I met Bill Lipke in the late 1970s when, he was both a professor of art history and the museum director at the University of Vermont. We were neighbors and fellow members of the Oriana Singers.
We also shared a fascination with war memorials and monuments developed in the late 1970's when we both read Paul Fussell's riveting The Great War and Modern Memory about the British "war poet," like Blunden, Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg.
Bill was particularly interested in the Canadian experience of The Great War, some of which I read about. Like any good academic, he raised many questions and replied with a few, thoughtful, if tentative answers. I could envision an interesting work of cultural history, " You have a book here," I said one day. "And I will help." In addition, I suggested that we compare World War One memorials with
—Erika Doss, author of Memorial Mania, and professor in the department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame
"In Grafting Memory: Essays on War and Commemoration, Bill Lipke and Bill Mares have written a well researched, wonderfully illustrated, and heartfelt history of war memorials dating from the nineteenth century to today in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain…"
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Contact Bill Mares, or click here to find an independent Vermont bookseller near you. Also available at Abe Books
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those of the American Civil War, in whose Sesquicentennial we were at that moment.
Lipke already had photographs of Canadian memorials, but together he and I also traveled to dozens of New England town greens, where granite sentinels stillstand. I went to Gettysburg, Antietam, and Washington D.C. to collect photographs. Then I went on to England and France with my nephew, William Spooner, to 'cover' the war cemeteries at the Somme, Verdun and Chateau-Thierry.
But we didn't neglect Burlington's own monuments. Our sleuthing found twenty, 300-pound bronze plaques listing 2,100 World War I service members in our downtown 1929 Memorial Auditorium. They were lying in piles in the basement. I spear-headed a local committee to restore and re-hang these massive treasures.
