Memorial Day: Time for 11th-annual Thunder Rolls in Belleville

David C. Brown Funeral Home and the Brown Family Center are sponsoring the 11th-annual Motorcycle Ride and Memorial Day Service to honor veterans.
On Monday, motorcyclists will start registering at 11 a.m. for the 27.8-mile ride at Wayne County Community College, 9555 Haggerty Road in Van Buren Township, north of I-94.
The riders will pay $10 per person, which all will go to help veterans and their families. Each paying rider will receive a commemorative pin.
The motorcycle ride, with police assistance, begins at 1 p.m. Several hundred bikes are expected to take part.
Throughout the years people have waited along the route to applaud the bikers and wave American flags at them.
The motorcycles, with patriotic flags flying, will go south on Haggerty road to Harris Road, west to Martinsville and then south to Willis Road. They will take Willis west to Sumpter Road and then head south on Sumpter to Oakville Waltz Road and head west on Oakville Waltz to Rawsonville Road, which they will take north to West Huron River Drive and then east into the City of Belleville and High Street.
When the motorcycle contingent gets to the Veteran’s Memorial in Horizon Park, at about 2-2:30 p.m., the Memorial Day service will begin.
Brown Funeral Home and Family Center is sponsoring the event. Kathie Steigerwald of Brown’s is organizing the event. She said it started 11 years ago when the World War II monument was dedicated in Washington, D.C., with the Rolling Thunder motorcycle ride.
Steigerwald said the National Funeral Directors Association raised over $4 million for the monument. She said she couldn’t go to Washington, so she decided to do it here in Belleville.
The first year the event started at Hillside Cemetery and came to the Veterans’ Monument. It was called Rolling Thunder and later she was advised that was an infringement on the copyright of the name.
An official came to see Steigerwald and he was very impressed that she had all the bikers sign waivers and that 100% of the money collected went to the veterans. He took the situation back to the national organization and it chose Belleville’s name for the event: Thunder Rolls.
Steigerwald said the event gets a lot of publicity and has been featured on all three television channels in Detroit. She said once she set up rides for some German journalists who filmed the ride and it was on TV in Germany.
There will be speakers, prayers, music, a 21-gun salute, and refreshments. The names of local veterans who have died since last year’s ceremony will be called out and a bell tolled for each name.