As falling snow whitened trees wrapped in red ribbons, Mary Gamber, 4, walked with her family and hundreds of neighbors toward the home of a fallen soldier’s father.
Like many others in the procession, Fred Gamber carried an American flag. His daughter, dressed in a bright pink coat, gazed in wonder Monday at all the signs and banners–as if a parade, not a funeral, had come to her Arlington Heights neighborhood.
“I want [my daughters] to see the type of sacrifice it takes for them to live the type of life they do,” said Gamber, who took off work to join his wife and three daughters in remembering Army Pfc. William Robert “Will” Newgard.
“We need to honor the people who die and are making that type of sacrifice,” Gamber said.
Newgard, 20, a member of the Army’s 1st Armored Division, died Dec. 29 when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle in Baghdad.
On Monday, as thousands of other communities have done over the course of the war, Arlington Heights paid tribute to one of its own.
After a funeral mass in St. James Catholic Church in Arlington Heights, Newgard will be buried Friday at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
But before the mass, scores of people bundled against the cold gathered in the 300 block of East Ivy Lane, where Richard Newgard, the soldier’s father, recently moved. The younger Newgard grew up in another house in the neighborhood.
Some in the crowd held signs of gratitude and American flags as the hearse, a red pickup truck and a black limousine with family members passed by on the way to the church. Emblazoned with a colorful, hand-drawn Stars and Stripes, one sign said, “Thank you, Will.” Another, “God Bless You, Will.”
As the limousine rolled slowly down the street, a window opened, and Richard Newgard called out softly, “Thank you, guys. Thank you.”
Thirty members of the Hersey High School choir sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as they led the hearse down the street. Newgard graduated from the school in 2005.
After the hearse paused in front of the Newgard home, two trumpeters from the high school band played taps.
An Arlington Heights police officer stood at attention and saluted.
Members of the Cub Scout pack and Boy Scout troop to which Newgard once belonged watched silently from the sidewalk.
“I’ll feel good about it in the future,” said Conor Cimo, 10, a member of Cub Scout Pack 269. “This family is going to get an uplift, seeing all these people come and support their son.”
Conor’s mother, Bonnie Cimo, recently sent an older son off to college.
“You realize what you’re doing is nothing like when a parent says goodbye to their children and they’re going off to Iraq,” she said.
Mary Jacks, 50, an Arlington Heights nurse, said the respect paid to the young soldier involved emotions difficult to describe.
“Our country is what this boy fought for,” she said. “I can stand here and honor him. We have this neighborhood, we have this country because of his sacrifice.”
At the mass, attended by several hundred mourners, Rev. James Hearne spoke of “our friend. A soldier.”
“It connects us to what’s going on over in Iraq, Afghanistan and the world, if we hadn’t been connected before,” Hearne said.
In the days following Newgard’s death, his family recalled his lifelong ambition to become a soldier–his love of G.I. Joe cartoons as a youngster, his year at a Wisconsin military academy when he was older. Besides his father, survivors include his mother, Kaki, and sister, Holly.
Newgard returned home for a two-week leave in December. During the visit, he spoke to children at Sanborn Elementary School in Palatine, where his mother is the secretary.
He was the second Hersey graduate to die in the Iraq war. In 2004, Army Maj. Paul “P.R.” Syverson III was killed by rocket fire. Syverson, 32, was a 1989 graduate.
Praising Newgard’s faith in God and his country, Hearne said, “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life. … And for that, there is a special place in heaven.”
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jjlong@tribune.com
