Bill and Dalia searching for the perfect river rocks
Pedro Munoz
Dalia, Bill and Gisela
The Rock Garden Memorial…
An Enduring Legacy of Stones G
eologists say the stones that line the riverbeds here in our northwestern North Carolina mountains may date back to between 300 million and 1.8 billion years ago. That’s when our great Appalachian range was formed during the massive tectonic plate collisions of the Americas with Europe, Africa and Asia. Over many millennia, mountain peaks were whittled down by the elements with many stones eventually coming to rest in the waters which snake throughout our mountain valleys. And that’s where this story begins. Or, should we say, that’s where several stories converge—in the riverbeds surrounding Banner Elk, NC. For it was here that the family of local sign maker Bill Dicks, the family of Pedro and Gisela Munoz, and the inspiration of their young daughter, Dalia, began a shared destiny to create an enduring legacy of stones. Bill Dicks has been a commercial sign carver for the past 50 years. His sign shop—aptly named The Sign Shop—is located at the base of Beech Mountain in Banner Elk. After Bill and his wife, Donna, were married in 1967, they moved to Lakeland, Florida, where Bill had graduated from Florida Southern College three years before. After moving back to North Carolina and graduating from App State with a Master’s Degree in Industrial Arts in 1972, Bill found himself being called on to make small signs for local businesses, a calling that would tie his destiny to that same legacy of stones.
Bill and Donna had two kids, Jennifer in 1972, and Dave in 1976. Dave grew up on our surrounding ski slopes and planned to become a professional ski instructor in Colorado. But, during his senior year in high school, he came home one day and announced—to his parents’ surprise—that he’d decided to join the Army’s 82nd Airborne. “I want to jump out of planes,” he proclaimed, a decision that would lead his destiny to converge with that of one Pedro Munoz. SFC (Sgt. First Class) Pedro A. Munoz had been a member of 1st Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group for seventeen years when he first met Dave at Fort Bragg, NC. Dave, who had taken up skydiving with his dad during his senior year in high school, had joined the Army just after graduation. By the end of his second year at Ft. Bragg, Dave was selected for the Army’s elite parachute team, The Golden Knights. A year later, Pedro, already in his early 40s, joined The Golden Knights, making him the oldest member on the team. Despite their age difference, Dave and Pedro quickly became close friends. And their friendship naturally led to the further linking of shared destinies between their two families. “Donna and I got to know Pedro and his family at the air shows we attended,” recalled Bill. “On one occasion in 1999, Pedro, his wife, Gisela, and Dalia, came up from Fort Bragg and spent a weekend with us at our home in the mountains. During that visit I showed Dalia how to sandblast a sign.”
By Steve York
Two years later Pedro was back up in the mountains, hiking the Appalachian Trail with a fellow Golden Knight friend. That was September 13, 2001. And that’s when Pedro first learned of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania. That evening, by their campfire light, Pedro stood up and sang the National Anthem. He then said, “We’re going to war.” It was on that fateful day that Pedro decided to leave the parachute team and return to his Special Forces Unit. That decision placed Pedro in Shindand, Afghanistan, on January 2, 2005, and it was on that day that SFC Pedro A. Munoz became the Battalion’s first Afghanistan combat casualty of 2005 and their first combat casualty since Vietnam. Pedro’s daughter, Dalia, was only sixteen at the time. The following year, Bill got a call from Dalia, who by then was a senior in high school. “She asked me if it would be possible to sandblast her father’s name on a rock,” recalled Bill. “I told her it was, and I would be glad to do it for her. But what she really wanted was for me to teach her how to sandblast so she could do it herself. She then told me about the five other 1st Battalion soldiers who had been killed in Afghanistan in 2005. She said she also wanted to sandblast a rock for each one of them and then place all six rocks in a memorial garden that she was going to build at the Battalion Headquarters.” Over the next few months, Dalia and mother Gisela made several four-hour Continued on next page
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