Shutdown cancels 'Heroes' event at air base
When the Navy finally left Horsham Air Guard Station in 2011, cutting the base's personnel in half, Col. Howard "Chip" Eissler was left with a sinking sense that the surrounding community forgot anyone was home.
When the Navy finally left Horsham Air Guard Station in 2011, cutting the base's personnel in half, Col. Howard "Chip" Eissler was left with a sinking sense that the surrounding community forgot anyone was home.
Still today, the man who oversees the station's 3,000 remaining service members says he's often stopped at the nearby WaWa by someone who sees his uniform, thanks him for his service, then asks where he works.
"Right there," he tells them, pointing across the street.
An open house and Hometown Heroes day expected to draw 10,000 people to the base Saturday - its largest crowd in years - was a chance to bridge that gap. But thanks to the federal shutdown, the event was called off Wednesday.
Eissler said it will take more than a year to reschedule due to upcoming deployments and regular training schedules.
"It's a big relationship there that we need to build," said Eissler, who has worked at the base for 20 years and remembers when planes coming in and out of the airport made its presence was so much more visible.
The base, home of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard's 111th Fighter Wing, hosts a Hometown Heroes day to honor its service members annually. This year it planned to combine that event with an annual family day and an open house.
Eissler said it would have been the first time the station opened to the public since 2006, when the base held its last air show. Those events, he said, regularly drew hundreds of thousands of spectators.
Saturday's event, which staff have been planning for more than nine months, would have included a charity 5k race on the old runway, a car show, a small business vendor fair, face painting and a moon bounce.
But it's not counted among the essential military functions funded during the shutdown.
Anna Richar, the station's airman and family readiness program coordinator, helped put the schedule together and is now tasked with calling participants to tell them it's off.
While she hopes word will spread, the base will also resort to placing signs - like the ones currently planted outside historic sites and federal buildings closed across the country - at the base gates Saturday.
"I've told people it's out of our hands," she said. "It is what it is. The government shutdown, it affects a lot of things."
As frustrating as cancelling is, Eissler said he's gone through worse and will reschedule.
"We probably wouldn't do it the first week of a fiscal year again," he said. "We learned our lesson."
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