Support our Troops Rally, Liberty University, Lynchburg, Virginia

Wow, what a great Rally. There were no anti-American, anti-war pukes on the campus of Liberty University.

It was a beautiful day for the 1 hour drive from Roanoke.

A special treat was driving by the D-Day National Monument in Bedford, Virginia and upon returning home to Salem, Virginia finding that in addition to the American Flags on all the utility poles in towndown each pole was adorned with a large yellow ribbon and bow.

I was proud to thank alot of troops today for their service. I would like to thanks all vets and active duty troops and their families for their service and sacrifice. Remembering those who have given their all in the service of our nation. Especially the brave men and women who have fallen in the War for Iraqi Freedom.

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Thanks Registered

Great pictures! I love those little patriots. Thumbs up for Lynchburg.

Apr 28, 2003
Flagpole to fly steel-hard pride

Salvaged WTC beams support it
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SALEM With American flags and yellow ribbons already decorating every lamppost on Main Street, the flagpole in Fletcher Smoak's parking lot had to be spectacular.
The brick company chairman had just the right connections to build what has become the mother of all poles in western Virginia - a 65-foot structure supported by two original steel beams from the demolished World Trade Center in New York.
"I didn't know it would be this massive," Smoak said, squinting above the 14-inch-thick girders that once supported Tower One between its 33rd and 36th floors.
Smoak will dedicate his new flagpole today with U.S. Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte, R-6th, and the mayors of Salem and neighboring Roanoke.
Far from the rubble, the beams look more like the product of an artist with a skill for steel.
Pocked with broken bolts and window brackets, the 14,000-pound beams are mangled at the bottom.
"It's impressive, isn't it?" Roanoke Mayor Ralph Smith said. "There are not many people in this country who don't recognize what those twisted beams were."
Smoak, 67, chairman and CEO of the Old Virginia Brick Co. in Salem, started looking for a piece of the WTC one month after terrorists brought it to the ground on Sept. 11, 2001.
"We wanted to do something more than a flagpole," he said. "We wanted to put up something to remind people what could happen if we ever get complacent about security."
Salvage from the WTC was available, but shortly after the terrorist attacks it was nearly impossible to get the right people on the phone.
"Things were just chaotic up there then," he said.
Smoak tried another route through Jay Brenner of Cycle Systems Inc., a business associate from Roanoke who knew someone who worked for one of the salvage companies with rights to the WTC.
"We made some calls," Brenner said. "It didn't take us much time getting the beams."
Workers hoisted the twisted steel on a flatbed truck and drove it 470 miles south to the parking lot of Smoak's Old Virginia Brick.
"Those things were so heavy, when they laid them down in the parking lot it was like an earthquake," Smoak said.
For months, workers scrubbed out rust and coated the steel with a clear epoxy.
An aluminum flagpole was bolted between the beams, and the foundation was circled with grass and a wall made from Old Virginia's colonial red range brick.
Smoak capped the monument with an eagle statue of bronze and gold.
The flagpole monument is now one of the few places where people can still see WTC beams, said Matthew Monahan, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Design and Construction, the agency that supervised the cleanup.
Only a small percentage of the 190,568 tons of structural steel was not melted down by salvage companies, he said.
"Some organizations felt so strong an attachment to the building that they tried to find and obtain a kind of relic of the World Trade Center," Monahan said.
"It's one of the few heartwarming aspects of this attack on America."
In addition to Smoak's flagpole, some battered chunks of the building were transported to memorials in a number of communities, including Charlotte, N.C., Lafayette, La., Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Naperville, Ill.
Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church in Albuquerque, N.M., is planning to use beams to rebuild a historic bell tower. In Tennessee, WTC steel will be shaped into a high school memorial.
Smoak, a South Carolina native who served in the Army from 1959 to 1961, still gets emotional when he thinks about where the steel came from.
"It's really quite moving," Smoak said.
"They knocked the towers down, but at least part of it is going back up."

RTD