By WILLIAM M. HARTNETT
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

HOBE SOUND - Tom Fucigna Jr. has found his niche in a post-Sept. 11 world: He’s a minuteman in the battle against poor automotive flag etiquette.

The 42-year-old environmental consultant has recovered hundreds of American flags from roadsides all over Palm Beach and Martin counties in the past few months. He spotted the first fallen flag on Woolbright Road in Boynton Beach less than a week after the attacks. Soon they started showing up along Interstate 95, which Fucigna drives each morning from his home in Hobe Sound to work in Boynton Beach. At last count he had recovered 323 flags, three on Wednesday alone.

He’s motivated partly by the loss of four family friends in the World Trade Center collapse.

“I think about those guys every time I pick one of those things up,” Fucigna said.

But he traces his sense of duty toward the flag to his days in Mrs. Olsen’s fourth-grade class at P.S. 98 in the New York City borough of Queens.

“She was the one who inculcated everyone into the Pledge of Allegiance and singing The Star Spangled Banner properly,” Fucigna said.

America began wearing its emotions on windshields and bumpers after terrorists struck New York and Washington, a restless mix of anger and patriotism manifested in “Proud To Be An American” bumper stickers; red, white and blue “Fear This!” windshield logos; even the occasional window decal featuring a Calvin-like cartoon figure peeing on an Osama-like cartoon head.

But no star-spangled trend took hold of the nation’s roadways quite as strikingly as the proliferation of American flags wedged into windows and taped to radio antennas.

Now, four months after millions of brand new banners were first flown, those American flags attached to automobiles can increasingly be found in a most ignoble spot: the roadside.

But flag recovery can be a sketchy proposition on frantic I-95 for Fucigna.

“There’s a bunch of them I have to drive by,” he said. “Some of those construction zones don’t have a shoulder you can pull off on.”

Fucigna cruises the far right lane of the highway, poking along at the speed limit in his old white Volvo station wagon. When he spots a flag on the ground ahead he pulls onto the shoulder only when he’s sure he won’t “cause an accident or be an accident myself.”

He has recovered the entire spectrum of raggedness, from a few pristine specimens that seem likely victims of an inadvertent window roll-down, to more than a few sorry examples with only the field of stars left. Fucigna also has found more than a dozen flags still attached to radio antennas.

All of which raises the question of what one should do with a worn car flag. The United States Flag Code offers the following: “The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.”

“The Flag Code does allow for flags to be affixed to automobiles,” said Ron Engel, deputy director of the Americanism division at the American Legion’s national headquarters in Indianapolis. “In the case of Sept. 11, there isn’t anybody who is going to criticize people if they might not abide strictly by the code because their intent is to show support for the country.”

Still, some common sense is in order, Engel said. While car flags featuring the logos of athletic teams normally pull only weekend duty, most banners of the Stars and Stripes variety serve seven days a week.

“You’re driving a car at 70 miles an hour,” said Mark Drela, an aeronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s like putting a flag out in a hurricane. See how long it lasts.”

High speeds lead to a high rate of flapping, which causes a flag’s individual fibers to rub against each other and eventually disintegrate. Because most car flags are made of cheap polyester or polyester-cotton blends, most will be reduced to shreds in a matter of weeks or months.

Drela said the only way to build a truly durable car flag would be to fabricate one from metal or Kevlar, a man-made organic fiber used in, among other things, bulletproof vests and anti-mine boots.

As for what Fucigna plans to do with his collection of fallen flags, you can see for yourself if you swing by his neighborhood this July 4.

“What I want to do is probably string them on one long line” along the neighborhood parade route, he said. “Or maybe as a maypole kind of arrangement.”

Information from The Wall Street Journal was used in this report.

Copyright 2002 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
January 24, 2002 Thursday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 755 words