ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, June 13, 1996 TAG: 9606130006
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN CASEY STAFF WRITER
WHEN Beverly Fitzpatrick Sr. noticed the frayed flag flapping in the breeze outside the Jefferson Center on Campbell Avenue, he knew just where to go.
With a quick call to a local tavern, the retired judge won a promise for a new one.
The guy on the other end of the line was Bill Arnold. From a permanently reserved stool at Brambleton Avenue's Coffee Pot bar and restaurant, the disabled veteran swung into action.
From his "office" - a pay phone near the pool table - Arnold made a call to Washington. Within minutes, he'd secured not just any American flag, but a certified, flown-over-the-U.S. Capitol Stars and Stripes.
Accompanied by a military color guard, Arnold presented it to Fitzpatrick outside the Jefferson Center on May 8.
"I've always known him as the flag man," says Fitzpatrick, who led the effort to restore the former high school as an arts center. "He's been a friend a long time. When I think of a flag, I think of Bill Arnold.
"Whenever you need a flag," the retired federal judge adds, "call Bill Arnold."
More than a patriot
The Jefferson Center flag was merely the latest in Arnold's efforts to spread the red, white and blue around the Roanoke Valley.
It's a service the 64-year-old Roanoke native has provided for years - to schools, businesses, fraternal clubs and public parks. Some, such as the $24 flag at the Jefferson Center, Arnold pays for himself. The money comes out of his only source of income, disability checks he receives from the federal government.
The flag flying at Fishburn Park since last year? That was Arnold's work. He raised the money that paid for the pole and flag, and got lights and a granite marker donated. The one above Lee Plaza across from City Hall? Arnold served on the committee that put it there. His name is on the marker.
Arnold got the Coffee Pot's flag, and the one outside the Town Motel on Williamson Road, and another at the Draft House on Bent Mountain, and some that went in classrooms at Glenvar High School and Virginia Heights Elementary School. Sometimes his efforts stretch out of the valley. One went atop the Moose Lodge in Floyd.
"How many flags have I done? I have no earthly idea,'' Arnold says. ``Why do I do it? It's teaching people what the flag stands for - to get them to notice the flag. The flag is a symbol of this country.
"People are so fup and unappreciative of the veterans who fought for this country. I want them to learn what freedom means and who fought for that freedom."
Don't even bring up court rulings on a First Amendment right to burn American flags in protest. It could ruin his day.
"I think they ought to shoot the SOBs who burn them," Arnold snorts.
By now, you've probably figured out that Arnold considers himself a patriot. That's a good guess.
That sense of identity goes as far back as World War II, when as an 11-year-old schoolboy he collected 1,000 pounds of scrap paper, tin and grease for the Allied war effort. Little Billy Arnold, then of Day Avenue, won a medal for it.
Testifying to his patriotism are dozens of framed letters from congressmen and generals, and commendations from veterans groups. They adorn the paneled walls of the tiny two-room apartment on Memorial Avenue in Raleigh Court where Arnold lives alone, without a phone.
"I've known Bill a long time," says Bob Slaughter, a D-Day veteran from Roanoke who's leading fund-raising efforts for a national D-Day memorial in Bedford. "Bill's just a patriotic person, he's a good American, and he takes great pride in that sort of thing."
But a simple label can't possibly sum up Arnold's life.
The patriotism is a rock Arnold has clung to through his life: a past that's included severe mental illness, a suicide attempt, stays in psychiatric wards, four failed marriages, bankruptcies, bouts with alcoholism, drug abuse and myriad health problems.
Arnold has laid out that turbulent past, unvarnished, in an autobiography he's worked on for years.
His goal, before he leaves this Earth, is to see it published. The working title is ``No Purple Heart for Me.''
Parts of the book are intentionally funny: the five-mile dashes the former high school football star made to escape his Air Force base and elude the MPs on midnight runs to Japanese and Korean brothels around the time of the Korean War.
And there is unintentional hilarity. Some of it comes from Arnold's penchant for non sequitur: ``Also growing up, I began to work at a fish market dipping oysters, which left me with a deep-seated inferiority complex."
But what ties it all together is a chronicle of his struggle with mental illness that began in the U.S. Air Force, and which he deals with to this day. Arnold sets that tone in the book's first sentence: "I am a manic depressive."
"I would tell my friends a lot of different stories about what happened to me," Arnold says. "And they would say, `You ought to write a book.' And so I did. And I did it ... to help other psychiatric patients realize, `Don't give up. Keep trying. You'll feel better.'''
A tough life
Arnold is shaped like a beer keg and looks a bit like comedian Jonathan Winters, or maybe a real-life version of the comic strip character "Sarge" from ``Beetle Bailey.''
His voice grates, as if he's gargled with iron filings: rough, from-the-gut utterings caused by throat polyps that have plagued him for years.
Catch him nearly any morning at the Coffee Pot and you'll likely find a cigarette in his mouth, a Budweiser on the bar in front of him, trading quips with owner Carroll Bell or whoever else is around.
Arnold cusses a lot. Somehow, he manages to laugh easily in between often melancholic accounts of growing up.
At age 2, "Master Billy Arnold" won an honorable mention in a nationwide children's photography contest. Not much later, his parents gave him away to the next-door neighbors on Day Avenue, Arthur and Mildred Wilson. As foster parents, they raised him.
"Mother was sick and couldn't take care of me," Arnold says. "My daddy was chasing [women] all the time. ... My life wouldn't have been nearly as good if it wasn't for [the Wilsons].''
Arnold went to school at Highland Park Elementary, then to the old Lee Junior High School downtown, where the Poff Federal Building now stands. There, he starred in track. He boasts that he never lost a 100-yard dash.
He went on to star on the Jefferson High School football team, then the William Fleming High School team after that school opened. Sportswriters of the day dubbed him "fleet-footed Billy Arnold,'' and photos of his touchdowns won prominent play in The Roanoke Times and the old World-News.
Arnold ran right behind lineman George Preas, who went on to play 12 years for the Baltimore Colts. "He's the one who made [Colts quarterback Johnny] Unitas famous," Arnold says. "He made me look good, too."
Even then, Arnold was a bit wild.
"Back then, if you were a good football player, you didn't have to worry about anything," he recalls. "I skipped [school] three days a week in the off-season."
Arnold graduated from Fleming in 1950 and enlisted in the Air Force only months later, in 1951. That's where his real troubles began.
Highs and lows
Arnold's first assignment was to radio operator school at an Air Force base in Mississippi. He didn't realize it then, but the headsets he wore for hours a day listening to monotonous Morse code began driving him crazy.
"Half the class went nuts," he recalls. "Put those headsets on 10 hours a day and listen to the di-di-dah-dah and see what it'd do to you. I hear it to this day, sometimes. Put on the radio, put on the TV, and there it is."
One radio student stabbed himself; another jumped off a barracks roof. Arnold, who'd begun drinking heavily, found himself spiraling into a depression he couldn't understand. He transferred out of the school and ended up as clerk at another base in Georgia.
There, Arnold made corporal. But back in Roanoke, his birth mother - who died at age 91 last week - was struggling with her own mental illness. The Air Force gave him another transfer to a cushy job at Langley Air Force Base in Northern Virginia so he could be closer to her. There, he made sergeant.
Meanwhile, the Korean War was raging on. Arnold felt guilty that he wasn't there. He volunteered for combat. Instead, he found himself detailed to a support role in Japan just around the time the war ended. He ended up spending 13 months in Korea after the battle was over.
Manic-depressives typically swing between periods of depression so low they can hardly get out of bed and phases of elation that take them so high it scares friends and family. Arnold was no exception. His depression grew, then swung back to manic periods.
"When you are manic, and you are happy, you are completely happy," Arnold writes in the book. "There is nothing about being sad at all, it's just that you're not responsible for what you do."
What Arnold did was a lot of drinking, fighting and whoring, to the point that he was busted back down to private. Twice, he missed his ship home when his tour of Korea was up.
By the time he made it back to the States, the mood swings were becoming more pronounced. While manic, Arnold would go AWOL. During one fit of depression, he slashed his wrists and wound up for months in a military psychiatric ward in Wichita Falls, Texas. He was discharged from the Air Force in 1955.
Civilian life
The highs and lows continued after the Air Force. Arnold found success selling life insurance both in the Roanoke area and in Florida; during some years, he was the top producer in his region for his company.
"Someone who's manic can sell anything," he says. "The hell of it is, when you're high, you accomplish a lot of s---.'' But the wild mood swings interfered with his business and his personal life. Arnold drank a lot. For five years he swore off alcohol, but he substituted marijuana for it. His mental illness cost him four marriages. Each ended while he was institutionalized.
The first marriage, which lasted the longest, produced the pride of his life: his son, Scott Arnold. "Scotty," as Arnold refers to him proudly, is now a doctor serving a surgical residency at the University of Virginia.
Between 1971 and 1976, Arnold owned Bill's Country Kitchen, a successful beer joint on Brambleton Avenue.
"At its peak, we were doing 50 kegs a week," he says.
By then, he'd started taking lithium, which he takes to this day to control the highs and lows of manic-depression. He hasn't had a major episode in eight years.
Arnold lost the Country Kitchen after he was hospitalized for a gall bladder attack that required emergency surgery. A bankruptcy and more ups and downs followed. He started drinking again.
During a subsequent stay in the hospital for one bad depressive episode, he said a prayer:
"Dear God, if you see fit to make me live in the outside world, I promise to devote the rest of my life to helping people."
"I sincerely mean this," Arnold writes. "I'm not advertising like Billy Graham or Oral Roberts, as a healer, just as a person who is willing to help anyone I can. I feel that God kind of leads you into these situations where you are able to be of help to people."
Pointing to a picture of Jesus on his bedroom wall, Arnold says, "That's the main man right there." He doesn't go to church because he can't sit still through the services, but "I've been baptized three times," he says. "To make sure."
Veterans and flags
After years of appeals by his doctors, the Veterans Administration granted Arnold a 100percent service-connected disability in 1976. The Social Security Administration followed.
He hasn't worked for a living since then. But he has worked - on behalf of veterans.
For years, Arnold has channeled his energy and insurance smarts as a self-appointed volunteer caseworker, helping veterans get medical benefits due them. He takes the calls at the Coffee Pot's pay phone.
"I've been doing it for years, and I'm really goddamn great at it," he says. "I've worked a million of them right out of here - put them in the hospital, take them to the hospital, get them eligibility, put in a claim for them, get them more money. I do everything and anything for them."
The state of Virginia has an office that serves as a veteran's advocate in getting benefits from the federal government. But it has no advertising budget.
"Bill funnels a lot of people in here," says Dennis Harris, regional manager for the state Veterans Affairs office in Roanoke. "He goes out and finds them. We don't have the funds to solicit or advertise. People like Bill help us find them.
"It doesn't matter their level of education, where they're from; Bill's one of these people, he can fall right in and communicate with anybody," Harris adds. "The unique thing about Bill is he doesn't care about their period of war, he doesn't care whether they're white or black, male or female. If they're a veteran, Bill wants to help them. He's very effective."
Making the rounds
In between the lines of Arnold's book are the ideas that life is a struggle; that winning means not giving up; that people may be measured not only by their accomplishments, but also by the problems they've dealt with in life.
Arnold will always have to deal with manic-depression, although it's now under control. And he can't stand being alone.
And so each day, he arises early and begins his rounds: 6 a.m. at the Texas Tavern; breakfast at Buddy's on Market Street; to the Coffee Pot for phone calls and an early lunch; and Luigi's restaurant on Brambleton Avenue, where he often has dinner.
And when Arnold tools around town in his red Camaro, here and there he can look up at an American flag - one sign of the impact he's had - waving in the wind.
Want to know more about our flag? Visit the Betsy Ross Home Page on the World Wide Web at
http://www.libertynet.org/iha/betsy/
LENGTH: Long : 253 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: WAYNE DEEL Staff 1. Bill Arnold visits Roanoke'sby CNBFishburn Park, one of the many places in the valley that he's
supplied with flags. 2. ROGER HART Staff. Judge Beverly Fitzpatrick
Sr. and veteran and flag promoter Bill Arnold salute the American
flag that Arnold presented during a recent ceremony at Roanoke's
Jefferson Center. color.