More info
For more information on Honor and Remember, visit www.HonorandRemember.org or the Facebook group “Honor and Remember of Ohio.”
FAIRFIELD — The city of Fairfield joined Hamilton, Fairfield Twp. and Butler County in adopting the Honor and Remember Flag to honor all service members who have been killed while in active service to our nation.
City Council voted unanimously to approve the flag July 11.
Fairfield Mayor Ron D’Epifanio heard about the nonprofit Honor and Remember organization last year and liked the idea behind promoting a nationally recognized flag, especially since the city didn’t have any symbol in place to honor veterans.
“It means a ton to me,” D’Epifanio said. “I just feel compelled that any time that I can give some recognition to these folks, that’s my job. I’m going to do it.
“My whole council is very, very dedicated to supporting our military and what we call our heros.”
Two flags were presented to the city by Tom Mitchell, director of the Honor and Remember Ohio chapter. D’Epifanio says it hasn’t been decided yet where the flags will fly.
The flags were purchased through a grant from the Michael J. Colligan Fund of the Hamilton Community Foundation.
“With any city or county or township that adopts the flag, we’ll work with local businessmen to get the flags donated,” Mitchell said. “Because a city that has to lay off workers doesn’t need to be spending money that they don’t have.”
Honor and Remember is a national organization started by the father of a soldier who was killed by a sniper in Iraq in 2005. Mitchell, a Hamilton resident, started the Ohio chapter in January 2010.
“The second part of our mission is to give each family in Ohio that’s lost a service member a personalized flag,” Mitchell said. “Because what we do is we put the name, rank, the date the person was killed and where they were killed, hand embroidered across the bottom of the flag, and we present it to the family.
“All of that is driven by fundraising and donations, which is driven by public awareness obviously, so the more cities that we get help from for adopting the flag, the more people know about it, the more likely they are to give donations.”
The Ohio chapter has presented 14 flags to families, has five ready to schedule and has 48 more families waiting for donations to fund the flags.
“As more people know about us, the more people request flags,” Mitchell said. “So we’ll never get to zero. There is no finish line, because we’ve got 23 from Ohio killed this year.”
Contact this reporter at (513) 483-5233 or tcox@coxohio.com.
About the Author