COLUMBUS – Columbus honors its veterans on the Friday before the national holiday is observed, on Nov. 9 this year, and that means some downtown streets will be closed for the annual parade.
The 2015 Columbus Veterans Day Parade will stage on W. Nationwide Boulevard between Neil Avenue and N. Front Street beginning at 10:00 a.m.
The parade starts at noon and travels east on Nationwide Boulevard to High Street, south on High Street to W. Broad Street, then west on Broad Street to the intersection with Starling Street.
Nationwide Boulevard will be closed to through traffic between Neil Avenue and Front Street until approximately 12:45 p.m.
Motorists should expect rolling closures along the parade route through about 1:30 p.m. and should plan for some delays downtown between about noon and 2 p.m.
Twenty new members were inducted into the Ohio Veterans Hall of Fame during a ceremony at the Lincoln Theater Thursday.
Among those honored were Bill Richards, 66, A Vietnam War Navy veteran from Columbus; the late William H. Adams, of Columbus, an Army veteran of the Korean War; Todd A. Briggs, of Westerville, an Air Force veteran of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm; George Freeman Jr., a Vietnam Army veteran from Marysville; Philip R. Gregg, an Army veteran from Newark; David L. Kolbe, Army veteran of the Vietnam War from Howard in Knox County; Charles D. Van Voorhis, a Vietnam War Marine from Marion County; and Peter Wilkinson, an Air Force Vietnam veteran from Dublin.
Richards dreamed of what he would say during his acceptance speech on the day he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. He wanted to be a professional baseball player, and the men enshrined in that hallowed hall were his childhood heroes.
“My dream of Cooperstown? That was nothing,” said Richards, one of 20 members of the Class of 2015. “The call to serve becomes a part of who you are. And to know these veterans, to be around them and hear their stories, nothing can ever top that.”
Unlike Ohio’s Military Hall of Fame, which honors veterans for their valor during service, the Veterans Hall of Fame really recognizes the good works they’ve done in their post-military lives.
“These men and women are heroes in their communities,” said Ohio Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor, who addressed the group during the one-hour induction ceremony. “They make a difference every day.”
Democratic U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown helped draft a letter from 19 senators to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, outlining their concerns over reports that deployed service members face significant financial vulnerabilities, including identity theft and fraud.
The letter urges the Pentagon to make sure that service members are aware that they can place a security freeze on their credit during deployment and that they know what are available if they become the victim of fraud, identity theft, or an error on their credit report while they are deployed.
Brown is a cosponsor of the Military Families Credit Reporting Act, which would provide service members the opportunity to notify credit reporting agencies of a military deployment and explain on their credit reports that late or missed payments were due to deployments.