The small cardboard box was sitting on the gravel floor beneath a vendor’s table at a flea market in Tampa Bay. Sticking out of its corner was a flag.
On Tuesday, the 67-year-old flag — a commemoration of a Korean War veteran’s burial in Arlington National Cemetery — will find itself in the hands of the fallen Marine’s family in Pittsburgh, a powerful example of how social media can reconnect people with things they didn’t know existed.
The nephew of Cpl. Ralph R. Fischer, who was killed in action overseas on March 2, 1951, will retrieve the burial flag from the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall and Museum in its original packaging, complete with an official Arlington letter from the year Mr. Fischer died.
“About a month before it was found, I was talking to my dad or my wife about the flag. I said, ‘I really wish I had this,’” said Ralph J. Fischer, the nephew and namesake of the Pittsburgh-born veteran. “I’m not a person that’s at a loss for words, hardly at all. I’m kind of at a loss for words.”
How a flag draped over a fallen Marine’s casket in the early ’50s got to a flea market in Tampa in 2018, and then back to his family in Pittsburgh, is a matter of chance and a miracle of technology. Tina Callen of Tampa was browsing the market with her husband when she noticed the flag. The seller wanted $50. “We started walking away,” she said. “How about $25?” the seller shouted after them. Sold.
At home, the Callens opened the box and found the letter, which was addressed to Frank J. Fischer, although mistakenly sent to Perryville, Pa., rather than Perrysville, where the Fischer family has roots.
“The government is mailing to you this United States flag, as a token of the appreciation and sympathy of a grateful nation, with the thought in mind that it will prove to be of sentimental value to you,” the letter read.
Ms. Callen, whose father and father-in-law served in the military, wanted to return the flag to the Fischer family, so she started researching in January. Her Googling led her to Soldiers & Sailors and its collections manager Lisa Petitta, who took up the cause. Ms. Petitta posted on her private Facebook page in search of the Fischers, and was connected with the nephew after the post was shared more than 400 times.
“When Soldiers & Sailors gets an artifact, we take care of it and it goes into our archives,” Ms. Petitta said. “But with this flag and its history, it only seemed appropriate to return it to the family.”
Ralph J. Fischer has a theory of how the flag ended up in Florida; he assumes it was donated after his grandparents, who retired to Fort Lauderdale, passed away about 20 years ago. But he doesn’t know how the flag made its way to Tampa on the other side of the state, still in its box in good condition.
He plans to bring his four youngest children to retrieve the flag from the museum. He wants them to “experience history.” He said he never got to meet the uncle he’s heard so much about, but knows he enlisted at 19 years old and was killed about a month before his 21st birthday.
“The flag, it’s something that I always asked my parents about,” he said. “Something I’ve always wanted.”
