Girl Scouts Burn U.S. Flags-- Out of Respect for Old Glory

Emmy Petermann of Arcadia loves this country. She loves its flag. But Friday night, she burned it.

Petermann’s flag--which she flew for more than 50 years--was the centerpiece of a rarely performed flag retirement ceremony at the Girl Scouts’ Camp Mariposa in Altadena.

As a teenage Cadette played taps on her flute, members of a Girl Scout color guard slowly lowered Petermann’s flag over a smoldering fire pit. The Scouts, all from the Mt. Wilson Vista Girl Scout Council, waited until it was engulfed by fire--and then tossed 13 more flags into the pit to burn.

In the nearly six months since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, America has been in the grip of flag fever.

Public buildings have been adorned with giant canopies of red, white and blue; street medians are decorated with flag-like bunting; and handkerchief-size standards wave from automobiles everywhere.

But on many of those flags, colors that were once vibrant and dramatic have faded. Crisp lines and defiant stripes are now threadbare and soiled. Their owners have tucked them away in garages, attics and closets, many unsure of how or where to dispose of them.

Petermann, 85, who immigrated to the U.S. from Germany when she was 10 years old, said she donated her aging flag--adorned with only 48 stars--to the Girl Scouts after seeing a notice about the ceremony in the local paper.

“It was fringed at the edges and had started to get funny-looking,” she said. “The white was very yellow.”

Hers was among almost 150 flags collected by the Scouts for the retirement rite. The Girl Scouts chose to make it the centerpiece of their ceremony because, in the 1950s, it flew over the Petermanns’ home in North Hollywood, where Ronald Reagan and his then-wife, Jane Wyman, once lived. The Pasadena Elks lodge donated eight flags to the Girl Scouts; the city of Duarte brought 85, neatly folded and bagged. But most of the flags were from people who felt moved to do something about their symbols of national pride that had been wasting away.

The burning of an American flag has long been a symbol of protest, one that conjures up a Supreme Court case, congressional debates and images of rioters around the globe protesting American foreign policy.

But the people who donated flags to the ceremony see themselves as true patriots. By this act of destruction, they were demonstrating their reverence.

“The first thing I did when I came here was put up a flagpole,” said Dean De Bois, a World War II Navy bugler who now lives in a mobile home park in El Monte and donated three flags to the Scouts. “I fly a flag 24 hours a day. I’ve had extras out, with the war going on in Afghanistan.

“When they fade, I save them up. This time, I saved them until I saw someone was going to have a ceremony.”

Federal law says that when a flag “is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, [it] should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.”

According to the American Legion, individuals can do this “discreetly, so the act of destruction is not perceived as a protest or desecration.”

But in part because many areas prohibit outdoor fires, the ceremony has become the provenance of Scout troops and such civic groups as the American Legion.

Such retirements are usually held on Flag Day, June 14. But Kathleen Vallee Stein of the Mt. Wilson Vista Girl Scouts said they felt the ceremony was needed sooner because so many new flags were bought after Sept. 11.

The Girl Scouts burned 14 flags Friday; the rest will be retired at a time when fire risks are lower.

For the teenage and preteen Cadettes who participated in the ceremony, the idea of burning a flag to honor it took a little getting used to.

Kate Paccone, 12, of La Canada Flintridge, one of the ceremony’s color guards, said that when she told her mother what she would be doing in the ceremony, her mother thought that she was mistaken. “I’d never heard of a flag retirement ceremony,” Kate said. “But I thought it would be an honor to participate.”

She and her fellow Scouts kept vigil over the flames overnight, then buried the ashes at dawn on the Camp Mariposa grounds.

Wendy Espinoza, 15, of San Gabriel, another color guard, said the hardest part of the ceremony was watching the flags be destroyed. “But you gotta do it,” she said. “You gotta do it.”