Stanley Ketchel ~ September 14, 1886 - October 15, 1910

Stanley Ketchel was born Stanislaw Kiecal in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Polish immigrants and became a middleweight boxing world champion. But before that, he was a teenage runaway, worked as a bouncer in Butte Montana, and started boxing in backroom matches. In 1903, he began boxing professionally, at age 16. He famously fought Jack Johnson and in 1910 he fought his last six fights. Stanley was recovering from those fights on a friend's farm in Missouri when he was robbed and murdered by a ranch hand. Read about his short and tragic life story in this well-written book.

Grand Rapids remembers him with a sculpture by Ann Hirsch (erected in 2015) on Bridge Street, part of the Community Legends Project.

The now defunct Rocky's Bar had this hanging on a wall.

Stanley's funeral was the largest in Grand Rapids until Gerald Ford's in 2007. He is buried with members of his family in Holy Cross Cemetery in Grand Rapids. When we first visited the grave some years ago, boxing gloves were hanging on the headstone and the base was clearly crumbling.

Today we visited and found a repaired grave site and members of Stanley's family nearby.

His father and mother:

His brothers, John and Alexander, and Alexander's wife, Ethel.

His brother, Leon, appears to have died in World War II in 1942 but details are scant.

Someone laid flowers on the grave of the "The Michigan Assassin" and boxers who come to town continue to pay their respects. RIP Stanley, the first middleweight champion to regain the world title after losing it. He packed a lot of living into his short life.

NASA Day of Remembrance ~ January 23, 2025

Each year on the 4th Thursday in January, NASA remembers the crew who perished in the Apollo 1 fire (1967), and the space shuttle crews who died, Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003.

This is the Space Mirror Memorial at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida from one of our earlier visits.

The names of the Apollo 1 astronauts.

Grissom and Chaffee are buried in Arlington National Cemetery (White is at Westpoint) and we paid our respects at their graves last year.

More on Roger B. Chaffee here.

More on Gus Grissom here. 

We also found the memorials/graves of the shuttle crews in Arlington.

The Challenger

Their names on the Kennedy Space Center Space Mirror Memorial:

The Columbia

Their names on the Space Mirror Memorial:

The Space Mirror is part of the larger Astronauts Memorial where these can be found.

We found a small memorial to these astronauts, who died so tragically, at the Armstrong Air & Space Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio.

More on Armstrong here.

Rest in peace and ad astra per aspera 💔

  

Martin Luther King, Jr. ~ January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968

"We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

Martin Luther King, Jr. sites visited:

The Lorraine Motel where MLK was assassinated is now the National Civil Rights Museum, 450 Mulberry Street in Memphis. We visited in 2016. The museum makes you relive the tragedy of 1968 but also honors the brave and courageous, short life that Martin Luther King, Jr., lived.

The boarding house from which James Earl Ray fired the fatal shot was made part of the museum.

For more of his history, this is an excellent book based on Martin's writings.

The sister cities of Benton Harbor and St. Joseph in Michigan each have a sculpture memorial. "A Seat at the Table" is in Dwight P. Michell City Center Park, 127 Pipestone Street in Benton Harbor. Both were erected in 2024 as part of the Unified Civic Monuments Project.

"The Mountaintop" can be found in Margaret B. Upton Arboretum, 601 Water Street, St. Joseph.

We found a tribute to Martin in the Empire State Plaza Concourse on the way to the New York State Capitol  building in Albany.

This photo is located in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York.

In 2024, we visited Washington D.C. and walked to the Martin Luther King, Jr, Memorial in West Potomac Park. Completed in 2011, it stands 30 feet tall and is inscribed "Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope."

Views from across the bay.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

 RIP Martin 💗

"The end of non-violent action is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community."