Riverside National Cemetery Initiates "Roll Call Project"

8-year-old Matteson Williams reads the last 10 names of Veterans interred at California's Riverside National Cemetery during the Memorial Day ceremony May 25. Nearly 147,000 names were read during the "Roll Call Project."

America's Busiest National Cemetery Brings Community Together to Remember Veterans.

Sometimes a great notion does, in fact, have an equally great outcome. That was the case recently at Riverside National Cemetery when an idea borrowed from the other end of the country became a successful collaboration between the RNC staff and the Inland Empire community.

The event, called the Roll Call Project, was inspired by the reading of the names of the victims of the 9/11 attacks in New York.

"Jim Buchholz (RNC cemetery representative) came to me not long after Sept. 11 last year and asked me if I thought we could do something similar, only reading the names of the Veterans buried here," said RNC Public Affairs Officer Jim Ruester. "I told Jim that I thought it was a great idea, but that I would have to do some research to see how big an undertaking it would be."

He learned that the annual 9/11 reading involves 2,801 names. At 30 years old, RNC holds the remains of nearly 150,000 Veterans.

"I knew immediately that it would take a lot of volunteers to read that many names," Ruester said. He was encouraged by the fact that, in New York every year, so many people want to read the names that the organizers assign the readers based on a lottery.

"I've worked with so many terrific, dedicated volunteers and met so many wonderful family members, that I believed that if we could get a number of them interested, we just might be able to recruit the number of volunteers we'd need," Ruester said.

That number, he soon found out, would be just over 300.

"I was thinking about it at home one day and wondering how long it would take to read 150,000 names," Ruester said.

He took out a phone book and started reading names for 15 minutes. Some simple arithmetic gave him his answer - it would take 6.7 days reading around the clock to read 150,000 names.

"When I realized that we might be able to complete it in the space of a week, it began to feel possible - and I knew that, if we were going to do it, the most logical time was the week before Memorial Day."

The next step in making the Roll Call Project a reality was getting RNC director Gill Gallo on board. That turned out to be less difficult than Ruester anticipated.

"Mr. Gallo's chief concern was the security of the volunteers, since people would be here overnight," Ruester said.

Since the success of the project would be based on getting enough volunteers, Ruester decided to tackle recruitment first. He sent out a news release March 24 to all Inland Empire (San Bernardino and Riverside counties) media outlets.

Ruester also recruited Veteran RNC and VA volunteer Hosea Taylor to work with the nearby Loma Linda VA Medical Center's Voluntary Services and other organizations to locate volunteers. The reaction of the community was immediate and overwhelming.

"Within a few days of the beginning of initial recruiting efforts, people started calling," Ruester said. "Since this idea had never been tried before, it was difficult to anticipate the reaction."

It was immediately obvious that he would need help. That's where the RNC administrative staff came in. Ruester created a form to capture the volunteers' information and distributed it to the staff. Along with the many calls they receive from and make to funeral directors each day, the RNC staff collected contact information from the many volunteers who called in each day.

"There is no way that I could have spoken with that many people," he said. "The phones were ringing constantly and having staff members gathering information became a real key to our success. This is the busiest national cemetery in the country, so the additional workload was taxing, but the team pulled together and helped capture the information we needed."

In only a few weeks, they reached the required number of 336 volunteers and people were still calling to volunteer. The RNC team decided that no one who wanted to read would be turned away.

"The callers were so sincere in wanting to be a part of it that I couldn't bring myself to stop accepting volunteers," said Gallo. "We decided to keep taking volunteers and then work out the numbers when we knew how many we had."

People continued to volunteer right up to the starting date of May 16, when the number of readers reached 750.

The Roll Call Project team faced a second dilemma when many volunteers requested to be scheduled for a time when a loved-ones name would be read. Because of the large number of names and the ever-growing number of readers, Gallo said his team had to keep telling volunteers that it would be impossible to predict when a particular name would be read. They finally solved the predicament by suggesting that each reader dedicate their time to the memory of their loved one.

"This turned out to be one of the highlights of the entire project," Gallo said. "In trying to not disappoint people, we created a way for them to connect with their loved one through the Roll Call Project. It was obvious that the dedications were very difficult for some, but they struggled through and, I think, felt better for having done it. For others, I got the sense that the person was experiencing some kind of emotional relief for the first time. It was moving and amazing to observe."

From its beginning on Armed Forces Day afternoon, the Roll Call Project rolled on, day and night, until May 24. But that was not the end of the project.

At Gallo's request, 8-year-old Matteson Williams read the last 10 names during the cemetery's Memorial Day ceremony on May 25, completing the reading of 146,892 names.

"Matteson had read twice during the week with her grandparents. She was so self-assured and sincere, that, to me, she was the perfect choice to read the last 10 names, connecting the Roll Call Project to Memorial Day," Gallo said.

It took about 800 individual efforts to complete the list of 146,892 names. From the individual readers to community volunteers like Danielle Segura, Brigitte Griffis and the Patriot Guard Riders who managed the reading site and scheduled all the volunteers, to the many RNC team members who contributed to the success of the project, it became a community effort. People came together for the purpose of paying tribute to the thousands of Veterans buried at Riverside National Cemetery and in the process created a community.

"It started out as an idea," Gallo said, "but it took all those people working together to make that idea come to life."