Benefield: Put conflict aside and replace water-damaged burial flags in Santa Rosa

This is a story about honor and tradition, volunteerism and patriotism.

It’s about community, solemn remembrance and customs.

But it’s also about communication gaps and personal tensions and the pressures felt when volunteers are pushed to their limit with no sign of reinforcements to back them up.

This one is messy.

Some details are sketchy.

But it’s a story worth telling because the event at the heart of it all — the 50-plus-year-old “Avenue of the Flags” held in Santa Rosa every Memorial Day to honor local veterans — is worth saving.

And celebrating.

“Avenue of the Flags” is simple in name but not in execution.

For more than five decades, the event has meant a weekslong volunteer-driven effort to put up as many as 1,000 U.S. flags throughout Santa Rosa Memorial Park on Franklin Avenue, each one in honor of a deceased veteran.

And these are not just any flags. These are Department of Veterans Affairs-issued burial flags — measuring 9.6 feet by 5 feet — given to the family of service members at the time of death.

On each flag, the service member’s name is written, as well as dates of service. Each flag is assigned a number. This piece is crucial, as the number of flags displayed each year has grown to 1,000.

While they remain in storage at the memorial park year round, they are in the care of American Legion Post 21, a local veterans group that for decades has not only run the “Avenue of the Flags” event but also painstakingly recorded and cataloged flags donated by veterans’ families to the event.

Those records are used not only to create a map of flags on display every Memorial Day, but also to locate specific flags in storage should family members ask for their return.

It’s precise and crucial record keeping done by volunteers committed to honoring veterans.

When COVID-19 struck in 2020, it marked the first time in nearly a half century that the “Avenue of the Flags” was more or less halted, per local and federal health guidance.

But that wasn’t the only reason the annual event turned into a shadow of its former self.

By most accounts, it was in spring 2020 that a leak was discovered in the storage area connected to the memorial park’s Hillview Mausoleum.

Approximately 500 flags were stored in that unit. The leak damaged as many as 300 of them, according to Tim Maloney, general manager of Santa Rosa Memorial Park and an Army veteran.

Maloney has assisted in the Avenue of the Flags event since he joined the memorial park leadership in 2001.

Steve Bosshard, a Marine Corps veteran and a leader in the Marine Corps League Detachment 686, has for years been actively involved in support of the American Legion in putting on the event.

He recalls first seeing the damaged flags three years ago.

“We went down to see how bad the damage was. The smell …” he said, not finishing the sentence. “The mold had done so much damage.”

According to Maloney, the park spent $130,000 this year in roof repairs on multiple buildings.

He’s also launched a fundraiser to replace the damaged flags. His estimate is that it will cost $20,000 to replicate the size and quality of the original flags.

“I’m going to replace the flags. I’m going to buy new flags,” Maloney said.

And yet, today, about three years after the damage was discovered, hundreds of flags, stacked in sets of 10 on wooden shelving, show dark mold stains and still sit in the original storage unit.

Maloney said without cooperation from the American Legion, his hands are tied.

The chain of command for the flags is tricky.

The flags are owned by the families, lent to the American Legion and housed by Santa Rosa Memorial Park. And the American Legion, not the Memorial Park, has always maintained the records, family contacts and Memorial Day maps for the flags.

Maloney said he cannot officially calculate the number of flags that need to be replaced, nor which families need to be contacted, because he does not have the record book that notes ownership of each flag.

And communication with the local American Legion has broken down.

“The flags always belong to veterans’ families,” Maloney said. “I can’t tell (families) if it has been destroyed or not because the American Legion is the only one who has the catalog, so when they ask if it’s damaged or not, I don’t know.”

Terry Thurman is an Air Force veteran and leader with the American Legion Post 21 who for years had spearheaded the massive, volunteer-driven event. She was loathe to talk about the issue.

“This is something that needs to be dealt with at our post level,” she said. “It’s not a situation that needs to be brought to the public attention at this point.”

But it already has.

Maloney has, each year during the pandemic, held smaller, dramatically modified Memorial Day ceremonies. But this year, he pulled 69 undamaged flags and hosted the biggest event since 2019.

With an audience of what he guessed was maybe 400 people, he put out the call for help to replace the flags.

“I verbalized these things at the Memorial Day ceremony,” he said. “I have never gone public but there is a need for a replacement of the flags before we can have a full program.”

But even if funds do come in to cover the cost of new flags, Maloney said that, per military protocol, he cannot retire the damaged flags without permission of families.

“They’ve been here for 50 years,” he said. “There is protocol.”

And he can’t do that without the help of the American Legion.

Maloney and Thurman disagree on communication. Maloney said he’s called Thurman. She maintains she’s heard nothing and feels that making it public will cause undue upset.

“This is a Legion program and there has been a situation and it can be rectified. It doesn’t need to be brought up to the public,” she said.

Bosshard, who for years has worked in support of American Legion efforts, defended Thurman. He praised her nearly three decades of effort in putting together the massive event with an aging group of veteran volunteers and not a lot of younger helpers offering reinforcement.

“We’ve been busting our butts. Someone else can do the heavy lifting,” he said.

It’s physical, time-consuming work to put on the event. And an ever-dwindling group of people have carried the mantle of hosting the event.

Weeks in advance of Memorial Day, a crew of veterans goes to each flag location — all 1,000 of them — and clears them so that on the morning of the event, volunteers can simply drop flagpoles into the PVC pipe sleeves.

“It takes about three weeks to go in and redo those holes,” Bosshard said.

And like many volunteer-driven efforts, it has come to rely on the same crew of people — mostly aging veterans — year after year.

Nine years ago, both Thurman and Bosshard made a public plea for more help, with Thurman saying at the time, “Nobody wants to see this program end.”

Today, volunteers are feeling it more than ever and that, perhaps, has led to the breakdown in communication over the damaged flags.

“People are burned out,” Bosshard said.

“We kind of felt like there was a lack of communication and taking responsibility and accountability and we were left twisting in the wind.”

That said, both Bosshard and Maloney believe there is a way forward, that an event that has run smoothly for more than a half-century can be resurrected.

And that the damaged flags can be replaced.

But that takes communication. And that, by all accounts, has been lacking these last few years.

“We need some meeting of the minds and figure out what could happen,” Bosshard said. “It’s just sitting down and working through all the problems. It’s not insurmountable.”

Maloney agrees.

“My goal is to bring it back to what it used to be,” he said

You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @benefield.