“Every day is Veterans’ Day”
Few people on the Gulf Coast have done as much for veterans as Dr. Barry Lee Booth — and fewer still can say they earned the credentials firsthand. The retired Fairhope-area dentist is a Navy veteran himself, a 1966-67 Vietnam tour attached to the 1st and 3rd Marine Divisions, and he has spent the half-century since working, in his words, to make sure the country never forgets what its service members gave. His motto is short: “Every day is Veterans’ Day.”
Booth’s fingerprints are on veteran projects across the state of Alabama, but none is larger — or more visible from Interstate 10 — than the Alabama State Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery at Spanish Fort. Booth was the guiding force behind its creation, encouraging the Baldwin County Commission to purchase the original land in 2006 and then donating three more acres of his own. The cemetery now covers 103 acres and formally opened in 2010, giving South Alabama’s veterans a state burial ground close to home for the first time.
Among the more recent burials was one that took nearly 80 years to arrive: Private Bill Morrison, a World War II soldier killed in action whose remains were not identified until 2022. Morrison was interred at Spanish Fort with full military honors, closing a chapter his family had waited a lifetime to read.
Honor Flight: 957 veterans, nine flights
Booth’s other landmark project was Honor Flight South Alabama, which he founded and led from 2008 through 2013. Over six years the program flew 957 World War II veterans — accompanied by volunteer guardians — to Washington, D.C., to see the memorials built in their honor. For many of them it was the first recognition their service had ever received. The program’s team included Col. Pat Downing, Margaret Coley, Cmdr. Pete Riehm and Col. John New, and it succeeded so thoroughly that it ran out of mission. “We ran out of veterans,” Booth says. “Every veteran that had wanted to go to Washington, we accommodated.”
Booth’s own ceremony attendance reads like a history of the memorial movement. He attended the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall in 1982, and he has returned for the quinquennial readings of the names of the fallen. In 2022, with the Vietnam generation shrinking, he personally read 350 names aloud.
A life measured in service
The honors have followed the service. Booth was named South Alabama’s Veteran of the Year in 2009 and Fairhope’s Veteran of the Year in 2010. In 2019 the University of Alabama School of Dentistry — his alma mater, class of 1966 — awarded him its Fuller Award, the highest honor the school’s alumni association bestows, recognizing dentists who have “given back above and beyond.” Auburn University, where he graduated in 1962, nominated him for its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022. And in 2022 Governor Kay Ivey presented him the Distinguished Service Medal, the highest civilian award the state confers. That same year, editorial cartoonist J.D. Crowe included him in a series on “22 Alabamians who made a difference in 2022,” describing Booth as a “passionate and relentless advocate for veterans.”
His service has crossed back to Vietnam, too: Booth has made three dental mission trips there, treating children in the country he once served through war.
Still on duty
Retirement, for Booth, has only changed the uniform. He serves on the USS Alabama Battleship Commission and the Veterans’ Cemetery Foundation, and he helped re-establish the public enlistment ceremony at USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park after a two-year pandemic pause — an event he calls “the alpha moment in a veteran’s life,” when recruits raise their right hands in front of their families for the first time.
His message, delivered to anyone who will listen — particularly young people — is the one he has carried since Vietnam: “It’s important to convey the importance of service to the nation to young people. It is important to find a way to serve the nation.”
The cemetery on the hill in Spanish Fort, the 957 veterans he flew to Washington, the names read each five years at the Wall — the record is the resume. Dr. Barry Lee Booth has spent fifty years making sure the Gulf Coast’s veterans are counted, and by his own accounting, every day is still Veterans’ Day.