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Beverly Shaw would like to ask the help of anyone who knows the whereabouts of a marble grave marker fifteen feet high in the Kansas City area with the inscription:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF WILLIE LEE
HE TOOK MY PLACE IN THE LINE HE DIED FOR ME
Recently Beverly's husband, Jerry Klukow, was doing some research in the sermons of Billy Sunday, a charismatic preacher of his day. This is the story that comes from The Gospel According to Sunday.
"In the war there was a band of guerillas, Quantrell's band, that had been ordered to be shot on sight. One long ditch was dug and they were lined up in front of it and blindfolded and tied. Just as the firing squad was ready to present arms a young man dashed through the bushes and cried, "Stop! " He told the commander of the firing squad that he was as guilty as any of the others. He had escaped and had come of his own free will, and pointing to one man in the line he asked to take his place. "I'm single," he said, "while he has a wife and babies." The commander of that firing squad was an usher in one of the cities in which I held meetings, and he told me how the young fellow was blindfolded and bound and the guns rang out and he fell dead.
Time went on and one day a man came upon another in a graveyard in Missouri weeping and shaping the grave into form. The first man asked who was buried there and the other said, "The best friend I ever had." Then he told how he had not gone far away but had come back and taken the body of his friend after he had been shot. He buried it so he knew he had the right body. And he had brought a withered bouquet all the way from his home to put on the grave. He was poor then and could not afford anything costly, but he had placed a slab of wood on the pliable earth with these words on it: "He died for me."
Sometime later, an unknown Major Whittle saw the inscribed fifteen foot marble monument.
Maybe this was a teaching story only or perhaps a composite of several stories, but I wondered if anyone had knowledge of a monument like this. Perhaps it was in a cemetery that has since been overtaken by city sprawl. If you have information, please give Beverly a call at (816) 478-7648.
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