For four weeks, a CMTC professor has been decorating his hall walls with Old Glory.
By Daniel Hartill
Staff Writer

AUBURN – Another day at war. Another flag.

Stars and stripes hang from poles on the wall and hooks in the ceiling. They lay stacked against each other or fall from free-standing platforms.

“I guess I just like flags,” Richard Bastow said, shrugging at his feeble explanation for the 20 flags that hang outside his office at Central Maine Technical College. Then, he paused and thought some more.

“It’s everything really,” he said. “Truth, justice, the American way, mom, pop and apple pie.”

It’s every patriotic slogan. It’s whatever America means to people.

And it’s a show of support for U.S troops abroad.

The flags began going up on Monday, March 24, the first school day after the start of the war in Iraq. They have been going up ever since.

“I could keep it up for weeks,” said Bastow, who chairs the school’s architectural and civil engineering technology department.

If he must, he’ll find enough flags to continue through May 9, when school ends. Yet, he still has more at home and even space reserved on the walls of the school.

Bastow has a flag cache at his home. He stores them in suitcases. Typically, they come out only for Flag Day and the Fourth of July.

It started small

He has been collecting them since the early 1970s, when his daughters began attending Girl Scout camps. He sent small flags with them, which they would use to decorate their tents.

By the mid-1970s, he was in full flag collection mode.

He’s received them on birthdays, Christmases and anniversaries. His oldest one, and perhaps his favorite, is a century-old wool flag that belonged to his family. It is 8 feet by 12 feet in size and has just 45 stars. It was therefore made sometime between 1896 and 1908, when the U.S. had 45 states. Alaska, Hawaii, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah were yet to enter the union.

Bastow has a flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol on his birthday. Another flew over the Auburn campus and was presented to him when he reached 30 years of service to the school.

That’s the flag he raised on Friday morning at 8 a.m. sharp, the same time that military bases raise their flags for morning colors. That’s when he raises them every morning.

Bastow was never in the military. He has respect for it, though, and hopes the flags show his support of U.S soldiers in the Middle East.

“I may or may not support the policies, but I support the troops,” Bastow said. “I feel like you have to whenever there’s a war.”

dhartill@sunjournal.com

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