Retirement announcement

Please join me in recognizing the retirement of Marie Albers, Taylor County Veterans Service Specialist on April 1st, 2021. Marie has served Taylor County veterans for 26 years. There are not many people in this world that can honestly be credited for helping literally thousands of people during some of the most difficult times in their lives. In the veteran service office, we assist veterans access the benefits they earned in return for their honorable military service. These benefits range from accessing healthcare, applying for disability compensation for service-connected disabilities, registering for education benefits and home loan guarantees, accessing pension benefits for qualified veterans, assisting surviving spouses with the burial and honors of their loved one, and so much more.

Marie has served the veterans of World War 1, World War 2, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan as well as the Cold War, Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, Grenada, Panama, and other conflicts and peacetime actions too numerous to mention. Her compassion and concern for these veterans and their dependents and survivors enabled her to connect with them on the most basic levels and they all came to know her and appreciate her dedicated service and extensive knowledge of the very confusing ways of government agencies and departments at all levels.

Growing up in Taylor County and living in Medford most of her life, Marie was familiar with local veterans through family and school connections and was involved personally in the struggles of the Vietnam veterans especially, who waited for so long to receive recognition and compensation for the horrors inflicted upon them by the use of chemical herbicides in Vietnam.

It is not just the veteran who is served by this office, but also their dependents who qualify for certain benefi ts, such as a disabled veteran’s children who qualify for the Wisconsin GI Bill benefits, or a surviving spouse who qualifies for ChampVA health insurance, Dependency Indemnity Compensation, and Wisconsin property tax credit based on their deceased veteran’s status. The benefits for a child or surviving spouse can continue on for decades after the passing of a veteran, and Marie has been a steady fixture to help see them through, the first person a caller talks to, and the first person they see when they walk through our door to seek assistance.

She has sat and cried with a surviving spouse who just lost their veteran after 70 years of marriage. She has congratulated them and shared tears of joy when after years of filing claims and appeal after appeal, a signifi cant claim award comes through successfully and completely changes the lives of these proud men and women. She has sat at her desk for days with a box full of receipts and papers, trying to make sense of the past year’s expenses in order to ensure an elderly widow continues to receive the pension she desperately needs to make ends meet. She has come in early and stayed late to ensure the transportation van and volunteer drivers were prepared for early morning departures and welcomed back for evening returns.

Over her time she has seen the office through from pen and paper notes, cabinets full of paper files, IBM electric typewriters, and boxes of blank government forms ordered from the government printing office, to some of the county governments first computers, and into the internet age with the squeal and tones of dial-up modems to the complete use of web-based data storage systems, email, and all the things we take for granted in today’s office environment.

She has served through four different veteran service officers, herself serving as VSO between their appointments, and been an instrumental part in the training of three of them. She has been the bedrock of continuity throughout some turbulent times in this office, including a point that she can be directly credited with successfully fending off attempts to reduce the office, which would have had a direct negative impact on our services. She has done all this without ever a complaint, seeing it as her daily duty. Her modesty and quiet demeanor belies the strength and dedication that she has shown over the years. She seldom took a sick day or a vacation and was known on more than one occasion to donate her accumulated days to a county employee in need of extra days to deal with a family emergency.

And so, it is with mixed emotions that we bid her farewell and good luck on her continued journey through life, and we want her to know that she is truly appreciated for the significant work on behalf of these veterans that she has done, and she will be sorely missed by all.

Thank you Marie.

— Jeffrey J. Hein, MSG, USA, Retired, Taylor County Veteran Service Officer