• Funds are used to promote patriotism among area youth.
Each year the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Post 4797 conducts a raffle to raise funds for community programs. This year, Jerry Lainhart and Ty Campbell were in studio at SVI representing the VFW Post 4797 on Monday morning. The post announced the winner of their annual fund-raiser drawing as Dave Wilson of Star Valley Ranch. Wilson won an authentic M-1 Garand rifle.
“This year, we raffled this rifle which was the standard military rifle from 1936-1961,” Lainhart told SVI. “Any foot troops would have been issued this type of rifle during that time. This particular rifle has an October 1944 receiver on it so it was just four months after D-Day that this rifle was made available to our troops. So it was assigned to a soldier who carried it someplace important. It would have been made available in WWII and Korea. It also has a 1964 barrel on it which suggests it was doing something important for the U.S. during the initial Vietnam period. It’s really a neat historical weapon. The winner will be the first civilian to fire this weapon. It was exciting to talk to so many people who bought a ticket and talk about this rifle.”
The monies from the raffle are put to good use according to Campbell.
“The money that we raise is put back into the community by means of supporting different programs from the VFW that promote patriotism in our community like the Patriots Pen,” he said. “There are opportunities for scholarships and prize money to be won on a state and national level. Because we want kids to be involved, we have gift cards to give back to them if they provide us with essays and the singing competition that we have. There are things that we want to promote with our youth and this raffle helps with that.”
Plans are already moving forward for next year’s raffle which will be another very desirable firearm.
“We are hoping to have an M-1911 A1 which was the standard Army issue semi-automatic for next year,” Lainhart added. “After we get our school programs kicked off, we’ll have tickets available at most community gatherings. We had them available in Alpine for Mountain Days and at the local gun stores. We are thankful for the area businesses who helped make them available this year and we’ll be reaching out to more to even expand that this next year.”
