The Rock Wall

A reader called Wednesday to find out what Don Boultinghouse wished for. Somehow at 2 a.m. Tuesday morning, that part of the Rock Wall got covered up with another article. We’re going to try to get the troops to be more carful on jumps.

Here’s what it said, “-Christmas Day, Tom told me that Donald Ray Boultinghouse is going to get his wish: Michaela is going to give him a great-grandchild. He told me he wanted one, but would never say anything to her or her husband, Wade. Kind of like I was when Adrian and Cain got a bigger house. Or Dad and Mom bought the farm in 1946.”

-The first baby of 2021 born to a mother who lives in a community served by the Sun will get an impressive list of prizes from area merchants. See Page. 9.  KL

Hope you had a wonderful and safe New Year’s celebration. We stayed home, as usual.

• The Sun checked with Superintendent Heath Oates who cut wood over the holiday.  He thinks that students who were ill recovered during the time off. Monday was a teacher day.

-The Sun checked with the local MDC office. There is no plan to collect discarded Christmas trees to sink in area lakes as fish habitat because the lakes are too low. However, they would work well in your private ponds and lakes. Add a concrete block or other weight to the stump end of each one to hold them where you drop them.

-Andy Graves shared Brian Shedd’s post.

You might remember the news story several months ago about a crotchety old man in Virginia who defied his local Homeowners Association and refused to take down the flagpole on his property along with the large American flag he flew on it.

Now we learn who that man was. On June 15, 1919, Van T. Barfoot was born in Edinburg, TX .

Twenty five years later, on May 23, 1944, near Cyrano, Italy, that same Van T. Barfoot, who had in 1940 enlisted in the U.S. Army, set out alone to flank German machine gun positions from which gunfire was raining down on his fellow soldiers. His advance took him through a minefield. Having done so, he proceeded to single-handedly take out three enemy machine gun positions, returning with 17 prisoners of war.

And if that weren’t enough for a day’s work, he later took on and destroyed three German tanks sent to retake the machine gun positions.

That probably didn’t make much news either, given the scope of the war, but it did earn Van T. Barfoot, who retired as a Colonel after also serving In Korea and Vietnam , a well deserved Congressional Medal of Honor.

What did make news was his Neighborhood Association’s quibble with how the 90-year-old Veteran chose to fly the American flag outside his suburban Virginia home. Seems the HOA rules said it was OK to fly a flag on a house-mounted bracket, but, for decorum, items such as Barfoot’s 21-foot flagpole were “unsuitable”.

Van Barfoot had been denied a permit for the pole, but erected it anyway and was facing Court action unless he agreed to take it down.

Then the HOA story made national TV, and the Neighborhood Association rethought its position and agreed to indulge this aging hero who dwelt among them.

“In the time I have left”, he said to the Associated Press, “I plan to continue to fly the American flag without interference.”

As well he should. And if any of his neighbors had taken a notion to contest him further, they might have done well to read his Medal of Honor citation first. Seems it Indicates Mr. Van Barfoot wasn’t particularly good at backing down.

WE ONLY LIVE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE BECAUSE OF THE BRAVE AND BECAUSE OF BRAVE MEN LIKE VAN BARFOOT!                                      KL