The décor in the modest rectangular space is trashy-rustic (wooden booths, a mounted American flag, brick walls), but the magazine rack holding Juxtapoz, The Journal and The/End betrays an appreciation for art.
Pressure on South Carolina leaders to pull down the flag had mounted, as politicians and activists said it continued to inflame racial tensions in the wake of Wednesday's shooting.
Friends mounted an American flag on the house's remaining bit of roof and defiantly spray-painted "Open House" and "Smile" on the side that remained, feeding Mr. Johnson's resolve to rebuild.
As kids, those of us not dragooned into the official line of march decorated our bike wheels with red, white and blue crepe paper, pegged our spokes with playing cards, mounted flags on the handlebars and rode alongside.
His children dragged it out of him that he had been steaming past Iwo Jima while Americans were raising the flag on Mount Suribachi, and that his ship had "positive contact" with two enemy submarines.
Not far from the campus of Central Connecticut State University, he saw the Iwo Jima Survivors Memorial Park: bronzed figures of five marines and a Navy corpsman planting the flag on Mount Suribachi — a symbol of his own service and that of his grandfather, stationed in the Pacific during World War II.
A history enthusiast has sued the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, claiming it lost several of his World War II-era photographs, including the shot of the flag raising on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima.
But as a respectful guest one of about half a million Canadian "snowbirds" who own winter homes in Florida, using special visas good for a total of 180 days in any 12-month period—he knows to follow strict protocol when mounting his flags, or face complaints from American neighbours.
The Mount of Flags was Castro's response to the U.S. chargé d'affaires' installation, in January, of an electronic ticker in the Section's windows, offering uncensored news reports twenty-four hours a day.
He gestured toward the Tribunal's most recent innovation, the Mount of Flags, a cluster of a hundred and thirty-eight steel poles, as high as a hundred feet and rising from a series of concrete plinths, flying black flags that block the view of the Interests Section from the street.
