer L.L. Bean.

This time of year, the wreath company employs more than 600 people in Harrington, about 45 miles up the coast from Bar Harbor.

Worcester has always returned the checks that people send him. The wreath-laying is his personal statement: “This is the least we can do.”

Very cool.