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Harold Walker and Courtney Fields with donuts they shared with Fields' students. Donuts a Veterans Day tradition for Valley Center teacher and her grandfather By Taylor Messick Last Updated: November 17, 2016 For the past 13 years, Harold Walker has been buying and personally delivering donuts for his daughters' classmates on Veterans Day. Walker is a Vietnam war veteran, retired Marine and Purple Heart recipient. His oldest daughter is Courtney Fields, who teaches algebra at Valley Center High School. Fields was in sixth grade in 2003, when she asked her grandfather to come speak to her class about Veterans Day, and the tradition has continued ever since. "I agreed to do it and just decided I would take some donuts with me," Walker said. "The next year she called me and asked if I was coming back and I decided I wasn't going to talk, that I'd just bring donuts." Walker said Veterans Day has an important connection to Kansas as Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the holiday into action. He said the first Veterans Day was celebrated in Emporia and started by a man who wasn't in the military, but was a patriot. Fields also has three younger sisters who all wanted Grandpa to deliver donuts to their classrooms, so Walker has kept the tradition alive. Last year when Fields started teaching at VCHS, Walker brought donuts for all six of her classes, which is about 144 students, and he did it again this year. "It really has brought more of an awareness to Veterans Day," said Fields. "Just now when we were walking down the hallway with the donuts a student of mine from last year made a comment that he had just realized it was Veterans Day. I don't think that was the original intention but that's what it has become. A lot of my friends from high school now equate donuts with veterans. They say they can just be eating a donut and they'll think about the veterans." For the last three years, Krispy Kreme has matched Walker's contributions by paying for half of the donuts he orders. |
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