Silly Saturday: The United States of America - The Boy Who Designed The Fifty-Star American Flag

     Hello everybody, and welcome back to Nations Made Fun! I'll be your host, Mr. Nations and today we'll be discussing the boy who designed the fifty-star American flag. Let's jump straight into it, shall we?

     A boy named Robert Heft loved flags and politics, so when his U.S. History teacher handed out an assignment that said that he needed to create a flag, he had a perfect idea. Make a fifty-star flag for the United States.

     To create it, Heft cut out fifty stars from iron-on material and sewed them onto a large piece of blue fabric. After doing this, he sewed the new amount of stars onto his family's 48-star flag. Such a simple idea, yet so effective.

      When he presented his new flag to his history teacher, his teacher was confused. His reaction when Heft presented the new flag was to ask "Why are there too many stars on this flag? Do you even know how many states we have?" Heft's final grade was a B-. Not bad, until you consider the fact that Heft's friend taped five leaves he found on the ground to a piece of notebook paper and got an A. Obviously Heft was upset about his grade, so when he asked his teacher to change it, his teacher sarcastically said "If you can get it accepted in Washington, I may consider changing the grade.

     Two years later and 21 letters and 18 phone calls, Heft received a phone call from the president at the time, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower had called Heft to ask him to come down to Washington D.C on the Fourth of July to raise the new flag of the United States. After this event, his teacher, a little surprised to be sure, changed his grade to an A.

     Although Robert Heft died in 2009, his story inspires children and adults alike to follow through with your dreams and to persevere until it seems impossible, but then it finally happens. His legacy lives on each time we raise the fifty-star American flag.

     Sources: https://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2016/06/14/boy-scout-designed-50-star-american-flag/