El Segundo Police Officers' Association

In 1917, an Army captain named Robert Queisser designed a small flag for a window.

He had two sons serving overseas. The flag he patented carried a blue star for each family member in service, and families across the country began hanging them where neighbors could see. It was a quiet way of saying that someone from this house is out there.

If that person did not come home, the family sewed a gold star over the blue one.

That is where the term comes from. Not a medal. Not a designation handed down by an institution. A mother with a needle, covering a blue star, in a window on an ordinary street. In 1918 the practice was formalized when the Women's Committee of the Council of National Defense asked President Wilson to approve a gold star for mothers who had lost a child in the war, and he did.

Gold Star Mother's and Family's Day is observed on the last Sunday in September, this year on the 27th.

Members of this association know Gold Star families in the communities we serve. Most of them will not say so out loud.

If you know one, they do not need a speech. They need to know their person is still remembered by name. Share this post in their honor.

There is a POW/MIA flag flying at your post office right now. Federal law puts it there.

The National POW/MIA Flag Act, signed November 7, 2019, changed a rule most people never knew existed. Before it, the flag was required at federal sites on six days a year. Now it must fly on every day the American flag flies. At the Capitol. At the White House. At every national cemetery, every VA medical center, the World War II, Korean War and Vietnam Veterans memorials, and every post office in the country.

It is also the only flag other than the Stars and Stripes ever to fly over the White House.

The design came out of a request from Mrs. Michael Hoff, whose husband was missing in Vietnam, and was adopted by the National League of Families in January 1972. A silhouette, a strand of barbed wire, a watchtower, and four words. You Are Not Forgotten.

More than 80,000 Americans are still unaccounted for from past conflicts.

Members of this association pass that flag most days without looking up. Today is a good day to look.

Share this post in their honor.

When the Air Force became its own branch on September 18, 1947, it did not have a uniform of its own.

For years afterward its people wore Army olive drab with new insignia. A brand new service, dressed in its old parent's clothes. Air Force Materiel Command's own history calls 1947 through 1954 the transition period. The blue everyone recognizes now had to be invented from scratch.

The falcon came later too. Cadets of the Class of 1959 chose it as the Academy mascot on September 25, 1955, for its speed, power, courage and agility. The Academy still keeps live falcons, cared for by the cadet falconry team.

Seventy nine years on, a service that started out borrowing its clothes flies 4,865 aircraft across the active force, the Air National Guard and the Reserve.

Some of our own members wore that uniform first. They tend to mention it.

Happy birthday to the United States Air Force. Drop a blue heart in the comments if you or someone you love served in it.

On September 11, 2001, the Coast Guard put out a call on marine radio for all available boats.

Ferries answered. So did tugboats, dinner cruise boats, fishing charters, and private craft whose owners had no obligation to be anywhere near it. Lower Manhattan had no bridges open and no subways running. The only way off the island was the water.

In under nine hours they carried an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people out. It remains the largest maritime evacuation in recorded history. Not one life was lost in the evacuation itself.

Most people do not know this happened. It is not in the footage everyone remembers. It was ordinary people with boats who heard a request and turned toward the smoke.

Twenty five years on, that is the part worth handing to whoever comes next. 2,977 people were killed that day, and thousands of others spent that morning deciding, without being asked twice, to go get somebody.

Every member of this association understands that decision. It is the same one they make on an ordinary Tuesday.

Share this post so someone who has never heard of the boat lift hears about it today.

Nobody is entirely sure who invented Labor Day, and the two leading candidates had nearly the same name.

The Department of Labor lays out both cases without picking a winner. Peter J. McGuire, a carpenter and co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, is the traditional answer. But the Department notes that recent research seems to support Matthew Maguire, a machinist from Paterson, New Jersey. McGuire and Maguire. A holiday celebrated for more than 140 years, and the credit is still open.

What is settled: the first Labor Day was Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City. By the time Congress made it federal on June 28, 1894, thirty one states had already made it a holiday on their own. The country adopted this one from the bottom up.

Today most people get the day. Not everyone does. Our members are working it, along with the nurses, the line crews, the dispatchers, and everyone else whose job does not observe a Monday in September.

Nine out of ten people who attempt su***de and survive do not go on to die by su***de later.

That figure comes from Harvard's Means Matter project, drawing on a review of ninety studies. It is worth sitting with, because of what it actually means. For most people the worst moment is not the permanent one. It passes. They go on.

September is National Su***de Prevention Month, and this is the month to say the difficult part plainly. Research from CNA and First H.E.L.P. documented 1,287 law enforcement and corrections personnel lost to su***de between 2016 and 2022, an average of roughly 184 a year.

Those numbers are not here to frighten anyone. They are here because a hazard that goes unnamed does not stop being a hazard.

Members of this association carry this alongside everything else the job asks of them. We would rather talk about it early than talk about it after.

If you are carrying something heavy right now, the odds are better than the moment feels.

Send this post to one person you have not checked on in a while.

***dePreventionMonth

When a disaster hits, the phone network does not fail evenly. Voice calls go first.

Here is why. A phone call holds an open channel for as long as you talk. A text message is a tiny packet that queues, retries, and slips through gaps a call cannot use. That is why the FCC's emergency guidance says plainly that in many cases text messages will go through when your call may not.

The second half of that guidance is the part almost nobody follows. Pick a contact who lives outside your area and make sure everyone in your household knows to check in with that person. When something happens locally, local lines jam. Long distance often still works. Your out of area contact becomes the switchboard while the neighborhood ones are useless.

September is National Preparedness Month. Two things, ten minutes, no shopping required. Agree on the out of area contact, and make sure everyone knows to text rather than call.

Our members work the days these plans get tested. The households that made one are noticeably easier to help.

Comment below with the one preparedness step you have actually done. Not the one you keep meaning to do.

Happy 110th birthday to the Marine Forces Reserve.

On August 29, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Naval Appropriations Act, formally establishing the Marine Corps Reserve as World War I loomed and the country began preparing for the possibility of entering it.

Here is the growth curve: in April 1916, the Reserve consisted of 35 Marines. By the time Germany surrendered in November 1918, it had reached 6,467. Reserve Marines fought at Belleau Wood, Soissons, St. Mihiel, and Meuse-Argonne.

Today, Marine Forces Reserve is the largest command in the Marine Corps, with roughly 40,000 drilling Selected Reserve Marines across 184 Reserve Training Centers nationwide. They hold civilian careers and stay mission-ready at the same time.

Several members of this association do exactly that. Two commitments. One standard.

Semper Fidelis.

2026 LA County Chiefs Pink Patch Project Photoshoot at the USS Iowa! October is just around the corner! Stay tuned for the 2026 Breast Cancer Awareness Patch!

The most dangerous part of a child's school day happens before the first bell and after the last one.

NHTSA data shows more school-age pedestrians are killed between 6 and 8 in the morning and between 3 and 5 in the afternoon than during any other hours of the day. Those are exactly the windows when kids are walking to stops, cutting across parking lots, and heading home with headphones in.

A few things worth saying out loud to any child walking to school this year. Use the sidewalk whenever there is one. If there is not, walk facing traffic so you can see what is coming. Cross at corners and marked crossings, never between parked cars. And put the phone away for the length of the walk, because a driver who is not paying attention needs you to be the one who is.

Our members will be on those routes when the year starts. We are glad to be there.

Comment with the age of the kid in your life heading back to class.