Good morning.
Memorial Day in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 84. Sunrise is 5:23 and sunset is 8:20 for 14 hours 57 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 71.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Memorial Day parade begins at 10:30 AM from Fairhaven’s Hearthstone Memory Care and will proceed along North Street to Whitewater’s Old Armory.
On this day in 1961, President Kennedy announces the Project Apollo before a special joint session of Congress: that the United States “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
A Wisconsin soldier now returns home:
After 86 years, Army Cpl. John “Jack” Ginzl is finally home in Rhinelander.
He was buried the day before Memorial Day in a public ceremony at Forest Home Cemetery. Jack had previously been interred in a military cemetery in Hawaii, in a grave for unidentified soldiers.
Jack volunteered for the military before the Pearl Harbor attack sent America into the Second World War. He was stationed in the Philippines when Japan invaded, shortly after the attack.
He fought in a months-long battle, was captured and endured the Bataan Death March.
Jack spent years as a prisoner of war before dying on Jan. 9, 1945, when allied aircraft bombed the unmarked prison ship where he was held in what is now Taiwan. The bombers did not know there were hundreds of American prisoners aboard.
For more than three-quarters of a century, Jack’s identity was lost among the unaccounted for dead.
Now, with the help of DNA research and the ongoing effort of the military to give names to the missing, Jack has returned to his family. On the day before Memorial Day, was laid to rest at Forest Home Cemetery in Rhinelander at the foot of his parents’ graves.
See Avery Martinez, After 86 years, Rhinelander soldier ID’d and buried at home, Wisconsin Public Radio, May 25, 2026.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
Torrential rain and dangerous floods threaten other parts of the United States: