Local members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion and the Wyoming National Guard will honor veterans who made the ultimate sacrifice with special Memorial Day services this Monday, May 25, at cemeteries in Byron, Cowley and Lovell.
Three services are scheduled Monday, conducted by members of the Everett W. Maxwell VFW Post No. 3161, the Robert Boyd Stewart American Legion Post No. 11 and local Wyoming National Guard members, most of them retired.
Commander Don Dover said that with so many local guardsmen deployed to Fort Hood, Texas, right now, en route to Kuwait, the normal firing squad was expected to be hard to come by, but he said longtime guardsman Allen Sessions volunteered to assemble a firing squad of retired guardsmen.
Services will be held at the Byron Cemetery at 8 a.m., the Cowley Cemetery at 9 a.m. and the Lovell Cemetery at 10 a.m., Dover said.
Dover will be the master of ceremonies for the services, which will include a rifle squad commanded by Sessions, a color guard provided by the VFW and American Legion and commanded by Dover and the sounding of “Taps” by buglers Elden Sanders and Dane Mickelson.
Bert Winterholler will be the featured speaker this year, and Isaac Mayes will provide special music, singing “America the Beautiful” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Memorial Day is a day set aside to honor Americans who have given their lives in the service of their country. The holiday originally honored military personnel who died during the American Civil War (1861-65).
The people of Waterloo, N.Y., first observed Memorial Day on May 5, 1866, to honor soldiers killed in the Civil War. Businesses closed and people decorated soldiers’ graves and flew flags at half-staff.
The holiday now honors those who died in any war while serving the United States of America.

The son of Bert and Alys Winterholler, Bert Winterholler Jr. grew up in Lovell and graduated from Lovell High School in 1965. After serving a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in southern Germany, Winterholler earned a B.A. in German languages in 1972 at BYU.
Winterholler attended dental school at Creighton University from 1973 to 1977 and graduated with honors from the Creighton University School of Dentistry.
He then spent 10 years in the U.S. Navy, first serving a one-year surgical internship at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Va., then serving aboard the USS Mt. Whitney, a command and communications ship, for two years.
Winterholler was then selected for training in oral and maxillofacial surgery, which put him back at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Portsmouth from 1980-83.
He was then assigned to the Roosevelt Roads Naval Hospital in Puerto Rico, where he served as Chief of Service. He was present when the United States invaded Grenada and the hospital tended to the many casualties that resulted from that operation.
Winterholler left the Navy in 1986 and has practiced medicine in North Dakota and Montana since then.
He started his Billings practice – Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery P.C. – in 1989. His practice specializes in oral surgery, extractions, reconstructions, work with the jaw, implants and oral tumors.
Winterholler remained in the reserves for four years, serving in Great Falls and Fargo and was eventually promoted to full commander. He said he left the armed forces just before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991.
Winterholler said he is grateful to the U.S. Navy for providing him the opportunity to gain the necessary education to launch his medical career as an oral surgeon, and he said he enjoyed his time in the service.
“I served with some of the finest people I’ve ever known,” he said.
He is also proud of having grown up in Lovell.
“There’s no other place I could have grown up and been the person I am,” he said. “I always say you can take me out of Lovell but you can’t take the Lovell out of me. I’ve always been a Lovell boy. Lovell is one of the best-kept secrets on the earth.”