CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Cub Scout Pack 65 has been learning the importance of the American flag.
"It means a lot. This is the country's flag. It's very important to the country so you need to respect it, and fold it correctly," 10-year-old Cub Scout Clint Ivey said.
To honor Old Glory, the pack will host a flag retirement ceremony on Wednesday evening, which is Flag Day.
"We took all these Cub Scouts out to the USS Lexington a few weeks ago for a campout and we watched a patriotic video and we decided, 'You know what? The summer is a great time for us all to get together' and Flag Day made the perfect opportunity for this," Michele Gaines, Pack 65 Committee Chair, said.
The group partnered with AOC Auto Parts, who will be cooking up some BBQ during the ceremony.
"They have some great 624 frontage, and we were going to put up some signs and it kind of just kept growing and growing," Gaines said.
Dinner will be served for 150 people and crafts will be available for the kids. The most important part of the evening, though, is educating the public on the flag.
"How will they know if we do not teach them? All of these things are going to be geared to educating the public on the flag, the history, the progression, the symbolism... everything flag oriented tonight for Flag Day," Gaines said.
Anyone who has a flag that needs to be retired can bring it to the ceremony. Flags will be retired properly at the end of the evening. The event begins at 6 p.m. at AOC Auto Parts, 14342 Northwest Blvd.
The US Flag Code states that if the flag is not in good enough condition to represent our country, it should be taken down and destroyed. The dignified manner they recommend is burning. This is the manner of retiring the flag that is used in the military.
It was June 14, 1777, when the Continental Congress approved the design of a national flag. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson issued a presidential proclamation establishing a national Flag Day on June 14.
Here's some history of the American flag from the Library of Congress:
According to legend, in 1776, George Washington commissioned Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross to create a flag for the new nation. Scholars, however, credit the flag’s design to Francis Hopkinson, who also designed the Great Seal and first coin of the United States.
The Library of Congress said to date, there have been twenty-seven official versions of the flag, but the arrangement of the stars varied according to the flag-makers’ preferences until 1912 when President Taft standardized the then-new flag’s forty-eight stars into six rows of eight. The forty-nine-star flag (1959-60), as well as the fifty-star flag, also have standardized star patterns. The current version of the flag dates to July 4, 1960, after Hawaii became the fiftieth state on August 21, 1959.