PepsiCo Honors Fallen Patriots With Rolling Remembrance

By Eli Amdur

Charles Clements, a Pepsi driver and U. S. Army veteran (1989-1991 and 1992-1994) who was an E4 and part of the Air Defense and Bradley units, stood on the grounds of PepsiCo’s facility in Auburn, Washington, a Seattle suburb, his 18-wheeler loaded with product and ready to roll. It was 10:00 A.M. on March 21, and it could very well have been just another routine workday.

But it wasn’t. Not by a long shot.

As Clements was preparing to start his route, he placed in his truck an American flag, following a short ceremony in which a VFW Color Guard presented colors as Mayor Nancy Backus and State Representative Kristine Reeves also participated. Clements then began this year’s Rolling Remembrance relay that would cover 14,000 miles – down the coast to San Diego and then turning eastward, culminating at PepsiCo’s headquarters in Purchase, New York, which it did yesterday, May 22, just in time for Memorial Day. A total of 55 Pepsi drivers – all of whom are United States veterans – made 61 stops along the way, each transferring the flag to the next.

In Clements’ case, that next driver was Rick Tooley, U.S. Navy (1982-1992), a highly decorated veteran with deployments including the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. After a stop in Tumwater, Washington where he was greeted by Pepsi Plant Director Joel Black and Employee Resource Group member J.T. King, Clements proceeded to Vancouver, Washington, where he met up with Tooley who, like all the other drivers, was doing his usual day’s work. This time, it wasn’t usual. This time, he had that flag.

What about that flag?

That Star Spangled Banner once flew over a U.S. military instillation in Afghanistan and was presented to PepsiCo by our troops in gratitude for remembering them with care packages. It was then that Jim Farrell, now Senior Vice President of Supply Chain at PepsiCo, recognized and seized the moment to do something special with that flag. That was the genesis of Rolling Remembrance, now in its ninth year.

Rolling Remembrance: A Fitting Tribute to Veterans

Farrell, himself a veteran of the United States Army (1993-1998), explained, “The best thing we can do

to honor those who lost their lives defending our freedom is to remember them, not forget them.”

And so, Rolling Remembrance was born. Each year it starts from a different city on the west coast and, by design, travels to as many different Pepsi locations – there are about 450 around the country – as possible. In its first year, 2015, Farrell remembers going out on the first leg of Rolling Remembrance with fellow veteran and Pepsi driver Russ Collins.

“Russ, do you think this is going to work?” asked Farrell.

“I know it’s going to work,” came Collins’ immediate response.

And it certainly has, but while sites and routes change each year, some things remain constant.

• The chosen drivers, all veterans, repeat the ritual of transporting that flag while driving across our land: beneath our spacious skies, through our amber waves of grain, along our purple mountain majesties, above our fruited plain. America The Beautiful!
• Each year, the flag is transported from PepsiCo’s headquarters in Purchase by a veteran who carries it onto a Jet Blue aircraft bound for that year’s origination point. Who’s flying that plane? Why, two veterans, of course.
• Those 18-wheelers serve as visual reminders wherever they go – a powerful yet elegant visual Rolling Remembrance – of just how much we owe our veterans and how important it is to commemorate those who have fallen and left families – especially small children – behind.
• In that light, PepsiCo, which has long had an exemplary record of hiring veterans, has raised more than $2 million to help the Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation pay for the further education of those children, many of whom are now coming of college age. That equates to 320 years of school so far.

Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation

One of those recipients is Sheridan Skurupey-McDonald, a former Children of Fallen Patriots scholarship recipient who lost her father in 2001 and went on to graduate from Randolph-Macon

College in Ashland, Virginia in 2018. She has since joined the Foundation as a development associate

and was a speaker at yesterday’s event.

“I owe absolutely everything to Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation,” she said. “As I reflect

on their generosity all these years later, it’s clear that my life would be much different without them. My experience has come full circle from being one of the original families enrolled in 2002 to getting to join the team this past December and help students like me. Being able to tell my father’s story isn’t always easy, but it means his legacy will continue to live on and create even more impact for so many deserving Gold Star Students.”

And who was there to hear her remarks? Well, the local police and the Westchester County police provided an escort onto the grounds as it arrived on the last leg from Albany, New York; a United States Marine Corps color guard accepted the flag from anchor leg driver Karl Dence, United States Army (1986-1994); and hundreds of PepsiCo employees put their work aside for an interlude to pay tribute.

Much has happened since the beginning of Rolling Remembrance, with plans for much more. Says Farrell, “It has become so much better than anything I could have ever imagined – and that’s because of all the people who have made it better.”

But this is about more than that. It is, as Katherine Lee Bates wrote in a further verse of her masterpiece, America The Beautiful:

O Beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!