As preparations swing into high gear for the upcoming Independence Day holiday, 115 area residents gathered late Wednesday morning at Meadville Senior Center for a special pre-lunch salute to veterans.

Sponsored by Active Aging Inc., the presentation was a prelude to the formal Salute to Veterans that has become an annual Veterans Day tradition in Meadville.

Fred Cunningham, Crawford County’s director of veterans affairs, remembered the late Richard Stephenson, the driving force behind local programs commemorating Memorial Day, Veterans Day and the Fourth of July. A retired Air Force colonel and an active member of the Meadville community for half a century, Stephenson died unexpectedly on Oct. 19, 2008, at the age of 82.

Confident that the Memorial Day and Veterans Day observations will continue, Cunningham was less optimistic about the Fourth of July celebration Stephenson introduced in recent years in Meadville’s Diamond Park.

According to City Clerk Janet Niedermeyer, no permits for Independence Day activities have been issued this year.

“I hate to see it go away,” Cunningham said of the ceremony. “Unfortunately, I won’t be here, but I would like to see it go on,” he continued. “It took Dick such a long time to get it going. My desire would be for some service organization to pick this up and go with it in the future.”

Stephenson, Cunningham added, “was a firm believer in everything veterans did.”

The late Joe Patterson, who had been involved with the senior center since the day it opened, was also saluted. Many of those present remembered his collection of military patches, which he sewed onto blanket-sized panels of fabric for permanent display. His widow, Mary, shared one of the patch-covered blankets with the group.

Although her brother Luke never served in the military, he serves his country protecting its border, Becky Dithrich Miller, manager of Meadville’s Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2006, said as she updated the group on the progress he has made since sustaining near-fatal injuries on Oct. 27, 2008.

Luke Dithrich was riding his motorcycle to work with the U.S. Border Patrol in southern California at 11:30 p.m. when a driver going the wrong way on a highway intentionally hit him, she said.

Recently fitted with a prosthetic leg and already walking without so much as a single crutch, Dithrich is expected to return to Meadville for a visit in August.

Because the driver who hit him — confined in a mental hospital where he will remain until he is capable of standing trial — was uninsured, her brother has been hit with astronomical medical expenses, Miller explained. She thanked his former co-workers at Appleby’s in Vernon Township for raising more than $5,000 on his behalf.

Keynote speaker Chief Master Sgt. John Amato, who has spent a total of 30 months on duty in various locations throughout the Middle East since the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, served most recently as superintendent/chief of operations with the 447th Expeditionary Logistics Readiness Squadron, 447 Expeditionary Group, at Sather Air Base in Iraq.

Home since April, the social studies teacher at Conneaut Lake High School described changes that have taken place in Iraq over the years.

Noting that he had found that most Iraqis “were pleased that we were there,” Amato explained that people are demonstrating in the streets “because they’ve never had the ability to do that.”