Rosemount Residents Tell Veterans' Stories Through Scrapbooks

ROSEMOUNT, MN — When Mary Prozeller retired, she didn’t realize that meeting a friend for coffee at Lakeville’s Heritage Center would turn into her and her husband launching an entire project to help veterans tell their stories.

Mary and Wade Prozeller, Rosemount residents, interview veterans and create scrapbooks of their time in the military. The goal is to create a tradition of veterans sharing their scrapbooks with family members, they said.

Mary told Patch she met some veterans at the coffee meeting and was captivated by their stories. She went home that day and talked to her husband Wade about creating scrapbooks for the veterans to remember their time in the military and to help tell their story to family.

“I said it would be a great idea to do a scrapbook for these veterans and where they've been,” Mary said. “So that generations to come would know what Grandpa or Grandma did. It's a passion for me.”

Wade, a veteran of the U.S. Army Reserve, told Patch that the scrapbooks honor self-sacrifice of those who served in the military.

“We will interview anybody,” he said. “We don't care whether they were in combat or whether they just swept the floors or whatever they did. Their self-sacrifice is part of democracy.”

The Prozellers create the scrapbooks out-of-pocket, they told Patch. Each scrapbook is unique and is based on the veteran’s experience. To make the scrapbook more personal, the Prozellers told Patch they will sometimes order a patch or postcard from where the veteran served.

Wade interviews the veterans while Mary collects photos of their time in the service, they told Patch. They also include information about the veteran’s life outside of the military, like when they met their spouse or had kids.

Though the veterans are appreciative of the scrapbooks, the Prozellers said the best reactions are from their families.

“I delivered the scrapbook to someone and his two daughters happened to be visiting at the same time,” Mary told Patch. “And they said, ‘Dad, what is this?’ And he says, ‘It's a memory book of when I was in the service.’ And they sat down and were looking at it at the table and one of them looked up and they said, ‘Dad, we never knew you were in Germany or France. Wow. You never shared that with us.’”

The Prozellers are hoping to build more scrapbooks for veterans. If you or a loved one would like a scrapbook, you can contact the Prozellers at wade.prozeller@yahoo.com.