Thought Id share this article from today's local paper.
Popular troop greeters at Bangor International Airport remembered
Troop greeters gathering in Bangor this week are missing two extraordinarily popular and loyal volunteers from their ranks. Margery Dean, a 79-year-old Bangor resident, and Everett Steele, 71, of Brooksville, who welcomed a combined total of more than 1,000 flights through Bangor International Airport beginning with Operation Desert Storm, died last week. Both were wheelchair-bound and in failing health, but mustered the strength to meet planeloads of soldiers until the end of their lives.
"Even at night, when I wouldn't go, Margery would drive herself over to the airport and push herself into the troop terminal," Bill Dean, her husband of nearly 40 years, recalled Monday.
At 5 p.m. Thursday, after having met two early flights that day, Dean drove his wife back to BIA where she suffered a fatal heart attack in their car. Dodging rush-hour traffic, he raced to Eastern Maine Medical Center in 12 minutes, but the Columbia Falls native and mother of eight died at the hospital.
Steele, a well-known Korean War veteran who helped design that war's memorial at Mount Hope Cemetery, died at his Brooksville home late Saturday night. He had battled Parkinson's disease for several years, but never gave up on the troop-greeting experience and appearing at local veterans events.
Last November, Steele presented his first annual Maine Troop Greeters Association award to Bill Knight of Bradford, who on Sunday remembered Steele as a good man whom he met at a 10th anniversary BIA observance three years ago commemorating the first troop flight on March 8, 1991.
What will now be named the Everett L. Steele Memorial Award will be presented to more recipients on May 2, the first anniversary of the first returning flight from Operation Iraqi Freedom to be greeted in Bangor.
Airport regulars Don Crosby and Ron and Evelyn Bradman remembered Dean's deadpan Irish humor and Steele's unwavering dedication to "his troops." Others recalled seeing 11-year-old Ricky Bradeen of Medford wheeling Dean around the airport, and how Dean beamed every time she mentioned her son-in-law Jim Law, an Army National Guardsman serving in Iraq.
Mary Drew of Orono met Dean last summer at EMMC when Dean's grandson Michael Merritt was undergoing surgery for a brain tumor. Drew's son Pat Skall was friendly with Merritt, and after that day, she became friends with the small, smiling woman in the wheelchair who inspired every soldier who walked down the airport ramp.
Nancy Bond of Charleston and Lynn Ryan of Hampden rode in Veterans Day parades with Steele and shook thousands of hands standing by his side in the airport.
"Everett, I can see you now, standing tall and proud at the gates of heaven, hand extended, welcoming our fallen troops," Bond wrote in a letter to the Bangor Daily News this week.
Wednesday, Rep. Pat Blanchette of Bangor is expected to have entered into the legislative record a House sentiment of Margery Dean's dedication to troop greeting. Former Rep. Charles "Dusty" Fisher of Brewer, a loyal greeter himself, made the suggestion after hearing of Dean's death.
Gathering at a local funeral home Friday, troop greeters dug deep and gave Bill Dean $320 to help cover undertaking expenses.
Tributes to Steele also are expected to follow in the coming weeks, along with more planeloads of troops passing through the Bangor airport.
