After days of brutal fighting, U.S. troops looked up at Mount Suribachi on the morning of Feb. 23, 1945, and saw an American flag flying.
Soldiers stopped and cheered. Ships offshore began blowing their horns.
A very famous photograph was taken.
Fifty years later, motorists on Interstate 4 south of Orlando saw a replica of the event that occurred on Iwo Jima. They’d stop and take not-so-famous photographs next to the bronzed Marines.
Then the flag and the men who raised it vanished from sight. That brings us to this week’s Ask Orlando question.
“For years as I drove down I-4 I looked forward to seeing the statue of the Iwo Jima flag-raising…. What happened to the man who erected it and where is the statue located now?”
The man was Bob Pipping from Lakeland. he died in an automobile accident in 1999. But about 10 years before that, he had an idea. He wanted to people to remember the sacrifices made by our military.
“He was very patriotic,” said his daughter, Alice Skipper.
There was no doubt about that. Pipping quit high school at 17 to join the Navy.
He fought in the South Pacific, then returned home and became a citrus farmer in Polk County. He’d line his orange groves with American flags, the big kind you see outside car dealerships.
Pipping wanted to do more, so he had a replica of the Iwo Jima statue built. It was modeled after the iconic photo of six Marines raising the American flag.
Pipping commissioned Felix de Weldon, who designed the original 60-foot monument at the Marine Corps War Memorial near the Arlington National Cemetery. He delivered a bronze monument, 9 feet high and 11 feet wide.
The smaller palette forced de Weldon to sculpt only four Marines, but there was no mistaking the image they were drawn from.
Pipping erected the monument in a grove by I-4 near Lakeland in 1990. Over the next decade, there’s no telling how many kids noticed it and asked a parent, “What’s that all about?”
Anyone born before 1950 could surely tell them.
Few probably knew how the monument got there, however, which was fine by Pipping. He didn’t put his name on it and wouldn’t say how much it cost.
“He didn’t do it for his own gratification,” Skipper said. “He was just proud of the military and loved our country.”
A couple of years after Pipping died, the state came up with a plan to widen I-4. The Florida Department of Transportation was going to do what the Imperial Japanese Army couldn’t — turn back the U.S. Marines.
A veterans group swooped in and moved the monument to the Fantasy of Flight air museum in Polk City. After a couple of years, the group hoped to relocate it to a rest stop on I-4.
That plan fell through and the monument was put in an Auburndale storage facility. That was no place for Cpl. Harlon Block, Pfc. Harold Schultz, Pfc. Ira Hayes and Pfc. Franklin Sousley to end up.
They are the four Marines on the memorial. Block and Sousley were killed in combat a few days after the flag-raising. Almost 7,000 Americans died and 20,000 were wounded capturing the tiny volcanic island.
President Franklin Roosevelt wanted the surviving flag-raisers to help sell war bonds. They were reluctant celebrities, but they followed orders.
In the confusion of war, one had been misidentified. It wasn’t until 2016 that a Marine Corps panel concluded Pfc. Harold Schultz was part of the flag-raising.
He was seriously wounded on Iwo Jima but recovered and spent 30 years working for the U.S. Postal Service in Los Angeles. USA Today reported Schultz never told anybody he was in the famous photo until the early 1990s.
He casually mentioned it to his stepdaughter over dinner.
“Harold, you are a hero,” she told him.
“Not really,” he said. “I was a Marine.”
Schultz, the last surviving flag-raiser on Iwo Jima, died a couple of years later.
But what became of their bronzed images in Florida?
I’m happy to report it’s found a home in Lake Alfred, which is about 40 miles southwest of Orlando. The city decided to build a memorial to veterans at Gardner Park in 2012.
The Iwo Jima monument was dedicated in 2013. It’s since been joined by a Purple Heart monument and others dedicated to troops from the area who were killed in Korea, Vietnam and the war on terror.
Names of the fallen are etched in granite. Pipping probably wouldn’t like it, but his name belongs somewhere at the park.
He may not have died fighting for our country, but he dedicated his life to honoring those who did.
“Ask Orlando” is a weekly feature intended to solve local mysteries and enlighten readers. If you have a question about anything Orlando, send an email to dwhitley@orlandosentinel.com.
