Wounded Army Ranger gives ‘salute seen around the world’
Heritage Festival, Kociela created St. Louis Bluesweek in 2010 to honor the city’s musicians and heritage.
While Chicago has tried and failed to launch similar blues shrines, St. Louis’ $14 million project won the backing of a local developer who wanted a museum to anchor a retail, residential and office complex next to the convention center downtown, just blocks from the Gateway Arch.
“There really wasn’t a museum that told the entire story of the blues, from day one through now,” Kociela said. “I knew what it could do for our city and our region. This is a massive international tourist attraction.”
Kociela and Beardsley reached out to leaders and musicians in cities with comparable bragging rights — chiefly Chicago, Memphis and Clarksdale, Miss., — for help, and none objected, Kocielsa said. To pitch the project, they brought in some of the genre’s contemporary heavy hitters: Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, Shemekia Copeland, Derek Trucks and Trombone Shorty.
It worked. Pinnacle Entertainment, which owns two casinos in the St. Louis suburbs, donated $6 million to the planned 23,000-square-foot interactive museum with classrooms and a small theater to host local and national acts.
George Brock, an 81-year-old blues harmonica player, stands behind St. Louis’ claim to blues fame. A half-century ago, Brock moved to St. Louis from Clarksdale, Miss., and he calls his adopted hometown a gem where blues can still be heard seven nights a week and a musician can make an honest living.
“They overlooked St. Louis,” he said. “St. Louis has just as much blues as Chicago.”
An Army Ranger wounded in Afghanistan has the Internet buzzing with a photo that Web viewers have dubbed “the salute seen around the world.”
Cpl. Josh Hargis, whose special operations unit is based at Fort Benning, Ga., was wounded Oct. 6 when an Afghan woman detonated a suicide bomb vest in Panjwai in Kandahar province and triggered 13 other explosive devices. The blast killed four members of Hargis’ 3rd Army Ranger Battalion and wounded 12 other American soldiers.
Hargis, a 2008 graduate of Cincinnati’s Gilbert Dater High School, went to a nearby military hospital. His numerous wounds called for him to be hooked up to a breathing tube and other medical plumbing.
“Josh was seriously wounded, as you know, and survived for almost two hours after his injury before arriving to the hospital,” Hargis’ commander wrote Saturday to the soldier’s wife, Taylor Hargis, who was at their home in Columbus, Ga.
His right hand was heavily bandaged. That hand, his saluting hand, rested under red, white and blue blankets when his commanding officer came into his room to present Hargis with a Purple Heart.
“Josh had just come out of surgery. Everyone in the room, probably about 50 people, figured he was unconscious,” Taylor Hargis said Tuesday. The soldier’s wife of 2½ years spoke by phone from San Antonio, where her husband will be hospitalized. He is en route from an American military hospital in Germany.
Yet, as the Purple Heart presentation began, Josh Hargis struggled to move his right hand and lift it into a saluting position. Military protocol calls for a sol- dier to salute when he receives the Purple Heart.
Adoctor tried to restrain the wounded soldier’s right arm. It was, alas, a losing battle.
“He had no idea how strong and driven my husband is,” said Taylor Hargis, who went to high school in Fort Myers, Fla.
In pain from his wounds, still groggy from surgery, bandaged, hooked up to yards of tubes and without opening his eyes, Hargis delivered what his wife described as “the most beautiful salute any person in that room had ever seen.”
The commanding officer told her the salute left everyone in the room in tears.
“I would have cried, too,” Taylor Hargis said. “I also would have told him how proud I am of him, how proud I am to be his wife, how proud I am of the people he’s serving with over in Afghanistan.”
She also would have told him she was not surprised by his hospital-bed salute.
Since the photo was taken of “the salute around the world,” the corporal’s breathing tube has been removed.
Josh and Taylor Hargis have exchanged phone calls.