This stranger wasn't going to give up

Jim Meikle wasn't going to let it go. "The whole thing bothered me," he said from his home in Baudette this week. He was talking about the plaque he saw hanging at a salvage yard this past summer and the nagging suspicion that a veteran was buried somewhere without a marker honoring his service.

"My dad was a World War II vet, so I take it seriously," he said.

Meilke has a trucking firm and had been in the area doing work related to the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. He needed a wheel and went to Mark's Salvage & Recycling off U.S Highway 2 in Saginaw.

"What's the deal," he recalls saying when he saw the plaque honoring the ware service of Cloquet's Sigfred Johnson and his birth and death date. He was told that the large plaque had been found in the trunk of a car sent to the yard for scrap. It had been hanging at the salvage yard office for a while because workers there deemed it hopeless to try and find information about it, Meikle said, given the common name Johnson.

"I assumed it had been stolen and left in the car," Meikle said.

Undeterred, he took down information from the plaque and went to work. Days he was rained out from work, he went digging. He went to the Cloquet VFW to no avail and then to Nelson Funeral Care, which was "extremely helpful" in locating Johnson's grave at Hillcrest.

"Once I saw that his grave was marked, I was satisfied," he said. He was delighted to find out that the VFW had relayed his information to Cloquet Combined Honor Guard member John Prouty, who went up to the salvage yard and collected Johnson's plague. Prouty provided a photo of it to the Pine Knot News and relatives of Johnson were soon found.

Meikle, in the meantime, had found Johnson's military registration card and death certificate. "I would have kept going," he said, but seeing Johnson's grave, which indicates his military service, he was happy just to know his grave hadn't been robbed. "I wasn't going to give up."

He said the plaque is so large, and obviously expensive for the time, that he remains mystified, along with others, about how it came about and where it had been before being found in the trunk of an old car.

"There's still a lot of questions," he said.