Reinventing the flag
Dylan Brogan’s flag story (“Wisconsin Deserves a Better Flag,” 6/9/2016) elicited memories of my excursion along the same path in 1979 at the behest of Dick Erney, a late director of the Wisconsin Historical Society who had been asked to provide the Assembly’s state affairs committee with a history of the flag in connection with the pending legislation. I returned from a vacation to find a note on my door with the assignment. As a result, the legislation rewrote the flag statute completely. No longer would a “legal” flag have to be silk, or embroidered, with fancy fringe or nearly five feet square. Instead it would be proportioned along the lines manufactured by America’s flag industries. And, yes, it would have “Wisconsin” and “1848” added to it.
I relied on Edward B. Kaye’s vexillological ancestor Whitney Smith of the Flag Research Center, and I suggested in testimony, on television and in print that Wisconsin really needed “a readily made, symbolic state flag that will be truly simple, striking and easily recognizable, even when seen at a distance and waving in a breeze.” It now has a readily made flag. It still needs everything else.
Jack Holzhueter
Mazomanie (via email)
Brian Lorbiecki’s proposed tricolor design for Wisconsin’s flag captures the state’s essence. Light blue depicts its vast unpolluted and unobstructed sky. Green represents Wisconsin’s farms, forests and land of fertile ideas. Dark blue positions Wisconsin on two Great Lakes with a Green Bay and a bounty of smaller lakes for fishing, swimming and boating. As Dylan Brogan’s article also observed, tricolor flags have the advantage of being affordable. All Wisconsin citizens could buy and fly a tricolor flag, because it would be less expensive to produce than the current flag, which is crammed with small details on a coat of arms that cannot be seen from a distance.
LuAnne Feik (via email)
I think the flag is fine; it’s the political majority that needs to be changed.
Carol Pope (via Facebook)
Wisconsin deserves a better governor, too.
Mary Johns (via Facebook)