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Cootie Catcher - U.S. Flag History for June 14th (2025)

Do you remember cootie-catchers?  They were a fad when I was young.  Known also as paper fortune tellers too, they fueled interesting games.  Their exact origin is unknown, according to Wikipedia.  Another name for them was 'salt cellar'.  The first reference to a salt cellar in Europe and the Americas was in 1836.  It was referred to in a November article that year from the The Lady's Book, a women's magazine published in Philadelphia.  Since there was no illustration in that article, it's unknown whether the salt celler and cootie catcher are the same.

With Flag Day arriving on Saturday, June 14th, I had an idea.  That was to create a cootie catcher as a learning game about the flag.  It would have exterior flaps looking like the flag, related flag information topics as choices inside (Flag Day, design, colors and adoption), and below the interior flaps would be narratives about the specific topic.   

Some might think this kind of effort is a waste of time, but I learned a lot by looking into the flag's history for the writing part.  Did you know a high school student designed an update to the flag in 1958 and that flag version is the one that flies today?  Why did he do that, you might be asking.  His history teacher gave students an assignment to make anything they wanted to share in show-and-tell.  In 1958, there were only 48 states, and Bob Heft (the student) wanted to see how the flag could be updated to reflect 50 states.  That's because he thought Alaska and Hawaii might become new ones.  Initially, Bob got a B for his project.  Two years after the project was completed, President Eisenhower called Bob to let him know his design had been selected for the new flag - since Alaska and Hawaii had become new states by that time. Ultimately, Bob's grade was changed to an A.  Isn't that cool?  

You can find the entire story here:


Back to the cootie catcher.  The first three photos show the finished project.  Looking it over, I discovered a very visible boo-boo.  That's because when you close it for use with the flaps open, the blue area of the flag is in the wrong place. The drawing on each flap needs to be reversed in order to come out right. You can see a draft of the one flap reworked.  

I've decided to leave this piece as is -- because I enjoyed the making of it, and it's inventive.


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