The Buddy Poppy is the purest form of helping vets.
Donations fund the claims office to help vets get disability payments, etc. There are more amputees now than there were during the Vietnam War. When you hear of a soldier killed in Iraq that represents four or five more possible amputees or service people in need of hospitalization.
Members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Post 4020 and its Ladies Auxiliary will be distributing Buddy Poppies in various locations throughout the Perham area on Saturday, May 13.
Mayor Vince Pankonin has declared the day as Buddy Poppy Day and encourages everyone to stop and get a Buddy Poppy to help honor the memory of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. It is one way to show support and help veterans and their families in our community.
From its inception, the Buddy Poppy Program has helped the VFW live up to its motto, "to honor the dead by helping the living." The small red flower symbolic of the blood shed in World War I by millions of Allied soldiers in defense of freedom was originally sold to provide relief for the people of war-devastated France. Later, its sale directly benefited thousands of disabled and down-and-out American veterans.
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In May 1922, the VFW conducted the first nationwide distribution of poppies in the United States. Then, at its National Encampment in Seattle in August 1922, the organization adopted the poppy as the official memorial flower of the VFW.
Early poppies were made by needy and disabled veterans. The name just "grew" out of the poppy makers' remembrances of their buddies who never came back from war. Undoubtedly, because it expressed so simply the deepest significance of the Poppy Plan, the name stuck. All over the country, the little red flower became known as the "Buddy Poppy." The VFW has made this trademark a guarantee that all poppies bearing that name and the VFW label are the work of bona fide disabled and needy veterans.
Currently the little red flowers of silk-like fabric are assembled in eleven different locations. The VA Facilities in which they are made are located in: Leavenworth and Topeka, Kansas; Biloxi, Mississippi; Temple, Texas; Martinsburg, West Virginia; Hampton, Virginia; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Dayton, Ohio; and White City and Grand Rapids, Michigan.
To date, the VFW has sold over three quarters of a billion Buddy Poppies.
