Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima monument coming soon

By Anna Noel

Yorktown News-View

Keep Yorktown Beautiful, or KYB, has recently decided to honor Yorktown-born Harlon Block, one of five Marines and one Navy corpsman who helped raise the American flag at Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi during World War II. The moment was captured by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography for his well-known picture, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. KYB hopes to have the statue installed at the DeWitt County Veteran’s Center within the next month.

“Someone came to me last summer and said, ‘Donna, we need to do this for Harlon Block,’” Donna Roeder, KYB president, explained. “Because he’s a worldwide figure of helping at Iwo Jima and helping the men put the flag up.

“He was born here, he wasn’t raised here, but he was born here. His mother and daddy lived down in the valley near Harlingen and they came up here when she was getting ready to have the baby so that she could have the baby here, they had family here. And he was born here, and we just want to put up a monument for that, in respect.

“Our group has jumped on it, and we’ve got Hilltop and Tara Friesenhahn helping, she started making the silhouette of what it’s going to be, cause it’s going to be out of metal, and she got on it right away. She has been amazingly helpful. What we’re going to do is, it was supposed to be about three feet, and we’ve decided to make it six foot tall, it’s going to be life sized, and it’s going to have a real flag on it. So it’s going to be pretty unique, I think.”

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