While Bellevue’s main Veterans Day celebration was scuttled due to cold weather, the show went on at St. Mary’s Catholic School in Olde Towne.
Community members and the school’s students gathered Friday afternoon for the annual Veterans Day assembly, which included the presentation of four Quilts of Valor to area veterans.
Steve Giles, Dave Sobilo, Frederick Wong and Rob Morgan received quilts during the assembly, which also included singing and remarks from veterans.
Thanking and honoring U.S. military personnel and veterans with a Quilt of Valor began with Catherine Roberts in 2003 while her son was deployed in Iraq.
Roberts felt “10 seconds from panic” and had a tough time sleeping, according to the organization.
In the middle of the night, she had a dream where she saw a young soldier deployed somewhere in the world and sitting on the side of the bed in the middle of the night. He was hunched over with a pervading feeling of gloom and despair. Then as if viewing a movie, the next scene in her dream was transformative. The soldier, still sitting on the bed in the middle of the night, now wrapped in a quilt and the whole atmosphere changed, from one of despair to one of hope and well-being. To Roberts, the quilt represented healing.
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Roberts — a military mom, nurse and quilter — thought that making quilts was something she could do. She began making quilts for wounded soldiers returning home from conflict.
Since that first quilt in 2003, the National Quilts of Valor Foundation members and volunteers have awarded more than 323,500 quilts to U.S. military personnel and veterans to thank them for their service.