Business Checks

Happy 4th of July America. Its really special when you can find a unique story to read about. I have one that is very sweet for everyone to enjoy.

Old Glory of old: 93-year-old mid state Ga veteran still has flag he made at age 15

The other day, they were discussing flags and the Fourth of July.

Flags are always a great topic of conversation when you’re sitting around shooting the breeze.

“I made my first flag when I was 15 years old …,” Byron said.

He was silent for a moment, reflecting on those stars and stripes of long ago.

“… And I still have it,” he said.

He rose from his easy chair, one of the few pieces of furniture in his house he didn’t make, and walked into the next room.

He reached inside a drawer of keepsakes — he could never be accused of throwing anything away — and pulled out the flag carefully.

It is a little tattered and frayed around the edges, and the blue isn’t nearly as deep as it was almost 80 years ago.

But it is still a remarkable piece of the past. The flag is nearly as old as he is, and he’ll be 93 in December.

He stitched and sewed it together as a teenager during the Great Depression. He used material from a feed sack and cloth from some old dresses that belonged to one of his aunts.

Eat your heart out, Betsy Ross.

Byron can’t remember the first flag he ever saw. It was probably when he was a young boy at Mount Carmel School. Or over at Charlie Moore’s store in Gordon. Or maybe even in front of the courthouse in Irwinton.

He had a strong desire to fly his own.

“I loved flags, but it was during the Depression,” he said. “We didn’t know it because we didn’t have any money anyway. Country folks were better off during that time because we could grow our own food.”

And make their own flags.

He asked his mother’s permission to use her sewing machine, a Singer with a foot pedal. Although sewing was something usually left to the women, he wasn’t completely in unfamiliar territory. In the past, he had made a couple of handkerchiefs.

He had no pattern to go by, so he cut the 13 stripes from a white chicken feed sack and strips from a red dress that was bound for the scrap pile. He found a large patch of blue cloth from another dress, shaped 48 stars out of paper and sewed them to the material.

That’s how many states there were in 1931. It would be another 28 years before Alaska and Hawaii joined the union.

(Folks back then were a lot more resourceful, don’t you think? They weren’t cut from the same cloth as today’s disposable society.)

Byron not only created a flag, he later fought to defend it. He served his country in the U.S. Army Air Forces in Guam during World War II.

For years, he and his wife, Marion, placed small American flags on the graves of all 101 veterans buried at Snow Hill Cemetery. (Marion died this past March. They had been married 68 years.)

DuPree wasn’t too surprised his friend had once made a flag. Byron has made just about everything else.

“I don’t think there’s anything he can’t make,” DuPree said.

Byron worked in the local kaolin mines and at the Naval Ordnance Plant in Macon. But most of his career was spent in home construction in and around Wilkinson County. When he wasn’t building houses, he was making furniture, cabinets and clocks.

He flies an American flag every day on a tall pole near his driveway.

But the flag with the most meaning — his own Old Glory — is in safekeeping and always within arm’s reach.

He holds it dear, and he should.

Their are business checks you can order, but is rare, but it does have the American flag on it, or flags.