There are no answers to most of this. REAL announcers would have gotten a fact sheet and TOLD us. But NOOOO, we have the lame NBC commentary, and therefore we will never, ever know about the blue stars, or who the aviators represented, or what the brides were about. Never.
Maybe you have to have the "touchy-feely lib gene" to get it. The rest of us suffer from touchy-feely blindness.