Eagle Scout project covers town with flags

An additional 250 U.S. flags will fly Labor Day along Poplar Bluff streets and highways thanks to an Eagle Scout, his troop and the VFW.

Law Summers is carrying on a family tradition started when his dad, Bob Summers, became an Eagle Scout.

Law and Bob are involved with Boy Scout Troop 4166, which was founded by Mark Richardson in 1988 with the First Christian Church as the sponsoring organization, Bob said.

“The troop has had approximately 90 Eagle Scouts since its conception,” Bob said.

The first Eagle Scouts were “Todd Richardson, who’s Mark’s son, Drew Brown, and myself, the three of us were the first three Eagle Scouts out of the troop,” Bob said.

Brown, who is a successful attorney on the East Coast, is the son of former residents Dave and Mary Lou Brown, Bob said.

Bob along with his wife, Emily, are troop leaders.

“We all got our Eagle Scout awarded to us on the same day, believe it or not,” Bob said. “That was in 1991.”

“Since that time, we put flags out on Labor Day, Memorial Day and the Fourth of July,” Bob said.

When Mark Richardson, Poplar Bluff’s city attorney, told the scouts, “people love to see the flags around town. There are people who would like to see flags, not just on the main strip on 67, they’d like to see flags on Ditch Road, 53 and all the way to the highway going to the airport.”

Richardson’s words sparked “my oldest son Law to come up with an idea to expand the number of flags as a great Eagle project. Over the last three or four months, he spent time working with the city utility company and Bill Bach to figure out how many flag bases there are around town on those roads.”

Law worked with Bach. who is general manager of Municipal Utilities, creating a mapping system of the many locations where the flag bases are located, which ones needed to be fixed, and the ones needing to be replaced. The troop has for years put out about 175 flags.

Law described the project as “really tough and time consuming project but worth it.”

Last week, the troop assembled about 250 new flags, putting them all together and getting them ready to raise before Labor Day. It brought the total number of flags to 425.

“Troop 4166 and the Poplar Bluff Memorial VFW Post 6477 are joining together to put out flags all over town,” Bob said. “The VFW has supported us. They made a $1,000 donation. We’ve had about another $500 in donations made from a variety of individuals, including Randy Stricker of Pack’s Do It Center, who helped us get all of the materials. We’re still looking for about $900 to pay for all the materials that are involved. If anybody would like to get involved, we would certainly love to talk to them. In addition, our troop has flag boxes around town to collect retired flags.”

Ralph L. Innes and other VFW members attended the meeting, presented the scouts with a check and joined the scouts Thursday night in placing the flags on the light poles.

Innes and Bob agreed, “We are doing something special for the city of Poplar Bluff.”

The scouts and VFW are “establishing a long relationship with our groups learning with each other,” Bob said.

Bob also plans for the scouts and VFW to have six meetings together a year.

Another of the troop’s three original Eagles Scouts, Todd Richardson, helped with hanging the flags.

The flags on Pine Boulevard go to Highway B on the east side of town.

One to two times a year, Bob said, “We go through a flag retirement ceremony where we honorably burn all of those flags through a US approved flag retirement ceremony.”