Memorial Day parade and event scheduled in Mazeppa
MAZEPPA — A long-standing Memorial Day tradition will kick off in Union County on May 25.
The Mazeppa Union Church at 3200 Johnson Mill Road will host the annual Memorial Day Parade at 6 p.m. May 25. It will be followed by a ceremony in the church cemetery with special guest speaker Don Turner.
"This is a great community event," church secretary/treasurer Hazel Roush said. "It draws the people together. They sit on their porches all through Mazeppa. It's a great community gathering to honor those who sacrificed everything for us."
The parade forms in the area of Thomas' Garage, 2499 Johnson Mill Road, and travels through Mazeppa toward the Union Church cemetery. Fire companies, residents and community organizations are part of the parade, Roush said.
Turner, a veteran from Mazeppa who served in the U.S. Army during Operation Desert Storm, will speak during the ceremony, she said.
The event has special music and a 22-gun salute by the American Legion. The ceremony is followed by an ice cream social in the community center sponsored by the Good Time 4-H Club, Roush said.
Doug Walter, of the nonprofit Union County Veterans Foundation, is a former organizer of the event. The parade and ceremony remind Walter of Mayberry, a fictional community that was the setting of the television sitcom "The Andy Griffith Show" in the 1960s.
"It's hometown America the way it should be and small-town America at its best," Walter said. "It's small and simple, and that's what makes it special."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Digital Trends
15 hours ago
- Digital Trends
3 underrated movies you need to watch in June 2025
It's been a strong few weeks at the box office. Lilo & Stitch and Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning powered a record-breaking Memorial Day box office. While Ballerina stumbled the week after, the live-action How to Train Your Dragon got off to a fantastic start with an $84 million opening. June still has several high-profile releases coming, including 28 Years Later, Elio, and F1. Many of these movies are sequels and IP-based projects, which tend to release during the summer blockbuster season. However, there are several underrated movies to watch this month. Some of these projects, like Ash, can be streamed at home. Recommended Videos When you're done here, check out the best new movies to stream this week, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Max, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, and the best movies on Disney+. Ash (2025) Ash is exactly what a B-movie should be. Directed by Flying Lotus, Ash follows Riya Ortiz (Eiza González), an astronaut who wakes up in a space station on a foreign planet with no memories. As Riya explores the station, she finds several crew members have been brutally slaughtered. The key to Riya's questions lies with Brion (Aaron Paul), a fellow astronaut who comes to the station after receiving a distress call. At first, Riya cannot comprehend what happened to the crew. As she experiences flashbacks, Riya starts to consider that perhaps she had something to do with her team's demise. Ash doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it packs a punch thanks to starry visuals, gory action, and a standout performance from González. Stream Ash on Shudder. Echo Valley (2025) Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney star in Echo Valley, Apple TV+'s thriller ripped directly from the '90s. Written by Mare of Easttown's Brad Ingelsby, Echo Valley introduces Kate Garrett (Moore), a horse trainer on her farm in Pennsylvania. Kate's life is in shambles after the loss of her wife, which affects her ability to pay the bills and keep the farm running. Kate's daughter, Claire (Sydney Sweeney), mistakenly throws a heroin stash in the river, leading to an explosive confrontation with the drug dealer on the farm. A few nights later, Claire shows up covered in the blood of her boyfriend. Kate now tackles the question faced by many parents: How far are you willing to go to protect your child? Stream Echo Valley on Apple TV+. Dangerous Animals (2025) It's fitting that a new shark movie comes in the same month that Jaws celebrates its 50th anniversary. While a great white shark plays the villain in Jaws, a serial killer becomes the primary antagonist in Dangerous Animals. Tucker (Jai Courtney) runs a cage diving business, recruiting tourists to swim with sharks. Yet Tucker has a dark secret — he feeds his passengers to the sharks and films their deaths. For his next victim, Tucker kidnaps the rebellious surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) and shackles her on his boat. Zephyr won't go down without a fight, which surprisingly excites the eccentric Tucker. Courtney lets it all go to play this flamboyant serial killer, while Harrison's star-making performance shines in this effective summer thriller. Dangerous Animals is now in theaters.
Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
‘The Damned' brings the Civil War to intimate life, obliquely and mesmerizingly
How much can you strip away from the war film and still have a war film? That question invigorates 'The Damned,' the new movie from Roberto Minervini, an Italian-born director who has spent the last 25 years living in America, our worrying cultural undercurrents seeping into his portraits of the marginalized and the discontent, usually documentaries. 'The Damned' represents his first foray into more traditional narrative storytelling, yet this existential drama bears all the hallmarks of his earlier work, less concerned with incident than conjuring a sense of place, time and, most important, a state of being. In his latest, Minervini brings viewers into the thick of the Civil War, only to find the same dazed souls and gnawing uncertainties that have always been his focus. It's a war film with very little combat, but it's about a war that still rages today. Minervini's naturalistic, observational style is on display from the film's first scene, which lingers on a pack of wolves meticulously digging into an animal carcass. 'The Damned' stays on the images just long enough for them to grow discomforting — when will Minervini cut away? — before introducing us to his anonymous protagonists, a collection of volunteer soldiers in the U.S. Army who have been sent out west in the winter of 1862. The specifics of the mission are as mysterious as these men's names as we watch them carry out the minutiae of military busywork. They set up tents. They play cards. They do target practice. Are they meant to represent the hungry wolves from the movie's opening? Or are they the prey? To call 'The Damned' an antiwar film would be to assign an arbitrary value to what is really a series of offhand episodes consisting of only modest activity. In Minervini's recent stellar nonfiction projects 'The Other Side' and 'What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?,' the director collaborated with his subjects to create unvarnished glimpses of everyday lives, sometimes working from prearranged scenarios. Although Minervini is credited as 'The Damned's' screenwriter, his new film draws from a similarly close relationship with his cast, the actors drawing on aspects of their real lives to inform their roles, scenes developing from a loosely sketched-out plot. In such an intimate, pensive atmosphere, characters emerge gradually out of the rugged landscape like windswept trees or weathered stones. The man identified in the end credits as the Sergeant (Tim Carlson, one of the subjects of Minervini's 2013 documentary 'Stop the Pounding Heart') is ostensibly the leader, but as the untamed Montana wilderness goes from barren to snowy over an unspecified period of time, the more apparent it becomes that no commanding officer is necessary. The skeletal score by Carlos Alfonso Corral, who doubles as the film's cinematographer, hints at an elemental menace just over the horizon. But real danger rarely occurs. Instead, these men are trapped in their own heads, their tender, confessional musings about God, war and manhood so rudimentary that they never aspire to the heights of folksy poetry. These soldiers are nothing special — as unimportant as their assignment. Because Minervini avoids the tropes of the antiwar film — no big speeches, no ponderous metaphors — it's almost a shock that he allows for one convention, an actual battle scene, which occurs about halfway through the 88-minute runtime. But even here, 'The Damned' refuses to follow formula, resulting in an intentionally haphazard sequence as the soldiers are ambushed, the characters fleeing and shooting in every direction, the camera trailing behind them, desperate to keep them in frame. Whether it's enemy forces or some random buffalo, the movie's shallow depth of focus ensures that we only see our troops. Everything else resides in a permanently fuzzy, unsettled background, a constant middle distance that traps the characters in their spiritual purgatory. There are limitations to Minervini's spartan approach. Whereas his documentary films crackle thanks to his unpredictable interactions with his subjects, 'The Damned' cannot help but feel slightly overdetermined, the outcomes predestined rather than organically unearthed. And yet, the concerns he brought to those earlier movies ripple here as well. 'The Other Side,' his somber 2015 study of racist drug addicts and gun-toting militia members in rural Louisiana, remains the definitive warning of our modern MAGA age, while 2018's 'What You Gonna Do' prefigures the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, for the first time, this prescient filmmaker visits America's distant past, subtly pinpointing the economic inequalities, senseless brutality and thwarted masculinity that will bedevil the nation for the next 160 years. The Civil War is long over, but the country's divisions remain, those core tensions naggingly unresolved. Don't think of 'The Damned' as an antiwar film — consider it an origin story for Minervini's perceptive, understated exploration of an America still in conflict.
Newsweek
3 days ago
- Newsweek
Mom Thinks She's Safe at Home Playing With Kids—Then Hears Terrifying Sound
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A mom of two who had set out to capture a cute moment with her daughter on camera ended up recording something altogether more unsettling. Arley Herrema, from Arlington, Texas, was at home with her 3-year-old daughter Ruby Jo and 7-month-old son Hayes when she inadvertently recorded the sound of something that left all three of them terrified. "My daughter was being cute playing hairdresser, so I wanted to capture the moment," Herrema told Newsweek. What she ended up filming instead was their reaction to the sound of a plane flying low over their home. Herrema posted the footage of their reaction to the sound to her TikTok @arleyherrema. Both Herrema and her daughter appear alarmed and confused by the noise, while her son starts to cry in the immediate aftermath. "I was terrified when I heard the noise. I did not know what it was initially," Herrema said. "Honestly, I thought it was a bomb at first, but then my rational thinking kicked in and realized it was a plane." It turned out what Herrema and her kids had heard was actually a "flyover" to mark Memorial Day. "We live close to the Rangers [baseball] stadium [at Globe Life Field] and they were playing a game that day," she said. Thankfully, Herrema said both Ruby Jo and Hayes calmed down "pretty quickly" after the initial incident, and she then decided it was something worth sharing to social media. She could never have predicted what would happen next. "I thought it was funny after the fact and crazy that I caught it on camera," Herrema said. "I had no idea it would spark such a political debate in the comments!" At the time of writing, Herrema's video has been watched over 3.8 million times. Many of those commenting on the clip have been eager to draw comparisons with what is happening in Gaza. "Imagine the kids in Palestine," the top comment on the video reads. "Now imagine all those babies in Palestine hearing that followed by explosions and carnage all around," a second wrote. A third commented: "Poor Palestinian children gotta go through that everyday multiple times a day and see worse and they know that sound is 100 percent a threat and not just a plane." Herrema said she had similar thoughts in the aftermath of her family's experience. "I had that thought as well when it happened and how scary it is for children and mothers who are being directly impacted by war," she added. "I didn't however just think of one side or even the current situation happening in the world, but any and everyone directly impacted by war past or present." That moment of reflection on the terrifying consequences of military conflict left her feeling a sense of gratitude for where Herrema and her family are in the world. "Definitely makes you grateful to live in the U.S.A.," she said. Figures published by the U.N., based on data from the Gaza Health Ministry, as of June 18, 2025, show that 55,637 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict. Those from March 22, 2025, gleaned from the same source, indicate 15,613 Palestinian children have died. The U.N. says Israeli media sources suggest there have been over 1,200 Israeli fatalities. At least 33 children are thought to have died. The Israeli figures include the fatalities from Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023.
