William T. Kerr: Father of Flag Day
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
June fourteenth is Flag Day in the United States, and the man most responsible for making it official lived for many years in the small community of Rennersdale, just outside Pittsburgh. William T. Kerr founded the American Flag Day Association of Western Pennsylvania in eighteen eighty-eight and led the national association as chairman for fifty years, tirelessly lobbying Congress and the White House to recognize June fourteenth as a national observance.
The date marks the anniversary of June fourteenth, seventeen seventy-seven, when the Continental Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes. Other figures also campaigned for Flag Day over the decades, but Kerr outlasted them all. On August third, nineteen forty-nine, President Harry Truman signed the act of Congress that officially established Flag Day, with Kerr standing at his side in the Oval Office.
Kerr was eighty years old. He died four years later in nineteen fifty-three.
