those who served Ardmore Veterans Museum a success
BY LISA SAVAGE
Hundreds of local veterans and their families have contributed service uniforms, photos and other keepsakes from their time in the military.
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lthough William Kelley, a World War II pilot, went through many battles unscathed, he eventually did meet an unfortunate end while flying. He had returned to the United States, and during a parade commemorating the end of the war, he died in a plane crash. His personal effects, which went back to his family in a trunk, remained unopened for years. When Kelley’s son — 18 months old at the time of his father’s death — learned a group of veterans hoped to establish a museum and were requesting veterans’ artifacts, he donated the trunk. Now, the pilot’s razor, shoes, rifle, metal tin and hundreds of pictures of him and other wartime photos sit among the displays at Ardmore Veterans Museum. “His wife never opened the trunk, and his son brought it to me,” says Ken Crosson, president of the Ardmore Veterans Group, which established the museum in 2018. The museum features many unusual artifacts, including a coconut that local veteran James Butler addressed to his wife and mailed during World War II. Mannequins are used to display uniforms, overcoats and other clothing people have donated to the museum. “There’s one overcoat that must weigh 20 pounds,” Crosson says.
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A man’s Air Force uniform hangs alongside the uniform his daughter, also an Air Force veteran, wore. Memorabilia from a brigadier general from Pulaski fills one corner. He served two tours in Vietnam and had all kinds of items, including coins, medals and pictures. “He donated everything he had, and it fills up one corner,” Crosson says.
A VISION TO HONOR VETERANS The museum, fulfilling Crosson’s vision, started as a veterans memorial with three flag poles placed on a concrete base for the public to see as they drove through Ardmore. There were memory rocks, each with the name of a local military member, their branch of service and other information. The display began with 30 rocks, and now there are more than 400 rocks at the memorial. But Crosson felt Ardmore’s veterans from Alabama and Tennessee needed more. “I thought, ‘If we could have a veterans museum, that would be wonderful,’” he says. Crosson served 20 years in the Army, from 1958 to 1978, and worked at Redstone Arsenal until he retired in 1996 and moved to Ardmore. He and others formed the veterans organization, and he has also served on the city council of Ardmore, Tennessee. Ardmore Telephone Company
