Wheaton memorial ensures soldier 'will not be forgotten'
Susan Watts sometimes had a distressing thought when she visited her son's grave in Wheaton.
Five years have passed since Samuel, a selfless 20-year-old soldier, died in a military hospital after he was wounded by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.
"If I go to his cemetery and it doesn't look like anybody's visited, you do think he's being forgotten," Susan Watts said. "And I know that doesn't really indicate that, but to his mom, it does."
But the sight of a new memorial in downtown Wheaton dispelled a mother's fears. Through tears, Susan Watts said she was humbled and grateful for an honorary street sign that immortalizes her son's name at a prominent corner near Memorial Park.
"It means everything to know that the community is behind us," she said.
Family friend Peggy Rosenwinkel petitioned the city to install the sign dedicated to Army Spc. Samuel T. Watts at Karlskoga Avenue and Hale Street.
"Gold Star families are sometimes afraid that their child will be forgotten, because while their lives have been jackknifed, our lives continue merrily along," Rosenwinkel said during a Friday ceremony unveiling the sign. "I am so grateful that we can all come together today vowing to the Wattses by this sign that we will never forget."
It's an "absolutely perfect," spot to install the sign, his mother said - near the park where Samuel would spend many hours riding his bike and perfecting BMX tricks.
"The serendipity, of course, is that it is adjacent to Memorial Park, which was established in 1921 to honor veterans," Rosenwinkel said.
A patriotic young man who admired those who served, Samuel Watts enlisted after graduating from Wheaton North High School in 2010. He trained as an infantryman and paratrooper at Fort Benning, Georgia. He returned home before his deployment to Afghanistan, and his great uncle, Bill Clanton, remembers seeing a "far different Sam."
"We hardly recognized the figure who seemed to fill the doorway as he entered the room: tall, strong, handsome, with a calm self-assurance, a quiet dignity and a sense of purpose," the Huntley man told the gathering.
The roadside bomb struck his unit in Afghanistan's Kandahar province April 25, 2012. Watts was flown to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland, where he died that May.
"We are forever grateful to the men and women who touched Sam along the way and got him to us, so we could hold him and say goodbye," Susan Watts said. "Not every soldier's family is given that gift."
His parents are grateful, too, for the mourners who lined the streets along his funeral procession. His father, Thomas, will never forget the pair of empty firefighter boots left outside the Wheaton fire station for his son, who had taken fire science courses at Addison's Technology Center of DuPage.
"We felt each and everyone's arms around us at that moment, just as we do today," his mother said.