It may not be a federal holiday, but it's a day of patriotism to fly the flag. I should know that today is Flag Day, having risen at the ripe hour of 5:15 a.m. to start loading a route of 138 flags by 6:15 a.m.
This is part of the Downtown Kiwanis Club fundraiser, which has more than 2,000 flags it displays in yards on Memorial Day, Flag Day, July 4, Labor Day and Veterans Day. Assistant sports editor David Henry, a Kiwanian, and his son Jordie, a junior at Randall, were also helping put out flags on the route, one of two in Wolflin.
The most overlooked day of the five is Flag Day, mainly because it's a work day and there's usualy nothing special to honor the day. Sometime around 7:30 a.m., a mom and her two young girls came biking past us as we were planting flags in PVC pipe in front yards.
"What is today?" she asked.
"Flag Day," I said.
"It's Flag Day, girls," she said.
Consider that their summer civics lesson.
Flag Day has been around nearly 100 years. President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation that June 14 would be Flag Day in 1916. The day commemorates the adoption of the U.S. Flag which happened on that same day by a resolution of the Second Continental Congress in 1777.
So, on this day, how well do you know your Old Glory trivia? Take this five-question mini-quiz and don't feel like a native of Serbia if you miss any.
1. What is the source of Francis Scott Key's "Star Spangled Banner," who wrote the lyrics on the back of an envelope?
2. Which president made it official the order of the arrangement of the stars on the flag?
3. Who is Elizabeth Grisom and what's her connection to the American flag?
4. Who planted the first U.S. flag on the moon?
5. What is "Shipwreck Kelly's" connection to flags and flagpoles?
1. An old English drinking song.
2. William Taft on June 24, 1912.
3. It was Betsy Ross' real name. Ross is widely credited with making the first American flag.
4. Astronaut Neil Armstrong in 1969.
5. Flapole sitting was a fad in the 1920s. Kelly started the fad in 1924, sitting atop a pole (man, that hurts to think about it) for 13 days and 13 hours in 1924. After his record was broken several times, he came back in 1929 and sat atop a flagpole for 49 days in Atlantic City.
But a simple display of the flag would be apprpropriate today.