Wrapped in Red, White and Blue

From the outside, Paula Burton’s Villa Park house seems to suffer from a flag deficiency. There’s only one, while the house down the street looks like it could be the headquarters for the local Fourth of July parade committee.

Step inside Burton’s two-story house, though, and she catches up with a riot of red, white and blue. Blankets bearing American flag designs are folded over chair backs. Flag towels and potpourri holders adorn the bathroom.

Burton is the human embodiment of eye-catching patriotism. And now her day is coming.

On Friday, she will witness the personal reward of her decade-long quest to organize a national, school-based recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.

“This is insane,” Burton, 61, said Wednesday, wearing a flag vest and red shoes and surrounded by the symbols of her country. “The president is going to lead the pledge from the Oval Office.”

Burton began in 1992--the 100th anniversary of the Pledge of Allegiance--to mount a national day of patriotic celebration centered around the vow of national loyalty. She created a patriotic singing troupe. She made T-shirts and CDs, created a nonprofit organization and a Web site devoted to the cause. She wrote to scores of public officials.

Success was limited. Until now.

As the nation seeks symbols and outlets for emotion, the Bush administration learned of her perennial campaign after a federal Department of Education worker happened upon the Web site of Burton’s nonprofit Celebration U.S.A. The White House quickly threw its weight behind it. Suddenly the long-sought goal--a national platform--was attained through a flurry of telephone calls and a couple of press conferences in Washington.

“It’s an opportunity for American schoolchildren to be part of a nationwide display at this time as people ask, ‘What can we do to help the United States?’ ” spokesman Ari Fleischer said during his Tuesday White House briefing.

Beyond the horrors of the attacks and the loss of life, Burton sees resurgent patriotism as an unforeseen positive effect of the terrorism.

But for her, fervid patriotism began long before the attacks and will last long after.

“I think publicly expressing your allegiance is a wonderful thing,” said Burton, tall and slender with wavy black hair and piercing blue eyes. “To think I could be a vessel of comfort for the country is humbling. It puts in perspective all I have been striving for.”

Burton’s patriotism, which some might dismiss as hokey or obsessive, flows from a deep well.

She is a Dutch immigrant whose father was imprisoned in a German labor camp during World War II. One of her earliest memories is of U.S. planes dropping not bombs but boxes of food and other supplies for a population slowly being erased by starvation.

“Those things, you don’t forget them,” Burton said.

She began her personal campaign in the late 1980s when as a substitute teacher she noted with dismay the monotonous, rote recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance by local schoolchildren.

Few children understood the words, she said, including what she sees as the all-important “indivisible.” And fewer still knew the words to such songs as “America, the Beautiful” and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

Burton made it her mission to bring the pledge and patriotism to life for students.

“Abraham Lincoln said the philosophy of the classroom in one generation is the philosophy of government in the next,” she said.

A Patriotic Cottage Industry

In the years since, she has made patriotism a nonprofit cottage industry, organizing Celebration U.S.A. to disseminate patriotic materials to schools nationwide at $9.95 a packet. The group’s children’s singing troupe, Catch the Spirit, has appeared nationally, including in front of the White House.

As a child new to the country in 1950, she was encouraged by her parents to become American. As a parent, she and her husband, a firefighter, passed those lessons on to her children.

“My mom taught me to be proud to be an American and to never take that for granted,” said Brady Smith, 36, one of her daughters.

Burton’s joy over achieving White House support for Pledge Across America is tempered by a mother’s sadness over another daughter, Brandi, who died in her 30s, earlier this year of cancer. Burton still has trouble talking about it without bursting into tears.

The emotions move quickly from elation to pain and back again.

On Friday, as President Bush leads the pledge from the White House, Burton will be with her Catch the Spirit singing group at Orange’s Serrano Elementary School, where she will join the nation in reciting those simple words of allegiance.