With Toledo High School’s trophy case still under construction, athletic director Grady Fallon’s classroom has become a temporary museum of the school’s history.
Dozens of trophies, with dates going back to the 1940s, are stacked on every available surface on the edges of the classroom. Photos signed by students and coaches of years past are piled on a table beside the shelves of yearbooks. Next to the whiteboard at the front of the room sits a dusty wooden shelving unit containing history Fallon is nervous to even touch: burial flags for four deceased veterans.
“To me, that’s bad mojo if you mess with a flag or put it somewhere it shouldn’t be, that’s got some meaning behind it,” Fallon said.
Fallon is looking for the Toledo community to help him find any of these four veterans’ surviving family members so they can decide what to do with their relative’s memorial flag.
“It’s just about respect for the community and traditions and records,” he said. “If you didn’t know that your great grandpa had a flag in the high school and you found out, like, ‘hey, this is your family’s, put it on the shelf and just say ‘this is my grandpa’s,’’ or whoever it is. I think it's just about the community,” he said.
Fallon recalled receiving an identical flag at his father’s funeral and said he knew how important that tradition is for veterans and their families.
“That, to me, is a tradition that they follow and that’s why I want to make sure that these get delivered properly,” he said.
But aside from the names displayed on the front of the shelves — Wallace T. Rudder, Clyde Hill, Edd Lyon and Clarence Norberg — Fallon knows little about these veterans and why their memorial flags are on a shelf in his classroom instead of with the veterans’ families.
Rudder’s flag happened to be stored with an undated letter, addressed to a “Miss French.” The letter read, “I’m glad to donate this flag in memory of my husband, a veteran of World War II.”
But as far as Fallon could tell from tentatively searching the shelves, none of the other flags were stored with information on their donors.
Some retired school staff may remember why and when the flags were donated to the school, Fallon said, “But even then, who do these belong to? Or what do we do with them?”
The flags were originally displayed in the Toledo High School’s trophy case, but were moved out when deconstruction of the old school began last year. Worried that the flags and some of the older trophies would be damaged in outdoor storage, Fallon volunteered his classroom in the new building as a place to store items from the old trophy case.
“Anything that I thought was really important or sentimental, I just thought I’d keep it myself until we find the right place for it,” he said.
The trophy case is one of the last pieces of Toledo High School's reconstruction to be finished. Once it's done, digital photos and information on all of the trophies will be publicly accessible via a smart screen across from the trophy case. But only a fraction of the trophies and school memorabilia currently cluttering Fallon’s classroom will physically fit in the new trophy case.
He’s on the lookout for volunteers to help find places to store and display some of the trophies and school memorabilia once they’re digitized.
“That's one-of-a-kind and you'll never get it back, so I hate to throw it away,” he said, “Even if it's on somebody's shelf at home, great, because it's part of the town and the tradition.”
For the memorial flags in particular, Fallon said he doesn’t feel like the school is the proper place to display them.
“There's just not a space like that anymore (to display them). And obviously we haven't been adding to that (memorial shelf) for whatever reason. … Somehow, whatever the tradition that was started has been lost.”
Fallon tried contacting the Veterans Memorial Museum in Chehalis to see if they had any information on the names displayed with the flags, but so far the museum hasn’t found anything.
Anyone with information on the memorial flags and the veterans they belong to is encouraged to contact Fallon at gfallon@toledoschools.us or 360-864-2391.
