Volunteers on Pins and Needles Over Torn Flags

The Stars and Stripes: They’ve made it through battle, blast and bitter strife for more than two centuries.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t make it through Rae Huffman’s grand old Kenmore sewing machine last month.

“By golly that thing can sew,” Huffman said. “But my needles just wouldn’t go through. I had to call up and say, ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t mend those flags.”’

At 76, Huffman is part of what’s been called the Greatest Generation--alumni of the World War II era who pitched in not for gain or glory, but because it was the right thing to do.

Last Memorial Day, she saw tattered flags flying in the annual display at Ivy Lawn Cemetery in Ventura. Some had whipped too long in the wind; others had been snagged on the radio antennas of cars coasting solemnly by.

To Huffman, volunteering for seamstress duty seemed like the right thing to do. Her husband, Ross, is buried at Ivy Lawn, after all, and he’d spent a lifetime volunteering.

A master chief in the Seabees, he’d trudged through north Africa during World War II. A few years later, he did his time in Korea. Finally, there was a tour in the jungles of Vietnam, building roads in the miserable heat. After that, he signed on for another.

So taking some flags home for a little cosmetic surgery didn’t strike Huffman as too great a burden.

“All those torn flags!” Huffman said. “Why couldn’t someone sew them?”

The same question had occurred to Eddie Leighton, one of a handful of volunteers who organize the hoisting and lowering of hundreds of flags at Ivy Lawn on Memorial Day and Veterans Day. He said his group keeps 867 flags folded in a shed at Ivy Lawn. About 150 are too torn up to fly, and the group has enough cash to buy only a few replacements.

Leighton was a machine-gunner at the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he calmed down by running a jackhammer at freeway construction sites.

Today, he stencils the names of recently deceased veterans on the margin of the flags donated by their families. He also inscribes their serial numbers, service and dates of duty.

“These flags weren’t really made for flying,” he said. “They were just supposed to cover the casket and then be stored away.”

For a couple of years, a woman named Karen repaired them, mending about 125. But she became ill and left town, Leighton said.

He and his buddies were hopeful when Huffman showed up and took 15 damaged flags back to her house in Oxnard.

Huffman is a resourceful woman. When she was 46, she returned to school and became a registered nurse. She is a former women’s fiddling champ, and edits the “Hoedown Lowdown,” the newsletter of the California Old-Time Fiddlers Assn. But she and her old Kenmore have their limits.

“I got three flags pinned up and trimmed and all ready to go,” she said. “I had one stretched out on the dining-room table, but just couldn’t sew it.”

So there you are. If you have a heavy-duty sewing machine strong enough for use on sails or circus tents, today--July 4, after all--is the day you might think about loaning it to some eager volunteers.

Who needs a flag amendment to mend the flag?

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Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.