Thousands place flags at Calverton National Cemetery

As he handed out American flags on Saturday to a troop of Royal Rangers from a local church, Jim Lynch had a request for them.

“When you place a flag, take a second and look at the name on that gravestone,” said Lynch, the chaplain of American Legion Post 1941 in Port Jefferson, N.Y. “Take a look at that date when they died and think about what they gave.”

Several thousand Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Civil Air Patrol members, their parents and others spent part of Saturday morning placing some 225,000 flags at the gravestones at Calverton National Cemetery in advance of Memorial Day.

This was the 25th year that Post 1941 has led efforts to place flags at each of Calverton’s graves, an effort that was spearheaded by former post commander Frank Belsito. He passed away last July.

“He wasn’t a tall man, but people still looked up to him,” Lynch said. “If you met him on the street, you wouldn’t think there was anything special about him, but let me tell you, he had a stubborn streak in him that kept him from giving up on something he felt strong about.”

“We are all here today because of one man — one man’s mission, one man’s dream,” said Doris Brennan, a former director of development at Boy Scouts of America who helped create the event. “When he saw that the flags were being placed at Long Island National Cemetery, but not here, he wanted to know why. The reason was practical — it was because people loved to put the flags out, but nobody comes back to pick them up, therefore Long Island National has to pay their staff to come pick them up.”

That’s not the case at Calverton, where volunteers will come back next weekend to pick up the flags. They’ll be stored and brought back out next year at Memorial Day.

“It’s an honor every year to come out here and see the whole community come out and honor our veterans at the cemetery,” said Jeffrey Taveras, the assistant director at Calverton.

“I love to see all these young people out here today,” said Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, who noted that the county has more veterans living there than any other county in the state. “It is fundamentally our obligation to make sure that we are passing on the lessons of history to them.”

Gravesite Flag Committee Chairman Frank Bailey thanked those who participated.

“Thank you for bringing your children out and showing them what Memorial Day is all about,” Bailey said. “Veterans Day is for the living and Memorial Day is for those who have left us. … It’s important to remember those heroes, and the spouses of those heroes, because without them, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”

With the thousands of volunteers on hand, the flag placing took only about 45 minutes, even with hundreds of thousands of graves in the cemetery.

Those graves include Belsito’s, where Lynch, current post commander Joe Rosalia and post members Bart Deceglie and Wes Schember placed a flag and spent a moment saying goodbye.