Ben Zaricor was a college student in St. Louis in 1969 when he saw this guy in a band get beat up.
Students getting pummeled wasn’t an entirely unusual experience on campuses in that tumultuous era of Vietnam and Kent State and Watts and civil rights marches, but what Zaricor couldn’t get over was the reason the guy got trounced — he was wearing a Stars and Stripes vest. Like he was Captain America in “Easy Rider,” with the flag on the gas tank and Peter Fonda’s helmet.
“And he nearly got beaten to death,” says Zaricor, 63, the former chief executive of Good Earth Tea and still managing partner of the Zaricor Flag Collection. “People thought he was desecrating it. It struck me not just that this was a symbol people were willing to die for. They were willing to kill for it, too.”
This impression was the beginning of one of the nation’s premier collections of American (and other) flags, some 3,500 patriotic banners and military symbols from over the centuries. Zaricor has spent 40 years and millions of dollars amassing the collection, much of it from the days before the Civil War, when there were few official standards of precisely how the U.S. flag should look (exact shades of colors, size, arrangement of the stars, etc). He usually keeps the collection in a warehouse at an undisclosed location near his home in the San Francisco area.
Flags — several of his are on display through Thursday at the 45th annual meeting of the North American Vexillogical Association, at the George Washington Masonic Memorial in Alexandria — are the iconic image of how a nation sees itself in a single, wordless image, Zaricor points out. He’ll use dozens of examples of his collection in a talk Thursday at 12:30 p.m., giving the Washington area a rare peek at what experts say is one of the preeminent collections of flags in the United States. (The last time he staged a display in the area was in Baltimore in 2005.)
“He’s worked long and hard at it, and he’s a real professional,” says Whitney Smith, founder of the Flag Research Center in Winchester, Mass., and one of the world’s top flag experts. (Smith has written “something on the order of 50 books,” one with Zaricor; has a library on flags of 17,000 volumes; and designed the flags of Guyana, Aruba and Bonaire.) “He’s really brought things together so that we have a sense of some of the older [American] flags.”
Zaricor started out by buying two Canadian flags in 1970. He was always interested in the history of the individual flags, he says. New ones out of the bag never interested him much. They had to have a story, and that story had to be able to be proved true. The first American flag he bought was his 25th overall.
“I never even told anybody outside the family I was collecting flags until about 25 years into it,” he says. “I always picked them up from yard sales or estate sales. There was never a day when I said, ‘Okay, today I’m going out flag hunting.’ ”
His collection includes eight original 13-star flags known to exist from the era of the country’s founding — more, he says, than any other collection or museum. He has an 1805 Union Jack from the Battle of Trafalgar, the last documented flag from that battle. He paid “about half a million” dollars at auction in 2005 for two flags that were flying on President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade when he was assassinated. Zaricor has flags flown by Buffalo Soldier units and some used by various battalions in the Civil War.
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