Newly Completed Chewelah Mural Combines Local and World History

“It tells the story in time,” American Legion member Dennis MacDonald said when discussing the final painting day of the mural on the west wall of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Post 54 in Chewelah. This wall faces Highway 395 and is located at 111 S. Park Street near Main Street. MacDonald added that the mural is designed to honor veterans.

The timeline from conception to completion for this project has spanned two years, starting with the initial proposal in 2023.  

“It was my dream,” said MacDonald, who is also president of the Riders, a nonprofit motorcycle enthusiasts group within the American Legion. “We started the process of getting the approval fall of 2023.” According to MacDonald, it took four months and, “Like almost all of the American Legions, we have what we refer to as the elders, in an affectionate way. By gender, men aren’t very good at change to begin with, so you have a board of five or six elderly men, and they are of the mindset, ‘Why would we change anything?’”

MacDonald, who grew up in Chewelah, said he believed that “just putting a [drab] color on the outside of the building isn’t going to attract anyone. And it’s been that way since I was a little kid here. And they’ve all been happy with that.”

By completing this mural, he hopes it will change the opinion of the VFW from “a facility known mainly as a place where gentlemen get together and drink [to what] it was designed to be: a meeting place, a melting pot of nothing but emotions, stories and carrying on family names.” 

Sherri Ballman, a local professional artist and American Legion Riders member, was the primary artist of the mural. “I hope we get more members from this,” Ballman said. “We do a lot of cool stuff. We are trying to make it more inviting.”

MacDonald explained, “I had to go to four different meetings and make everybody understand it’s not going to cost anything. We had a couple of key players that were a part of the elders group who saw the vision and knew that there’s going to be a changing of guard in every facet of life. So when that comes, we have to be able to have something to pass on, something that people want.”

He said the group considered receiving funding from the city, but ultimately declined. “There was a program here in town for the beautification of all the buildings. If you spent $4,000 upgrading your building, and you complied with the colors and everything they wanted, they would give you $2,000. The difference between what they wanted and what we wanted for the American Legion was considerable,” MacDonald said. Instead, the Riders raised the money for materials themselves and supplied all the volunteer labor to make their dream possible.

He elaborated, “We do tons of fundraisers, we try to help people and other organizations, and of course, you have to take care of home base. We decided we would just do it, and the legion wouldn’t have to pay anything at all. The Riders group would absorb the cost of doing the whole thing. We wanted to take it on.

“Within the Riders group, there are 20 members, 17 of whom are active,” said MacDonald.  “The American Legion consists of families. At the top, you have the American Legion, next, you have the VFW-Veterans of Foreign Wars. Then, there is The Auxiliary (women’s group) and Sons of the American Legion, which is comprised of people who didn’t serve, yet can become Legion members through their grandfather's or father’s service. The last one that came along is the American Legion Riders. We are the newest to the families of the American Legion, and with that we have young blood.”

Ballman added, “We spent more than $4,000 making this happen. It was a lot of repairs, a lot of paint; it was all on materials, none of the labor.” She commented on her experience during the process of approval: “They [the elders] were still apprehensive and wanted to make sure it was going to be suitable. So, I drew out a concept of it. They had to see some of my artwork, so we brought some in, so they could approve.”

MacDonald quipped, “It was truly like applying for a job, yet the job isn’t going to pay.”

Ballman said she was raised in Chewelah and attended elementary school with MacDonald.   Her five-year-old granddaughter, Margaret Holm, has also been a contributing artist on the wall, the youngest participant in the project.  MacDonald’s grandson, Colton McCroskey, age 6, too, has lent a hand to the efforts. During the fall of 2023, the Riders began work. MacDonald said, “The wall was plain and it was falling apart. A lot of these buildings are what we refer to as ‘pumice block ’; grey blocks with two holes in them. A lot of places put a stucco facade on them. The facade that was put on this one was concrete. So when it was breaking out, we had to take hammers and chisels to it. We spent the majority of that fall just cleaning and repairing the wall. They knocked mud out and mudded back in, replaced wood, removed concrete…It’s a very old building.”

It wasn’t until the summer of 2024, they were able to begin painting. MacDonald said of the delay, “When you think you are just going to take a wire brush to clean a building up and get to work, well, that is definitely not what happened.” He also suffered a heart attack in July 2024. “I wasn’t a lot of help to the group for a while,” MacDonald remarked. “But everyone persevered and continued to make things happen.”

Members of the Riders painted the base coat and Ballman started the panels. The mural is comprised of five vertical panels touching the street, a vertical end cap on the north corner and one large horizontal expanse across the top that includes an American flag, soldiers from all the Armed Services, and images of the Battle of Iwo Jima, the Arlington National Cemetery and the Post 54 sign. “Each panel is associated with a specific war or group within the VFW.  Each one has a story,” MacDonald said.

MacDonald and Ballman both put forth that the mural was a collaborative experience with community influence and involvement throughout, beginning with the south end, the first panel, which depicts Vietnam. Ballman said, while painting this first panel, “I was just going to do the gun and the paratroopers, and this guy, Dennis Bean, [American Legion member] kept riding up on his wheelchair everyday to watch to see what was going on.

And he finally said, ‘Are you going to do any special forces?’  

And I said, ‘Well, I hadn’t thought about it, but I can. He told me his story from when he was in Vietnam. [Although] I had already painted that guy’s uniform, he said, ‘Can you make it special forces?’  

So I made it be him; I had to change his uniform because he wanted it to be the tiger-striped uniform.”  

Ballman said she also updated the patches to accurately reflect his status. “There was only one paratrooper mission in Vietnam and he was part of that. So, that was how that panel evolved,” she said.

The second panel from the south showcases the Coast Guard. MacDonald clarified, “We didn’t really have any local individuals involved in that one. The Coast Guard is kinda new, and it’s only been in the last couple of years that the American Legion recognized the Coast Guard.  That one we also wanted to have for our sign that explains what the American Legion is. Sherri and my daughter, Amanda McCroskey, made the wooden scroll sign on the second panel.

“The third panel represents women and WWII,” MacDonald stated. “My want was to be sure we put a nurse on there; probably one of the most unsung heroes of anywhere. Nobody really thinks of them until you are looking up at one. By the time you are looking up at one, that is the only person in the world that matters to you at that moment. If it hadn’t been for two nurses, I wouldn’t be here,” he described gravely.

MacDonald added that the Legion was founded to help soldiers “Transition from wartime to civilian life and the nurses were a big part of that.”

Ballman further clarified,“They didn’t know what PTSD was back then, and so they would open it up and have nurses there to help these people and give them a place to talk.  They called it ‘shell-shock’”

Ballman said, “The nurse we used [in the mural] was actually a long-time resident of Chewelah, her name is Marie Alm.”  

MacDonald said Alme served in World War II. “Her daughter, May, sent us pictures of her. Her daughter is a member of VFW, but lives back east. The club is trying to figure out if we can help her come out to see the mural. We have several people who knew this family and this lady, and they said it is more of a portrait of her than a rendition. Sherri hit it,” he celebrated.

The other woman shown in the panel is local VFW member Donna Meyers, who was in the Air Force. Ballman said, “She was on surveillance plans; she didn’t fly. We had to figure out a way to use her, so we took a World War II female pilot and put her face on it.” 

The fourth panel is dedicated to the Navy. “If we ever got more advice from anyone, any branch, it was the Navy. The numbers on the submarine represent the gentleman in here who served on that submarine: Ben Paramore,” MacDonald revealed. “Paramore, one of the elders, was also a huge advocate of this project.”

MacDonald shared an anecdote illustrating Ballman’s attention to detail in this panel, “The submarine that Sherri found that carried the name that Paramore served on, somewhere in there had an upgrade and it had hand railing put on the deck. Everything she put up there, she put up to be a representation of that vehicle, whatever it may be.

Ben [Paramore] came out and looked at it; he was all excited and he didn’t say one thing. Yet, in our texting back and forth, he said, ’By the way, I didn’t serve on the one that had handrails. I served on the older one that didn’t. But everything’s great, you don’t have to change anything.’

So, I shared that with Sherri and I will be darned if that hand railing didn’t disappear.”

Referring to the fifth panel depicting a code talker from World War II, when the Navajo language was used by the military to communicate in secret, MacDonald said, “[With this mural] we were fortunate to capture things that some people really don’t know anything about. We have a local Native American member [Dan Nez] who is actually Navajo as a part of our organization. He represents the code talkers.”

Consistent with the pattern throughout the mural, Ballman found an anonymous picture of a code talker, and she changed the face to look like Nez’s. MacDonald stated, “This tells a local story, but it tells a worldwide story. It’s very encompassing.”

Ballman also emphasized, “A big point we strived for is that we didn’t want any blood and gore and no sadness, kneeling at a cross, anything like that. Just all positive and feel good.”

MacDonald said, “If you take a minute and absorb everything that she put on this building, some facet of a true American’s life, they will feel the same thing they would if there was somebody kneeling at a cross. Just because those people were represented here, it truly doesn’t mean they came home. It’s always the backstory; it doesn’t get told very often, but it’s the backstory that kept everything upfront working. Not many families don’t have a story of someone who served or multiple somebodies who served. Sherri’s family served; her husband and son served in the Marines.”

The final panel is the corner piece;  Ballman announced, “What I am painting today is a picture of Dennis’ grandson, Colton McCroskey, and he is going to be at the bottom of this, saluting all the above. [McCroskey] will be in color, while all the rest is black.”  

“All the rest” refers to a symbolic representation of all the wars post World War I that the United States participated in, starting with a motorcycle from World War II, a tank from Korea, helicopters from Vietnam, jets from Desert Storm, a black stealth bomber for anything modern, which MacDonald suggested, "looks like a bat” and “a rocket at the top for the Space Force,” Ballman finished. MacDonald explained that they added that “because NASA has become part of the Armed Forces.”

“In the beginning, I thought this would just take a couple of weeks, but it’s been a couple years more like.” Ballman said.

“This summer in July, my husband, who had Alzheimer’s, came up missing and he still hasn’t been found in four months, so that slowed down things. Staying busy helps,” She confessed.

Overall, she said, she is “so excited to be done. I loved doing it, but it’s taken up a lot of time.”