With the enthusiasm and determination of a committed local historian and genealogist, Gwendolyn McCaffrey McReynolds explores the Yorkville (Tennessee) High School World War II Service Banner and those persons commemorated or memorialized in the stitches.

The service flag (or service banner), sometimes called the "Blue Star Flag" or the "Boys in Service Flag," originated in World War I. Captain Robert L. Queisser, 5th Ohio Infantry, designed the original service flag to honor his two sons serving in France. The image captured the public imagination and became the unofficial symbol of a child in service.

In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson approved a Women's Committee of the Council of National Defenses suggestion that mothers who had lost a child to the war wear a gold star on their traditional black mourning arm band. Eventually, gold stars came to be used on service flags to indicate the death of the service member.

During World War II Americans enthusiastically resumed the display of service flags. Many flags were hand crafted but some were manufactured and the image also appeared on a variety of commercially available products, like decals. Besides individual flags it became a common practice to make a flag representing the "boys in service" from an entire organization or community. This was probably most often done by churches but was certainly not limited to communities of faith.

My own first experience with this uniquely American iconography came, I believe, on a trip to Mac's Surplus in Aberdeen, South Dakota, worlds away from Yorkville, Tennessee. It would have been in 1968 or 1969 and my fascination with all things military was only just beginning. At the time, Mac's was a treasure trove of military surplus. On this particular visit, I was fascinated by a bin full of waterslide decals in glassine envelopes. Each decal bore a single blue star on a white field with a red border. I had no idea what they were but they cost 5¢ each, in my mind they were military, and they were really cool. Neither the clerk nor my dad had any idea what they were, the image having fallen somewhat out of vogue by the Vietnam era. Still, I recall that I invested my quarter in five of them. It did not take long to encounter someone who was familiar with exactly what that symbol represented. Somewhere in one of my family's many moves, the decals were lost, but I never forgot their special symbolism.