Martha Crepps, a town clerk in little Badgington, Iowa, sewed tiny flag pins of red, white & blue yarn for each of the 628 residents in her town, but her HMO later refused to pay for the carpel tunnel surgery she then needed, on the grounds that her patriotic fervor was a voluntary action on her part.

Bob Zulotsney, a machinist in Chicago, placed first in a Fourth blueberry pie eating contest, then second in a whipped cream swallowing race, after which he staggered to the edge of the stage and fell, slicing open his right thigh, and actually bled red, white & blue.

A fight broke out in Yuma, Arizona at the Fourth of July parade, when three young toughs wearing American flag shirts attacked a Mexican-American youth waving a Mexican flag in one hand and an American flag in the other. After police broke it up, the Mexican-American and one of his attackers lay bleeding on the street, each one as red-blooded as the other.

Billie Sue Braxton, the runner-up in the Miss Fourth of July contest in Towbridge, Mississippi, got pregnant after having sex with her boyfriend under the bleachers during the town’s Fourth celebration, and nine months later had a baby boy with a birth mark on his buttocks that bore an amazing resemblance to “bombs bursting in air.”

Pat DePaul, a gay librarian with a bad heart, underwent open-heart surgery in Los Angeles after falling ill during a Fourth of July picnic and, though he otherwise fully recovered, realized to his dismay that he wasn’t gay anymore. Surgeons later confessed that they had transfused DePaul with the blood of heterosexual donors by mistake.

And finally… at a Fourth of July flagpole climbing contest in Jablonski, Missouri, participant Roscoe Jones lost his grip and fell backwards, landing on top of the mayor’s wife, who was holding a stop watch. Neither one required hospitalization but the watch disappeared, only to be discovered three years later during the mayor’s wife’s emergency appendectomy.

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