Memorial Day traditionally honors military veterans who died in America's many wars, but amid all the ritualistic remembering, some "veterans" are mostly forgotten, namely, the cannons and war wagons that accompanied flesh-and-blood vets in training and battle.
Beneath tall, swaying evergreens and palm trees, more than a hundred such antiquities rest in splendid obsolescence in a dusty dirt lot in South El Monte. Retrograde tanks and personnel carriers, outdated anti-aircraft guns, boxy Jeeps and hulking trucks of World War II, Korean conflict and Vietnam War vintage, all crowd the premises at the easily overlooked American Society of Military History Museum.
Every artifact in the place is armored, if only with resonant memory for the once-young men who operated them in all their former power and ferocity.
The museum, brainchild and life's mission of Don Michelson, was established as a nonprofit in 1962. Michelson was an officer in the Army's Quartermaster Corps during World War II, and later was the longtime boss of the PX at the old Exposition National Guard Armory in Los Angeles. He is 90, "the oldest piece of equipment in the place," said his son Craig, the self-described "curator-slash-everything-else" of the museum.
The elder Michelson's collection had the humblest of beginnings.
"Somebody gave him a Jeep," Craig Michelson said. "Then pretty soon the people making the movie 'What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?' needed some old military equipment and the studio didn't want to buy them, so they came to my father and said, 'You find 'em and we'll rent 'em, and when we're done, you can have 'em.' Back in the old days nobody wanted the stuff."
Through purchases from individual collectors and at auctions, donations of items and loans of equipment from the military services, the museum's collection burgeoned.
"I'm a junkman," said Don Michelson, commanding the desk inside the 1960-vintage Army expandable instrument repair trailer that serves as the museum's on-site office. "I've always saved stuff, all my life. In the beginning you could buy a Jeep for $500. Now you have to add a zero to that. The Army and Navy, before they go out and shoot something up for target practice, they ask if we want it."
