On Peachtree Road in Atlanta, signs of patriotism marked almost every block -- flags flying at half-staff in Buckhead in front of Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza malls, at the Marta train station. Expensive homes with neatly trimmed lawns have flags draped across the front door.
A red Cadillac with four large flags in each corner, its radio blaring "Stop, hey, what's that sound, everybody look what's going down," pulled out of Rocky's Italian Restaurant on Peachtree where a band was playing a "USA Jam" to raise money for the Red Cross. A woman walked out of a church on Peachtree wearing an antebellum-style Southern bonnet with red, white and blue ribbons.
On a football weekend in the Deep South, cars that would have normally flown college flags now flew one, the same one.
American heartland
In the heartland, the flag waved from the antennas of hot rods. In Brookville, Ohio, gasoline stations and the Holiday Inn pushed flags on 2-foot sticks into their grounds. Hastily made paper flags appeared in windows of trailers and rich people's homes. Flags appeared on the tops of buildings that had never before wore one. In Rockford, Rochelle and Le Roy, Illinois, the flag hung at half-staff and from poles in front of courthouse squares, schools, town halls and police stations.
"There is hope in that familiar sight," wrote Carin Chappelow, in a column for the Journal Review, a daily newspaper with a circulation of 10,000 in Crawfordsville, Indiana. The Wal-Mart there ran out of flags on Wednesday.
At the start of a prayer service in front of the court house in Crawfordsville, Glen Long, a member of the local post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, clutched three small flags. "Five minutes ago I had 48," he said.
Near Washington, in the well-to-do, normally sedate Chevy Chase Village, on the northwest edge of the capital, six flags appeared on a single block of Grafton Street. John Klein, a retired federal worker, usually puts one up on holidays. Klein's flag is there again. But there is another on the home of Laurence Alvarado, an accounting firm executive, and another at the home of Peter Yeo, a Senate aide, and Ann Urban, a consultant. Another waves across the street, from the stoop of Emilie Downs and Clark Evans Downs, a partner in a law firm in Washington. "Because of what happened," said Julia Downs, one of the couple's two college-age daughters.
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