Fayne Haynes has been “the Flag Man” of Murfreesboro since 2000.
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Over the past 11 years, Fayne Haynes has seen thousands of American flags fly out the door of his business.
The 89½-year-old World War II veteran and former P.O.W. can’t help but grin when he considers how many of those flags today wave in the breeze o’er Rutherford County in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
From 1950 until 2000, this building a few blocks off the square was home to Haynes Bros. Candy Company, a business Fayne operated with his brother Haywood.
In 2000, when the patriotic Haynes went to find a big flag to fly from his 30-foot-high flagpole, he couldn’t locate one in town large enough to suit him. Thus, he opened Fayne Haynes Flag & Flagpole Company.
“We built a little museum here, and I had this big 30-foot flagpole,” says Haynes. “I could not find anything but 3X5-foot flags in Murfreesboro. That’s all they had. I wanted bigger flags for myself. I decided to go into the flag business.”
Not only does he sell thousands of flags a year, many of them 4X6-inch stick flags, but he also sells 20-, 25- and 30-foot aluminum and white fiberglass flagpoles. They stand erect in front of homes and churches and also at such businesses as MidSouth Bank, Florida Brothers Auto Parts, the Murfreesboro Exchange Club and Goo-Goo Car Wash. His flagpoles also hold flags in Christiana, Bell Buckle, Manchester and Shelbyville as well as at the Eagleville ball park and the Cascade High School football and baseball fields.
Known to many as “the Flag Man,” Haynes only sells flags made in the U.S.A.
“We have access to over 200 world flags and all the state flags,” he says. “The company we get them from has been in business for over 100 years.
“As for U.S. flags, we have 4X6-inch stick flags that we sell for a quarter, and we sell thousands of them. We carry from the little bitty on up to a 10X15-foot in stock, and we can get bigger ones.”
As for the larger flags, he knows his business, saying, “The Poly-Max flags stand the winds better. It’s a little thicker flag and cost a little more than nylon, but I think the nylon flies better.”
He especially wants home owners to be aware about their right to display the American flag known by such names as Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes, the star spangled banner and the red, white and blue. “You don’t have to have a permit to put up a flag in Murfreesboro,” he says.
Haynes and his wife, Beatrice, have been married 68½ years and have four children, 11 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. The businessman maintains a homemade museum in his flag office, a long room that overflows with photographs, newspaper clippings, magazines, books, map and memorabilia from his life, his military service and about the candy company.
The hard-working man finished his formal education after eight grades at a two-room schoolhouse in Deason in Bedford County. Before WWII began, as a youth of 17 he drove a peddling truck.
“I bought chickens and eggs and sold groceries and kerosene when kerosene was a dime a gallon. Eggs were 13 cents a dozen,” he remembers.
Drafted at age 20, Haynes entered the U.S. Army in late December 1942 and mustered out Oct. 16, 1945. But in those dark and dangerous hours in between he fought in the Battle of St. Lo, the Battle of Brest and the Battle of the Bulge and was a gunner for six months and two days on the front lines in Europe as a member of the 612th Tank Destroyer Battalion, B Company.
“I think that the good Lord saved my life several times in combat,” he confesses. “I went in with the 1st Army, and we were the first to land on Omaha Beach.
“We were the only ones that had a gun that would knock Hitler’s tanks out. They trained us to death. We had 12 guns, we lost one in landing. Within two hours we had the guns ready to fire. My gun alone fired 1,001 rounds the first 10 days,” said Haynes, who proved to be deadly accurate as a gunner. He knocked out targets as quick as lightning.
After fighting their way into France, Haynes and his crew raced 600-plus miles across the country in an open halftrack to the Siegfried Line between Belgium and Germany. In Manderfeld, Belgium, they bogged down and were stuck for 73 days mired in the mud, but the German Army was trapped in muck as well.
“We had to wait until it froze over, and then the Battle of the Bulge started,” Haynes said. On the first day of the battle, the gunner and gun commander knocked out three tanks but was soon surrounded, trapped by an SS Panther tank unit. “There were only 123 of us there, and all were either killed or captured.”
Haynes spent four months in a prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag XIB, in Fallingbostel, Germany, southwest of Hamburg. He was one of 94,941 Americans who were kept behind Nazi barbed wire during the war.
Once the Germans sensed they going to lose the war, Haynes and his comrades were taken from the camp and marched east. About eighty miles into the forced march,>>> the Tennessee soldier and four of his fellow G.I.s escaped. They were enabled by a German Army field map and compass that another G.I. passed along to him.
(Haynes has the actual the map on a wall in his office and has marked the route they took with a lead pencil.)
“I thought the Holy Spirit was with me at all times,” said Haynes, a strong Christian. “That night it came to me like a dream: the Holy Spirit telling me how to get away. The next day, I told my buddy, ‘Here is how we are going to get away.’ We were marching up front, and I told him, ‘We are gonna drop back along the way and be the ones at the very back.’
“They gave us 10 minutes’ rest every hour, and we would lay beside the road. ‘When they holler for everybody else to get back in the road, we are gonna lay there and let them walk off and leave us,’” he told his pal.
“The Germans did just that. They never looked back. They left five of us there. We waited until they were nearly out of sight and got up and walked off.”
The danger was not over as the small band had to work its way back toward friendly territory by passing German soldiers and then past British defense lines where they might accidentally be shot.
Eventually, they joined with the British army for three days in combat conditions until a mail truck carried them off the front lines. They were flown from Holland over the English Channel to Bristol, England, and then taken to the 318th American Field Hospital, where Haynes spent 18 days and put on 25 pounds.
“When the war ended in Europe, they let us go into Oxford. I’ll never forget: an old woman hugged me and said, ‘Oh, you Yanks have won the war. Now my son can come home.’ I spent 10 days in London waiting for the boat to come home on. We were there for the Victory Parade, and we saw the king and the queen,” Haynes recalled.
“We finally got on the boat, and once we were out to sea, a voice over the loudspeaker said, ‘This is the SS John Ericsson, and we’re homeward bound to America,’ and everyone on board screamed, and we rode the boat back to New York.”
Haynes, who was awarded a Purple Heart, was not in good health when he returned stateside.
“At the end of the war I was in the V.A. hospital for a while, and they said there wasn’t anything they could do for me. They studied my records, and said I was worn out. I was worn out all right, but what they didn’t know was that I was coming down with TB,” he said.
“I had been in there for 31 days, and they told me there was nothing they could do for me. I said, ‘You all may have given up on me, but I ain’t giving up ‘ I called my brother and he came over and got me.”
Haynes’ tuberculosis was not diagnosed until Murfreesboro doctor David Dodd figured out his illness in the 1950, but the rigors of war had taken a terrible toll on his body.
“It took me a long time to get my health back. For 20 years after the war I was just skin and bones, like I was in the prisoner-of-war camp,” Haynes said. “I went to the Mayo Clinic in 1965, and they diagnosed me for five or six things … But they treated me, and I gradually got better over the year.
“Now I go to get a physical every year, and they say there is absolutely nothing wrong with me. Everything is right in place. My doctor wrote on the paper, ‘You are absolutely super.’”
And super-patriot Haynes, who weighed 130 to 135 pounds after the war, today tips the scales at 184 pounds and appears to be fit as a fiddle with a memory that is amazing. There is no doubt that the man, who will turn 90 in January, would go back and do it again, but then his service and attitude are what have made him an icon of Murfreesboro.
Maybe it’s not so amazing after all that he saw a need for bigger flags to be more easily accessible to Rutherford Countians smack-dab in the middle of the Volunteer State.
“The flag is a symbol of our country, our great nation,” he states, “and that is why so many of us fought in so many different wars, for the flag, and that is why I am proud to be an American. God bless America!”
Haynes drives a white Buick Lacrosse that displays a POW license plate tag. His vehicle also flies a small American flag above the right door and a MIA-POW flag the same size above the driver door.
“I’m the Flag Man” says Haynes, with no brag but simply sharing fact.
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