Memorial to veterans, families graces Spokane Valley yard

One could say Christina Heston returned home to a monumental surprise when she found a beautiful memorial to military members and their families on her Spokane Valley front lawn.

“I guess he hid it from me in his man cave,” Heston said about her husband, Leonard, who designed and built the memorial as a surprise. “He’s a tenderhearted man. He wanted to include everyone with a military connection on this memorial.”

Now, in the Hestons’ front yard near Bowdish Road and East Ninth Avenue, a 2-foot-tall cement soldier kneels by a large plaque inscribed with a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “Honor to the soldier and sailor everywhere, who bravely bears his country’s cause. Honor also, to the citizen who cares for his brother in the field and serves, as he best can, the same cause.”

Christina Heston’s father, Robert Christopulos, served in World War II and was wounded in the battle of Iwo Jima. He recovered well enough to be sent to the Korean War, which broke out in 1950. By then he was married to Helen Christopulos, and as the war raged the two wrote letters back and forth.

“It easily took a month for a letter to make it,” Christina Heston said. “Two of their letters crossed in the mail. They both wrote the same: that they should become missionaries in Korea when the war was over.”

And that’s how she ended up spending her formative years, from 1956 to 1967, in Korea.

“The house was always full of children,” Heston said. “Some were very seriously injured. Mom doctored them up.”

She returned to the U.S. as a 20-year-old in 1967. Her parents came back, too, but her dad later went to Vietnam during the war there, when there was a dire need for chaplains.

Leonard Heston said his eyesight was too poor to serve in the military, but he holds his uncle Joe McKusick in high regard.

“He survived the Bataan Death March,” he said. “We think we got it bad, and you look at something like the death march, and you realize what bad is.”

Leonard Heston said he wanted to build a memorial for everyone who’s served and for their families.

“It’s not just the GIs, it’s their wives and siblings and parents, too,” he said. “The farmers produce food. Everyone contributes when we go to war.”