Flag Day Comes Early at School

It was one of those awkward moments when nobody knows for sure what to do.

The student body president at Hamilton High School asked an auditorium full of graduating seniors, parents and scholarship presenters gathered for senior awards night to rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.

But when the audience stood with Elizabeth Bernier last June to salute the Stars and Stripes, there wasn’t a flag in sight.

In fact, as school officials and alumni group leaders found a few days later when they searched closets, basement storerooms and classrooms, there wasn’t an American flag to be found anywhere on the Westside campus.

Former students solved that problem Friday when they returned with their own salute to the school: 101 American flags.

That’s enough to put a flag in every classroom, said Lorey Yzuel, a member of Hamilton’s first graduating group--the class of 1932.

“I couldn’t believe it when I heard that my old high school didn’t have any flags,” said Yzuel, who will celebrate his 84th birthday today and was among a dozen alumni who returned to the school Friday.

“We had flags in all the rooms back when we were here,” said Pat Culver Battle, class of ’34. “And we saluted it every day.”

State law and Los Angeles Unified School District policy require students at all schools to salute the flag daily. But the regulation is virtually unenforceable, district spokesman Shel Erlich said Friday.

No one is certain what happened to Hamilton’s flags. But they have apparently been missing for decades.

“They weren’t here when I was a student here,” said Dimone Watson, a 1988 graduate who returned four years ago to teach English at the school. “My classroom now doesn’t have one.”

Principal David Winter welcomed the flag contribution. He speculated that American flags may have disappeared in the 1960s or ‘70s when young people were protesting U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

“I don’t think the emphasis then was placed on saluting the flag,” he said. “But we’re going to bring it back” by using a new public address system to encourage students to pause for the Pledge of Allegiance each morning.

Winter personally delivered the first flag to math teacher Susie Rainey’s room. Youngsters looked up from a trigonometry assignment to watch him insert the flag in a holder bolted to the top of a large cabinet near the front of the classroom.

“I’m OK with the Pledge of Allegiance,” said 17-year-old Julia Newmann. “I’ll do it.”

Classmate Robert Elfman, 18, said he was glad to see the red, white and blue.

“It’s a good icon for America,” he said.

Hamilton High Alumni Assn. President Brian Bumpas, 78, said the 2,200 members of his group dipped into their dues kitty to finance the $800 flag purchase. Included with the 3-foot classroom banners were 5-foot-wide American and California state flags for the auditorium.

Association members said it was money well spent.

“We need to remember the people from this school who died for that flag,” said Doug Haig, 78, a West Hills resident who graduated from Hamilton in 1938.

“And those of us who almost died,” said Richard Eshleman, a 74-year-old Mt. Washington resident who spent part of World War II in German custody as a prisoner of war after his fighter plane was shot down.

“When I came back home in the spring of 1945, I was invited back here to the school to talk about the war. I ended up by reciting the words of the National Anthem. People were crying--I’ll never forget it,” Eshleman said.

The returning graduates lingered around the school’s statue of namesake Alexander Hamilton, the early American statesman, before leaving Friday. They told current student body President Dominique West, 17, that life was easier in the past.

“We had one less line to say in the Pledge of Allegiance in our day--there was no ‘under God’ in it back then,” said 62-year-old Ron Balin, a West Hollywood resident who graduated in 1954.

And the flag salute was simpler in the old days too, said 1951 graduate Henry Merkle, 65, of La Crescenta.

When he was a kid, everyone saluted the flag by merely raising their right hand into the air. He said that changed when World War II broke out and the hand-over-the-heart salute was adopted.

“The old one looked too close to Hitler’s Nazi salute,” Merkle said.