An Ohio mayor’s greeting to visiting French students has sent U.S. military veterans to the barricades.
When students from France arrived in Medina, Ohio, last month as part of a cultural exchange, Mayor James Roberts ordered city workers to fly the French flag from the city’s firehouse as a welcome.
Some veterans took the demotion of the Stars and Stripes from Medina’s tallest flagpole--even temporarily--as an insult, said Ellis Provchy, the commander of a northeast Ohio unit of Disabled American Veterans, a group chartered by Congress to help veterans and the families of disabled veterans.
“The flag represents the blood that each of us lost in foreign lands,” said Mr. Provchy, a veteran of the Korean War.
He led about a dozen veterans in full-dress uniform through the town square in protest.
While the mayor eventually restored Old Glory to its post atop the firehouse, the veterans last week were seeking an ordinance guaranteeing that the U.S. flag will always fly from the city’s highest pole.
“We have nothing against the French,” Mr. Provchy said. “But the American flag should be flown from a proper height.”
Cornell University has decided not to admit Elizabeth Mikus, the Massachusetts student who was considering suing the university because it accidentally sent her a “welcome” notice instead of a deferral letter last December. Ms. Mikus received a rejection letter last week. (See Education Week, 4/12/95.)
She was one of 44 applicants to erroneously receive the letter from the Ivy League university in Ithaca, N.Y. She has been accepted at several other colleges but has not yet decided which she will attend, her lawyer, Allen H. Tufankjian, said last week.
As for suing Cornell over the mistaken letter, the Mikuses “are keeping their options open,” he said.
