Two active leaders in Santa Clarita’s veteran community are working to bring a war memorial to the Veterans Historical Plaza located in Newhall.

The memorial would feature the engraved names of the 50 military service members from the Santa Clarita Valley who fought and died in battle from World War II to the present.

“In this city, 17 percent of our population are veterans– that’s a huge amount,” said Friendly Valley Veterans Club President Chuck Morris, who is spearheading the project alongside Veterans Memorial Committee President Bill Reynolds. “So we felt that this is something that needs to be done, and it should be done.”

Bill Reynolds (left) and Chuck Morris (right) with a project sample.

Reynolds and Morris are both veterans of the U.S. Army who are actively involved with a number of local veterans organizations, which led to the creation of the project last year.  

By researching media archives, Reynolds was able to obtain the names of 20 fallen military service members from World War II, five from the Korean War, 14 from the Vietnam War and 11 from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars that would be included in the memorial.

In August 2015, Reynolds and Morris proposed the project at a Santa Clarita City Council meeting, and said that city officials gave their approval for the process to move forward the same night.

The first step was to obtain the approval of the Veterans Memorial Committee, which was headed at that time by longtime community leader Duane Harte, who died of an apparent heart attack in November 2015. Reynolds presented the project to Harte and his fellow committee members at a meeting, garnering their support and Harte’s approval in writing.

Several months later, Reynolds was put in contact with a Vermont-based granite memorial company called Picture This On Granite, which reportedly reached out to Mayor Bob Kellar via email after reading about the project online.

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Using online live imaging, company officials drafted a design for the memorial that fit the layout of the site  in December 2015: a 6-foot by 8-foot granite monument with an estimated cost of approximately $45,000.

The site of the proposed War Memorial project.

The planned monument would depict artwork of images representative of all of the wars from World War II to the present, as well as the insignias of the various U.S. military branches with the names of the 50 known fallen military service members engraved, according to Reynolds.

“If we find out that we missed a WWII killed in action, if it comes up out of the community, we can have a name added,” he said. “Unfortunately, there will be space on there to add more (names) if there’s another war in the near future.”

While the project’s $45,000 price tag does not include the cost of a crane and crane operator or concrete work for the base of the memorial, Reynolds said a local Vietnam veteran and contractor has offered to donate his services.

“He will absorb that (cost) because that’s how strongly he feels that this should be done,” Reynolds said. “He’s a true patriot.”

Reynolds and Morris are currently in the process of coordinating a meeting with Kellar and Rick Gould, the director of parks, recreation and community services for the city of Santa Clarita.

Reynolds expects the meeting to take place in the next week or two, with its purpose to receive approval from Gould so that the proposal can be added to the Santa Clarita City Council’s agenda for consideration.

“While we’ve been waiting for that, Chuck and I have been busy all over town drumming up support for this,” Reynolds said, noting that they’ve spoken with SCV residents, businesses and numerous veterans organizations. “The common reaction before you even get done talking about it is, this is a no-brainer. So we’re confident that we’ve got full community support for this.”