This is what it’s like to visit America’s Gold Star Families

Blake Stilwell
Apr 29, 2020 3:50 PM PDT
1 minute read
Veterans Benefits photo

SUMMARY

In 2018, Navy veteran Anthony Price burned through more than 450 gallons of gasoline and three sets of tires. He spent more than 700 miles in the rain, many days in temperatures above 100 degrees, and at least one day in the snow. He did all of it t…

In 2018, Navy veteran Anthony Price burned through more than 450 gallons of gasoline and three sets of tires. He spent more than 700 miles in the rain, many days in temperatures above 100 degrees, and at least one day in the snow. He did all of it to honor the families who lost a loved one to America's wars. And he's going to do it again in 2019, as he has for the past six years.


The Gold Star Ride of a lifetime.

Price began his ride for Gold Star families in 2013 as a means of calling attention to those families and saying thank you in his own way. Since then, he has been to more than 44 states, enduring extreme temperatures and conditions just to ensure the families of fallen service members are taken care of. As the Gold Star Ride website says, "We ride because they died... We do the work that our fallen heroes would do if they hadn't fallen for all our freedom."

Soon the Minnesota-based Price and his fellow riders were a full-fledged nonprofit, dedicated to the mission of helping those in need. Gold Star Riders actively support, comfort, and provide education benefits to Gold Star Families throughout the United States directly with personal visits via motorcycle. They also vow to partner with any group who actively helps these Gold Star families.

Price literally even wrote the book on the subject, "Yours, Very Sincerely and Respectfully." the story of their 2018 ride, which covered 18,000 miles over 58 days, visiting 64 families of fallen troops. The proceeds of which go toward the Gold Star Ride Foundation.

"The families themselves are not looking for any stardom or any fame or any glory," Price says. "They're just looking for someone to remember, to remember a huge sacrifice."

The title of Price's book is a reference to Abraham Lincoln's "Bixby Letter," a letter the 16th President penned to Mrs. Lydia Bixby, a widow believed to have lost five sons during the Civil War. In it, the President is said to have written his regret at her loss and his attempt to console her by reminding the mother of the Republic they died to save. He ends the letter with "Yours, Very Sincerely and Respectfully."

Price in an interview with a Fox affiliate.

The letter is an apt reference, as Price describes on commercial producer Jordan Brady's "Respect the Process" Podcast. Price mentions that he would talk to twenty or so people a day, on average, for two months straight. He found that 19 of those 20 didn't know what a Gold Star Family was. In one case, even a Gold Star Family did not realize they were a Gold Star Family.

To be clear, a Gold Star Family member is the immediate family of any military member who lost their life in military service – mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives, and children.

"One of the reasons we do this is because no one else was doing it," says Price. "Every once in a while I hear someone say 'you're adding an element that makes [the loss] a little more palatable... the work you're doing is helping me make sense of the tragedy I have to go through.'"

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