It's Flag Day -- and don't you forget it.

I was relieved that my local newspaper remembered today is Flag Day. Right up there at the top of Page 1, a beautiful, unfurled American Flag. Good on them.

In some newsrooms somewhere, though, I’ll bet this occasion was overlooked, and all hell broke loose.

It happened once at the small daily newspaper where I worked. No tribute to the American Flag in the paper June 14. My editor, after fielding a few calls from fuming flag fetishists, grudgingly sent me to cover the Flag Day ceremony sponsored by the American Legion and DAR in a local park, so at least we’d get something in the June 15 edition.

Now, covering a Flag Day ceremony was pretty far from the Woodward-and-Bernstein adventures in “All the President’s Men” that sparked my interest in journalism, but by that point, I already had realized Hollywood had sold me a bill of goods, so I went without a fight.

Mind you, these were pre-Wikipedia days, so to get background to fill my story out required a stop at the public library where I checked out a couple of books about the American Flag. Then, mighty pleased with myself, I crafted the moist poignant prose ever about Old Glory. I’m sure even Betsy Ross would have found it a bit much.

The boss sure did. He’d had asked for 500 words, but I’ll bet I turned in close to 800, convinced he would be pleased at my artistry and diligence. Indeed. He showed his appreciation by cutting the story to fewer than 400 words. Even that didn’t make it into the paper, as more pressing news came along and it was left on the paste-up table. The editor did throw me a bone by allowing me to add a sentence to the photo caption – an indignity I’m sure Woodstein never suffered.

Thus, I learned one of many important lessons of community journalism: Attention must be paid to Flag Day. Ditto Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7. Presumably, there was a time when a failure to “remember the Maine” on Feb. 15 occasioned righteous indignation, but the Spanish-American War just doesn’t have much cachet anymore. Maybe still at Hearst papers.

But you can’t be too careful. I enjoyed this letter to the editor in my local paper a couple of months ago:

"April 9 was the 69th anniversary of the Bataan Death March. I read the paper from front to back, and there was no mention of the death march. Why not? Is the torture of 80,000 starved, sick and sounded Americans and Allied prisoners and the death of 16,000 or 17,000 of them worth commemorating? Or at least mentioning?"

Newspapers can’t just dismiss people like this as aging cranks, because aging cranks represent at least 75 percent of the people who bother reading newspapers anymore, even if we read them at least in part looking for something to piss us off –- and almost always succeed, whether it's a horrible grammatical mistake, a typo, or an overlooked event, current or historical.

That includes this aging crank. I notice that today’s paper had no mention of the fact that on this day in 1954, President Eisenhower signed a bill into law adding the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Or that on June 14, 1952, the keel was laid for the nuclear submarine USS Nautilus, thus beginning the age of the Nuclear Navy. Or that on this day in 1648, Margaret Jones was hanged in Boston for witchcraft in the first such execution in the Massachusetts colony. Finally, and perhaps most egregiously, the paper somehow overlooked the fact that on June 14, 1789, the Rev. Elijah Craig of Bourbon County, Kentucky, first distilled whiskey from maize.

None of this in today's paper. Indignant letter to the editor to come.