July Fourth a special day for retired Marine

Friday, July 5, 2002 | 9:07 a.m.

After seven years of legal and legislative battles to win the right to fly the American flag on a pole outside his home, retired Marine Everett Gifford was able to raise the Red, White and Blue on the Fourth of July.

"I live and die and breathe that flag, and for seven years I fought to get it back," Gifford, a sergeant during the Korean War, said.

Gifford filed and lost a lawsuit in District Court against the upscale Flamingo West Park after mobile home park rules prohibited him from flying the American and Marine Corps flags on a 30-foot pole outside his home.

The park rules allowed Gifford to place a small American flag outside his home, but he said the flag was meant to fly high in the air every day, not rest on a stick just once a year.

He turned to state Sen. Bill O'Donnell for help in preserving what he saw as his patriotic right.

O'Donnell pushed legislation through the Senate that would prohibit a mobile home park from adopting a rule banning the flying of the American flag on its property, but it failed in the Assembly, said O'Donnell, who attended Gifford's long-awaited flag-raising.

"Flying that flag is a symbol of the freedom we enjoy," O'Donnell said just before Gifford raised his flags. "When somebody denies (another) the ability to fly the American flag, they don't deserve the freedom it represents."

Gifford folded and tucked his flags away after the legislative loss until Sept. 11, when a former Navy captain and neighbor, Martin Katcher, picked up the fight by flying the American and Navy flags that Tuesday.

"I put the flags up, and said, 'No one is going to tell me to take them down now,' " Katcher said.

By then ownership of the park had changed, and the new community manager, Fred Goda, thought the former rule was "ridiculous" and "un-American."

Gifford decided he'd wait until Independence Day for his own big flag-raising.

Now all tenants at the community can fly both the American flag plus a flag of their military background.