DAR Chapter Knits Poppies To Support Mission of The Doughboy Foundation
Published: 23 July 2024
By Linda Mitchell Phelps
Special to the Doughboy Foundation website

Poppy Card framed
The Otway Burns Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) is chartered in Swansboro, North Carolina, just outside the back gate of MCB Camp Lejeune. Many of the chapter’s members are military-related and all have a heart for the military–those coming up through ROTC and other cadet programs, active-duty members, and veterans who have served this great country.

Members of the Otway Burns Chapter, NSDAR, pictured by the Chapter’s Flag Retirement Box at the local VFW post.
In 2018, chapter members were preparing to attend the DAR’s Continental Congress to accept awards associated with hosting the Vietnam Traveling Memorial Wall over Memorial Day weekend in 2017. Regent Linda Phelps asked chapter member Margaret “Missy” de Tenley if she would knit four poppies for the four members attending Congress with Phelps, as she was putting together a gift basket for each.
De Tenley not only knitted four, but kept knitting, and when Phelps learned there was no National World War I memorial on the Washington, DC Mall, a fundraiser was born.
De Tenley has knitted hundreds of the little poppies. Phelps attaches pin backings to each and mounts them on a card she designed for the pins. The front of each card contains the poem written by DAR member Moina Michael in November 1918:
We Shall Keep the Faith
Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet – to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.
We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.
And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.
The back of each card reads, “Inspired by John McRae’s poem In Flanders Fields, DAR member Moina Michael penned her own poem of response in 1918 and vowed to see the red poppy adopted as a symbol of remembrance. She came to be known as the Poppy Lady because of her campaign to honor veterans through the wearing of the red poppies.”
Proceeds from the purchase of the DAR Otway Burns Chapter’s red poppy pin will be donated to the Doughboy Foundation to support The National World War I Memorial at Pershing Park on Pennsylvania Avenue i Washington, DC, one block from the White House, which honors the Americans who served in the First World War.
Each poppy is sold for $5 and one hundred percent of the price goes to the Doughboy Foundation. It hasn’t been a lot, but it’s what the Otway Burns Chapter can do and the members are thrilled to be part of honoring the memories of our World War I veterans.
Linda Mitchell Phelps is Regent of the Otway Burns Chapter, National Society Daughters of the American Revolution.
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