Constable: Vet won't surrender Confederate flag

This proud man with the two Confederate battle flags flapping in his Elmhurst front yard says he won't bow to public pressure the way his relatives living in Skokie did during World War II.

"Their name was Reich, as in Third Reich," says Gilbert Fischer, 74, explaining how having a name associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis led to vandalism of the Reichs' mailbox and a dramatic altering of family history. "They changed their name to White."

There is no white flag of surrender when it comes to flag controversies in today's America. A school board member in Elgin ignited a firestorm by saying the U.S. flag means no more to her than toilet paper. The re-creation of an old art display featuring a U.S. flag on the floor has some folks up in arms at York High School. And what started as one football player's way to bring attention to racial inequalities has exploded into a national debate about respect for the flag and its meaning.

Such controversies don't faze Fischer.

"What people do is up to them," he says.

He won't cave to critics who think his displays, sometimes including flags from the wrong side during the Civil War, are anti-American or racist. Nor would he ask NFL players to stop kneeling during our national anthem. In a black-and-white world, Fischer challenges the gray matter of critics.

Every summer during daylight, if it's not too windy or rainy, he flies a handful of flags in his yard, generally including one or two Confederate battle flags.

"That Confederate flag cost me $1,500." he says, explaining that he bought it at Gettysburg in a fundraiser to restore Confederate cannons. That flag shares space in a fence with a 1962 U.S. flag he got at a local VFW Post. An 18th Century version of a U.S. flag with 13 stars in a circle flies from his porch. Some days he'll add flags for prisoners of war, those missing in action, and his beloved Army and other military branches. Just one day a year, he says, he flies flags intentionally to irritate people.

"On Marine Day, I fly all Army flags," he says with a chuckle.

He yields only to weather, not public opinion.

"I've been flying my flags for 47 years in Elmhurst," Fischer says, noting that he rarely heard any comments until the past two years. "I've had six complaints. People call me a racist. I say, 'No, I'm an American.' I've had 90 people say it's fine. They beep the horn and say, 'Nice flags.'"

Fischer, who was born in Chicago and grew up in Lombard, says that "c" in his last name means that it is German, but he's a proud American. "I fly American flags," says Fischer, retired from a 37-year career as a postal letter carrier in Lombard. "When we honor our dead, we honor everybody."

Even if that means flying a flag that has been embraced by white-supremacy groups. Dismissing suggestions that the Confederate battle flags were carried by people fighting Americans in a war against the United States of America, Fischer insists that fighters for the South deserve his respect.

"They're Americans," he says, noting that Confederate soldiers are buried near their Yankee counterparts in Elmhurst's Arlington Cemetery, "It was brother versus brother, family versus family."

A neighbor and father, who asked that we withhold his name because he doesn't want public attention for his family or his neighborhood, says that Fischer is well-known in the community and that people tolerate the Confederate flags even if they wish he'd stop flying them. They cut Fischer breaks because of his military service and the era in which he grew up. "I'm happy to talk to other people," Fischer says, extending that philosophy to critics. "You people are so weird. I don't understand how people are afraid of flags. I don't understand how people are afraid of statues."

Flag debates can be complex, but not Fischer.

"Gilbert Fischer was a soldier," he says in summing up who he is. "His whole family was in the military, and he flies the flags to honor them."

While he, and his neighbors, are glad that his flags have not attracted racists or protesters, Fischer says one of his yard displays wasn't as fortunate.

"It was a Friday, Dec. 2, 2016," he says of the date that lives in infamy for him.

"I had a problem with baby Jesus," Fisher says, explaining how vandals destroyed his nativity scene. "They smashed Joseph and took Jesus."