Greenfield Senior Living residents bonded through respect for country

Click Here to Recommend Story View larger image Greenfield Senior Living residents Walter Schlotterbeck, 88, right, and Ken Clingaman, 86, salute the flag outside the senior home in Woodstock recently. Rich Cooley/Daily Related News

By Preston Knight -- pknight@nvdaily.com

WOODSTOCK -- The bond between Ken Clingaman and Walter Schlotterbeck started before one knew the other existed.

In the fraternity that is America's armed forces, a natural kinship develops that can overcome obstacles, such as conflicting temperaments. This, at least, is Susan Spangler's interpretation of the relationship that Clingaman and Schlotterbeck, residents of Greenfield Senior Living on Ox Road, have going.

Clingaman, 86, is from Indiana and served in the Navy during World War II. Schlotterbeck, 88, is from Massachusetts and served in the Army in Korea and Vietnam. Just those snippets of their life stories help tell it all -- these men would die for their country and, in the process, rest happily with an American flag by their sides.

In May, when Clingaman arrived at Greenfield, administrator Suzie Grubb approached him about putting up a flag in front of the building each day, said Spangler, director of the facility's memory support program, of which the two men are members. Schlotterbeck, a resident for about a year then, got word of it and joined Clingaman to make the display a team effort.

But they've made it much more than just placing the flag out at 7 a.m. and removing it by 7 p.m. each day -- the veterans have established their own ceremony. They salute the stars and stripes and say the Pledge of Allegiance, just as any soldier would, Spangler said.

"It just comes natural," she said.

The two do not share a friendship as much as a respect for one another, founded upon the kinship that comes from both men being veterans, she said. Schlotterbeck's wife, Peg, of Woodstock, agrees.

"It's an implied thing to him," she said of her husband having a flag. "We always had a flag at home. ... He feels no flag should be out at night unless it's lit under light. He's very fussy about that."

Mrs. Schlotterbeck is sure that her husband asked to join Clingaman immediately after learning that a flag was being displayed at Greenfield. A recent illness, though, has forced Schlotterbeck to sit out from helping his fellow veteran with the daily flag duty.

Clingaman said he appreciates the help when he gets it. But he loves the job, first and foremost.

"I was excited to get that privilege," Clingaman said. "When they asked me to do it, I said, 'Yes, I would appreciate it very much.' And it's just gone on like that."

After serving in Okinawa, Japan, during World War II -- "I had seen enough of things I didn't care to stay there long," he said -- he settled in Texas, working different jobs. Clingaman retired in 1986, and his wife died four years afterward. He later came to Virginia, where he had family.

Schlotterbeck, a 1948 graduate of West Point, retired as a colonel in the Army in 1971 and then worked at Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire. Stationed in Washington "a lot," he used to frequent Bentonville to feed his appetite for fishing, Mrs. Schlotterbeck said. The couple wound up in the Woodstock area, and with a pond on their property.

"He still has a great dream to be on the edge of the pond -- it's got bass, blue gills," Mrs. Schlotterbeck said.

While the recent illness has robbed him of being able to help Clingaman with the flag, Schlotterbeck is nowhere close to losing his American pride. As the two men, with Spangler and Mrs. Schlotterbeck, sat in Greenfield to talk about their volunteer flag work, Schlotterbeck, unprovoked and after playing some footsie with his wife, said only one complete sentence during the course of the conversation -- the Pledge of Allegiance.

"He's a great patriot," Mrs. Schlotterbeck said.