Stamp Slight Still Miffs Villagers : Flag Day Is Biggest Day at Holiday’s Birthplace

What is perhaps America’s most enthusiastic Flag Day celebration occurred Sunday, as it does every year, here in the heart of Wisconsin’s dairy land in a tiny village of 400 people named after a Chippewa Indian chief.

“We go all out June 14 because Waubeka is the birthplace of Flag Day. Dr. Bernard J. Cigrand started it all up there on Schumacher’s Hill in the one-room Stony Hill School,” explained John J. Hames, 67, president of the National Flag Day Foundation.

For 40 years Hames, long-time local fire chief, resident deputy sheriff and an active member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, has organized Waubeka’s Flag Day festivities.

Heat Thins Crowds

Normally, 5,000 to 15,000 people from all over Wisconsin show up for the big Flag Day Parade here. But Sunday’s sweltering 103-degree heat held down the crowds.

There were almost as many marchers in the parade as spectators sitting under the shade of the blossom-laden catalpa trees along Waubeka’s main street, which is, of course, named Cigrand Drive.

While 72 marching units--including Wisconsin’s only fife and drum corps--paraded along the mile-and-a-half route, musical groups such as the 35-member Community Chorus from Hartford, Wis., sang such songs as “Rally Around the Flag,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

However, a different note was struck during the flag-raising ceremony at the Cigrand Memorial, where the featured speaker, 74-year-old Socialist Frank P. Ziedler, who served as Milwaukee’s mayor from 1948 to 1960, warned: “The American flag is not a battle flag to be truculently waved by a nation spoiling for a fight.

“Old Glory should be a standard embodying the best qualities of a human society dedicated to fairness and respect for all people representing the moral strength of justice in a free society.”

Families Picnicking

Meanwhile, back along the parade route, families such as Marleen and Thomas Croissant, both 37, from Sheboygan Falls, and their daughters Jessica, 9, and Janie, 7, picnicked while they waited for the parade to begin. “We came here because Flag Day started in Waubeka,” Jessica said.

The air around them was filled with the pungent odor of the bratwurst being barbecued by families in backyards, by the parishioners at St. Paul’s Community Church, by the firefighters at the firehouse and by the veterans in VFW Park along the banks of the Milwaukee River.

After the parade, a special program was held where it all began, at a one-room school now surrounded by flags from all 50 states and overshadowed by a gigantic American flag on a towering flag pole.

Flag Day had its beginnings at one-room Stony Hill School in 1885, when 19-year-old teacher Bernard Cigrand, the Waubeka-born son of Luxembourg immigrants, had his eighth-grade graduating students do essays on the birthday of America’s flag.

Cigrand eventually left his home town, got a dental degree from Northwestern University and later became president of both the American College of Dental Surgery and the Chicago Public Library.

Never Forgot Waubeka

But he never forgot Waubeka or Flag Day.

He was a prolific writer and wrote histories of both the flag and the American Seal, as well as books on Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton and the history of dentistry in America. Biographies of Cigrand all tell of his constant habit of singing and whistling to himself his favorite songs, “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “On Wisconsin.”

In 1894, he founded the National Flag Day Organization, served as its president and relentlessly campaigned and lectured all over the country to have Flag Day made a national holiday.

Finally, on June 14, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation setting aside June 14 as a national observance of Flag Day. In 1949, President Harry S. Truman signed the congressional act making June 14 a national holiday.

Cigrand is Waubeka’s favorite son not only for his promotion of Flag Day but also because of his ethnicity. Ozaukee County--of which Waubeka is a part--has the largest settlement of Luxembourg immigrants outside of Chicago. Anita Becker, 67, editor of Letzebueger Sprooch (Luxembourg Speech), the monthly publication of the Luxembourg Society, noted that one-fourth of the county’s 67,000 residents are the descendants of Luxembourgers.

Known in Luxembourg

“Dr. Bernard Cigrand is probably better known in Luxembourg than he is in America,” Becker said. “Many stories have been written in Luxembourg about Dr. Cigrand being the father of Flag Day in America.

“We Luxembourgers, John J. Hames and many others in Ozaukee County worked for years to have a U.S. postage stamp commemorating Dr. Cigrand.”

Two years ago, Postmaster General William Bolger flew from Washington to Waubeka to unveil the Flag Day stamp on the 100th anniversary of the day Cigrand launched his effort to make Flag Day a national holiday. Residents here vividly remember the unveiling at the Waubeka firehouse, and so may Bolger, because he was met with shocked silence when the stamp was finally shown.

It was a 22-cent stamp showing the flag flying over the Capitol with the words “Of the people, by the people, for the people”--but there was no mention of Flag Day, Cigrand or Waubeka.

‘What a Disappointment’

“Stamp Doesn’t Do Justice to Flag Day” was the headline on the Ozaukee Press’ lead editorial, which read in part: “The new stamp is supposedly in honor of Flag Day. You would never know it. What a disappointment. It’s mundane, dull, ordinary as a stamp can be. No reference to Stony Hill School, to Bernard Cigrand, founder of Flag Day.”

Becker agreed: “Here the bands were playing. All the schoolchildren were there. There were speeches about Dr. Cigrand and then they unveiled the Unflag Day Flag Day stamp. I have never been so angry in all my life.”

“Nobody knows by looking at that stamp that it has anything to do with Flag Day. They pulled a dirty trick on the people who worked so hard,” declared A. G. Jungers, 74, who was born in Waubeka.