He told an irresistible story about the flag for years. The country believed him. He made it all up.
This claim was already far more modest than the notion that Heft was credited as the flag’s designer, but the most damning sentence came in the third paragraph: “As it later turned out, this was the arrangement that the U.S. government used when they started manufacturing the flag.” In other words, less than two years after his alleged triumph, his own hometown paper said nothing about Heft designing the flag, let alone his dramatic meeting with Eisenhower.
Heft always said that designing the flag in Stanley Pratt’s American history class was the turning point of his life, and he precisely dated the beginning of the project to Friday, April 18, 1958. This is inconsistent with the assertion—which appeared equally often in his recollections—that he was 17 and a high school junior at the time. The chronology also conflicts with his claim to have contacted Gov.
Heft’s implication that no one else had anticipated the admission of Hawaii—which had usually been mentioned in the same breath as discussions of Alaskan statehood—was ludicrous, as was the notion that he made his flag “while other flag designers were still fooling around with 49-star patterns.” There was no mention of Eisenhower, but the other pieces of the myth were falling into place, and Heft evidently felt more comfortable telling the story in Maryland.
Heft’s lie slowly grew over time, and his exaggerations frequently took the form of large numbers. In a 1967 talk in Kansas City, Missouri, for instance, he said that his design had been chosen over 90,000 identical entries because his flag—which he now backdated to 1958—had arrived a year and a half before the others. He also claimed to have turned down an offer from the Smithsonian to purchase the flag, which he said elsewhere had been insured by Lloyd’s of London for $250,000.
A few years into his tenure as mayor—which was characterized largely in news reports by his hostility to the mostly immigrant workers who picked tomatoes on nearby farms—Heft made a failed run for the Ohio House of Representatives, and he tried again in 1984. Sen. John Glenn, who later credited Heft with the design of the flag in a speech in the Senate, hailed him as “the greatest mayor the city of Napoleon ever had,” but Heft was soundly defeated.
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