For a decade, Louis Charles Martin rested in an unmarked grave in the back row on the southeast corner of Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery.
Block 20. Lot 105. Space 5.
“This is about as far back as you can go, can’t go much farther,” said Douglas Peyton, cemetery supervisor, as he surveyed the back row of plots.
Last week, the U.S. Army veteran’s government-issued marker was placed for the first time at the head of his grave.
His life story remains mostly a mystery. But a group of friends who knew nothing more of him than the engravings on his bronze marker banded together in his memory.
“All I was worried about is that we would get it to where it needs to go,” said Louis Kenneybrew III of Oak Cliff. “I would have liked for the family to know it was found, but this is the next best thing.”
Accidental finding
Since July, the marker has been kept in Kenneybrew’s bedroom, propped up between his dresser and air-conditioning unit.
He found the marker this summer wrapped in a crate in a pile of trash and broken chairs near Garrison Street and East Kiest Boulevard in Oak Cliff.
Not knowing there was a grave marker inside, Kenneybrew carried the crate home, along with the broken furniture, to burn as firewood.
“I picked it up and put it on the back of the truck, and when I got back to the house, I looked at it,” Kenneybrew said. “It was a shock.”
That month, he enlisted the help of his friend, Flora H. Cook. She began calling cemeteries, searching to find where Martin was buried. She looked for a relative to place the headstone and pay the cemetery’s $250 installment fee.
By chance, she first called Lincoln Cemetery, where staff confirmed he was buried and did not have a headstone.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ website also confirms a marker was issued in 2003 and that Martin was buried at Lincoln Cemetery.
Josephine Schuda, spokeswoman for the department, said it’s not unusual to hear stories of markers found in the trash, but they’re usually markers with errors or damage. Because of privacy issues, she did not provide more information about Martin.
She said it is rare to find a headstone for an unmarked grave.
“We do run into it with some regularity,” Schuda said. “But it’s unusual to find the grave was not marked, and that it was a marker meant to be put in place.”
Searching for answers
Two months after Kenneybrew found the grave marker, he and Cook still had not located a relative of Martin’s.
In mid-September, Cook solicited her younger sister, Linda Hardeman-Hodo, for help.
“What I would like to know is where it’s been all these years. His headstone just floating around like that … I can’t imagine,” Hardeman-Hodo said. “It touched me in a way that I had to do something. Many of our family members were veterans. Veterans, whether dead or alive, deserve respect.”
Hardeman-Hodo’s search took her to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ office in Washington.
In a phone call, a department representative told her that Martin’s sister, Mary Herrod, ordered the marker in 2003 to be sent to her home on Sonora Avenue.
According to a public record search, Herrod died in May 2011.
And when Kenneybrew and Cook drove to her former home on Sonora Avenue, they found only a vacant lot.
“To me, that was a dead end,” Hardeman-Hodo said.
‘It was a shame’
The following day, Hardeman-Hodo made a list of American Legion posts in the Dallas area, hoping one would be willing to receive the marker and pay to have it placed.
Jackson-Hughes American Legion Post 368 in Richardson was the first to answer the phone.
“I thought it was a shame,” Post Commander Larry Taylor said.
Though Martin wasn’t a member of the post, Taylor said the executive committee and its membership base agreed to deliver the marker to the cemetery and pay the $250 installation fee.
Later, Lincoln Cemetery opted to waive the fee, saying it initially didn’t know the extent of the story.
“We don’t want any veteran to go without a headstone. That’s what we’re about: Veterans helping veterans,” said Taylor, a fellow U.S. Army veteran who fought in the Vietnam War.
The four agreed to meet for the first time Oct. 28 at Hardeman-Hodo’s home to pass on the marker.
It was the first time for the three to meet Taylor.
It was also the first time for Hardeman-Hodo to see and touch the marker she’d worked to restore.
“I was just thankful I was able to do that deed,” Hardeman-Hodo said, her hand brushing the marker. “Thank God for the American Legion.”
The four stood on her front lawn while Kenneybrew retrieved the marker from his truck, passing it onto Taylor and Harry Ploehn, post executive board member.
“This was all I ever wanted,” Kenneybrew said.