Now, RJ Childress is about to meet the elusive man in the green jacket—the mysterious patriot who made them both go viral.
Somehow a simple salute from the old man to an American flag stirred thousands of hearts, and Mr. Childress would have words with him in private.
It started with the senior’s sincere gesture of respect on the side of the road. Both men were among the crowd at one of those festive, rustbelt Christmas parades on South State Street in Westerville, Ohio, on Dec. 3.
Mr. Childress’s own daughter was marching in the Children’s Christmas Parade, and the 46-year-old dad, who works in finance but is a budding photographer, had toted along his handy point-and-shoot Fujifilm X100V.
Seeing the American flags being carried by officers in the parade, Mr. Childress rose to his feet but noticed he wasn’t the only one now standing at attention. For the old fellow—wearing his green jacket—stood also and, with his back to Mr. Childress, offered a salute.
Stirred by the man’s patriotic display, Mr. Childress methodically clicked off a couple of well-placed shots of him saluting the flag and thought little more of it, except that they seemed rather special.
Fame did not follow immediately after the parade when he posted photos of the man’s salute on Instagram. But follow it eventually did.
“I thought that was a nice gesture,” Mr. Childress told The Epoch Times. “Initially, it wasn’t about the photograph at all, it was the moment, and I felt the emotion of it.”
It didn’t dawn on Mr. Childress that hundreds of thousands of others would feel that emotion, too, until a thought came to him as he sat in Starbucks one week later:
“I wish there was a way I could find out who this man was because I’d love to gift him with a print.”
So, in a bid to identify the man, Mr. Childress anonymously posted the photo to a Westerville community page and hoped for the best.
“I shut my computer, and I went home, and I picked my kids up, and we went to the local basketball game,” he said, adding that right after the game his phone was lit up by notifications and messages from locals who loved the salute.
Right there on the spot, Mr. Childress threw together a Facebook Business page as a sort of public search hub. Within a day, the salute had been viewed 750,000 times, he said. Today, that number has more than doubled.
With community members scrounging in parallel for the old man “finally someone popped up and said, ‘This is my grandpa,’” Mr. Childress told the newspaper, adding that he immediately messaged back in hopes of solidifying the lead.
“I have not had a conversation with [the old man],” he said. “Only with his wife, and they’re very private people.
“I’m actually meeting with him today at noon.
“I’m going to put together a little gift package for him and present that to him, privately, you know.”
Their plan was to meet at a coffee shop.
Mr. Childress said, “We’re going to meet finally and probably have a couple of laughs because I don’t think any of us expected all this to happen.”
And that’s just what they did.
On Dec. 19, Mr. Childress met the man who had worn his green jacket to the Christmas parade and made him famous. He learned his name is Donald, his wife’s Susan, and they also live in Westerville. The men snapped a photograph together.
In an update, Mr. Childress revealed that Donald is everything they had all hoped he would be. That is: kind, humble, shy, soft-spoken, and a proud American.
