Maine news, sports, weather from Waterville Morning Sentinel

BILL NEMITZ: Tuesdays with the Freeport Flag Ladies

Trio honors victims of 9/11, military

BY BILL NEMITZ, MaineToday Media Columnist

FREEPORT -- You might think, in these hopelessly polarized times, that it's impossible to wave the American flag without being political.

You'd be wrong.

"We're not here for political reasons," Elaine Greene said Tuesday amid the near-constant morning traffic along Main Street. "All we ask of our fellow Americans is that whatever you do for your country, do it from a place of ... "

"HONNNNK!" bellowed a dump truck, its smiling driver waving vigorously as he rolled slowly by.

Greene didn't miss a beat.

"Whatever you do for your country," she resumed, waving back, "do it from a place of love."

Wonder what pure patriotism looks like in this era of them versus us, right versus left, red-neck conservative versus bleeding-heart liberal?

Look no further than Greene, 65, Carmen Footer, 73, and JoAnn Miller, 69 -- better known throughout Maine and beyond as the Freeport Flag Ladies.

This Saturday will mark the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. It also will be yet another milestone for these three perpetually smiling women who started waving their flags that awful day nine years ago and, week after week, month after month, year after year, haven't stopped.

"We've been here every Tuesday," said Miller.

Come on. Every Tuesday? For nine years?

"We've never missed a Tuesday," repeated Greene. "Ever."

It began, as legends often do, with an impulse.

Three days after Sept. 11, while the entire country ricocheted from shock to anger to grief and back, then-President George W. Bush asked Americans to step outside their homes and light a candle in memory of the terrorists' 2,977 victims.

"And so we did," said Greene, who shares her 13-room home on nearby School Street with Footer and Miller. "But we live on a dead-end street, so we decided to head up to Main Street."

As they left the house, Greene suddenly stopped and rushed back inside.

"This nudge inside me said, 'Pick that flag up,' " she recalled. "I didn't know if it was the right thing to do, but I did it."

In a week already supercharged with emotion, the flag became a communal lightning rod. Virtually every driver who drove by that evening sounded a horn in appreciation and support. Some, their eyes wet with tears, rolled down their windows and hollered, "God bless America!"

Turning to her two friends, Greene asked whether they'd be willing to commit to doing this every Tuesday morning (the day and time of the attacks) for the next year. Without hesitation, Footer and Miller said yes.

"But then after that year was up, we knew we were going to war," said Greene. "So we stayed standing for the men and women who would be going."

Four-hundred-and sixty-eight consecutive Tuesdays later, some 150,000 American troops remain in Iraq and Afghanistan; and as long as they're fulfilling their duty over there, the Freeport Flag Ladies simply can't imagine abandoning their post here.

"These men and women have come to see us as a symbol standing here for them," said Greene. "We're here so that people don't forget them."

The three retirees -- Greene ran a hospital X-ray laboratory, Miller was a physician and Footer oversaw an ultrasound department -- have forgone any and all vacations since 2001. The money they save keeps them in their trademark red-white-and-blue cotton shirts -- they've each gone through at least a dozen -- and covers their ever-growing list of other expenses.

Their mission, you see, now extends far beyond their weekly appearances from 8 to 9 a.m. on Main Street.

Two or three times a week, they travel to Bangor International Airport to help the Maine Troop Greeters (another homegrown tradition) welcome planeloads of soldiers en route to and from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Miller, the Flag Ladies' photographer, estimates she's taken 1 million photos of the troops. She then e-mails a large percentage of the images to family-support groups, or directly to soldiers' families, all over the country.

The Flag Ladies also have marched in dozens of parades and spoken to countless veterans groups, school classes and civic organizations.

They've stood vigil outside funerals for Maine soldiers killed in action.

They've sent packages to troops overseas and given a lucky penny ("With this lucky penny you will never be broke," reads an attached card) to every veteran and active member of the military they meet.

The odometer on their van reads 169,000 miles -- almost all in support of their mission.

Their website, www.freeportflagladies.com, routinely tallies anywhere from 250,000 to 1 million hits each month. When a company called recently to ask about buying it, the Flag Ladies politely replied that some things are simply too precious to sell.

Of all the things they do, however, nothing recharges this tireless trio quite like their Tuesday mornings on Main Street.

It's here, after all, that an old World War II veteran regularly removes his hat and slows down way up by L.L. Bean. As cars back up without complaint behind him, he then creeps by with one hand on the wheel and the other in crisp salute to his beloved red, white and blue.

It's here that a Vietnam vet one day got out and, one by one, hugged all three Flag Ladies. He explained that he'd been driving by for a few years -- still smoldering about how his country had let him down and irritated that these three women would presume that merely waving their flags somehow "would change my heart."

"Well, you finally did," the man said that day. He's been beeping and waving ever since.

It's here that Greene, who suffers from Crohn's disease, once showed up for duty so sick that Miller insisted they head for the hospital.

"She was absolutely ashen," Miller recalled. "I was so worried about her."

Then a school bus appeared, filled with young children holding up flag pictures they'd created just for the Flag Ladies. Suddenly, Greene's color returned. Just like that, her pain vanished.

"You could literally feel the energy," Miller said. "It made the hair on the back of your neck stand up."

It's also here that the Flag Ladies hope you will join them from 8 to 9:30 a.m. on Saturday to remember why they began doing this in the first place.

"Stand here for an hour, hear those horns beep and wave your own flag," Greene said. "It really will move you to feel more involved with your country, more involved with your community."

"Beep-beep!" sounded a passing car.

"Honk Honnnnnk!" echoed the one behind it.

Greene, her left hand on her flag, her right raised in that never-ending wave, just smiled.

Politics? What politics?

"Remember what happens every time one of those horns beeps," Greene said. "In that moment, this country is a little better."