Year round, the Service Flag of World War II honors veterans who worshiped at the First United Methodist Church on Main Street as it hangs proudly, under glass, in Fellowship Hall.
At the beginning of the war in October I942, Leone Beall Barrett and Claudia Frothingham Frank lovingly crafted the banner with 30 blue stars honoring the church's members who were fighting overseas. That number grew to 82 stars as the war raged until 1945.
Church member Ann Marie Miller is president of the Laurel Chapter of the American Rosie the Riveter Association and daughter of a Rosie, Wilma Foster. Miller said the absence of gold stars (whose color represents those lost in battle) signifies that all 82 servicemen came home.
Last week, 91-year-old veteran Laudis Turney Sr., of Laurel, saw the heirloom flag for the first time. He was tickled to discover, after all these years, that one of those stars had been sewn for him.
Turney remembers having difficulty enlisting in 1942 as an 18-year-old; at first his father, James Harley Turney, refused to sign the permission papers. But when Congress lowered the draft age to 18 in September, the elder Turney decided his son should go where he wanted before he was drafted.
So Laudis Turney signed up for the Navy at a Baltimore Post Office and reported to Camden Station, but "they'd met the day's quota" and sent him home. When he was recalled two weeks later, the same thing happened again.
It was December before Turney reported to the United States Naval Training Center, Bainbridge, in Port Deposit for boot camp. He went on to serve on the USS Oceanus (ARB-2), a World War II battle damage repair ship that departed for Guam to join the Iwo Jima invasion in February.
Sold for scrapping in 1962, Oceanus won a battle star for her World War II service. And Turney came home with three bronze stars awarded during the Asiatic-Pacific Islands Operation at the West Caroline Islands, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Turney said he "buried a lot of sailors over there" and saw quite a bit of action at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Tokyo Rose used to broadcast propaganda to his ship from a big radio tower in Peleliu in the Western Caroline Islands "all the time," and he chuckled when he said the Marines bombed that tower every day until it was demolished.
Turney said everyone onboard the ship was issued a knife as a sidearm for protection. The only time he handled firearms was in boot camp.
"They wouldn't give us guns or rifles when we went on those islands," Turney said.
His battle station was the engine room, and Turney served as the engineer on one of the ship's two motor launches.
On the ship, Turney socialized with and became close to the guys he bunked with; they were at sea most of the time and letters and communications from home didn't come often.
The men were occasionally rationed beer chits (although never more than two at a time) but couldn't drink on the ship. So when they couldn't go to shore, sometimes 30 or 40 sailors would board the motor launches and be lowered to the sea to drink their two beers.
"It was pretty clever, but that was the only way we could drink," Turney said.
Sometimes natives would row alongside the Oceanus in dugout canoes to trade beads and grass skirts for cigarettes. Most of his memorabilia has been lost, but Turney still has a handful of those beads.
He also has a framed photo of the Oceanus.
"My son, Rick, found the picture of my ship on the Internet and I framed it with all of the information," Turney said.
Turney said his high school sweetheart met and married someone else. But on his first day home, he met his true love and wife of 69 years — Sara Harris Turney, 90 — at the Laurel Bowling Alley that used to stand on Route 1 across from Prince George Street.
Today, he lives just around the corner from the house he grew up in on Ninth Street. He and Sara survive two of their three children and have two grandchildren.
On Memorial Day, Turney said he plans to go to the First United Methodist Church and visit Ivy Hill Cemetery.
"It's good to see old friends and all," Turney said. "You've just about outlived everyone."
A Rosie story
At the age of 18, 90-year-old Wilma Ferrebee Foster joined many passionate young women who left their homes to support the war effort. A native of Berryville, Va., she went to work at the Fairchild Aircraft plant in Hagerstown, where she lived with her older brother and his family for the next four years.
Two of her brothers had already gone to fight with the Navy, and her fiancé (who would be killed in Italy) had enlisted in the Army.
One of the original "Rosie the Riveters" who stepped up to fill the gap left by male workers fighting overseas, Foster said it was patriotism that motivated her to work on an assembly line for 96 cents an hour.
She said the work was not difficult because the "Rosies" were well trained and supervised. But life was not easy. A curfew was in effect, no lights were allowed outside after dark and military police patrolled the streets.
"Everything was rationed," Foster said. "You couldn't drive very far and foodstuffs were rationed."
In 1942, Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb wrote the "Rosie the Riveter" song, a national hit recorded by artists all over the country. And about three years into the war, Foster said Kaiser decided they needed a "Rosie the Riveter" model.
"They started fussing over who would represent the Rosie in the icon picture," Foster said. "When we found out who they picked, we thought we looked better."
A tight-knit group by necessity, Foster said the "Rosies" at Fairchild were ecstatic to give up their jobs and resume their prewar lives when victory was declared: Their men were coming home.
"After the war was over, there was so much celebration going on. We all just disbanded and celebrated," she said.
Foster returned home in December 1946. One evening she went "masquerading" (caroling in disguise) with her sister and some friends and met the man she would marry two months later, Abe Foster, a civilian worker at Fort Meade.
"I kept being clumsy, so he (literally) picked me up," Foster said.
North Laurel residents, they were married for 47 years until his death in 1996, and had two daughters, four grandchildren and eight great grandchildren.
Miller said her mother was disappointed that some women strayed while their men were away fighting during the difficult days of World War II.
At the end of the war, when the entire country celebrated, Foster said it seemed like everything but love was rationed.
Foster and Turney, both in their nineties, were very young when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and plunged their country into war. Miller said that many of the older Rosies (as well as the older vets) have passed on, and there are not many left to honor.
Soon, she said, it will be left to the daughters and sons to tell their stories.
On May 23, Rosie the Riveter Day, the Laurel Chapter of the American Rosie the Riveters Association and members of the Laurel American Legion will meet at Mission BBQ at Towne Centre at Laurel at 11:30 a.m., in commemoration of their service in World War II.