Replacing an American flag in Wiscasset High School’s Stover Auditorium on Nov. 14, students and staff took the opportunity to honor the local education icon the gym is named for; hear some lesser known pearls of flag etiquette; and donate to the local American Legion post.

Wiscasset School Committee member and former Wiscasset selectman, school teacher and school administrator Eugene Stover received the retired flag; and American Legion Post 54 received a check for $200 the school raised for the new flag and for the post’s project to put up American flags in town.

“You have a nice bunch of students and faculty here. Thank you very much,” Post Commander William Cossette Jr. said at Friday’s assembly. He told students he was proud of them.

Stover said he will add the flag he received to others he has at home, including one his grandson Jeremy Main gave him after having it on board the Army helicopter he piloted while serving in Afghanistan. Main’s mother, Stover’s daughter Jeanne Main, attended Friday’s ceremony with her father.

Principal Cheri Towle said that, because the gym is named for Stover, and he has long served the schools and the town, he was the perfect person to receive the old flag. Deb Pooler, the high school’s technology coordinator and student council adviser, said she felt privileged to announce that the flag was going to Stover. “He is somebody I looked up to as a kid,” she said.

“I’m humbly grateful that you ... present this flag to me,” Stover told attendees.  “I will honor it always ... and I will speak of it proudly when people ask about it.”

Stover was Wiscasset High’s assistant principal in the 1970s when Boothbay Harbor-raised Stan Tupper, a former U.S. Congressman, gave the school an American flag that had flown over the U.S. Capitol. Tupper donated the flag in honor of his grandmother, Stover said.

The flag hung in the school gym (now Stover Auditorium) for about two decades before being replaced by the one that was retired on Friday.

Cossette explained to the students the retiring flag was to be lowered slowly, and the new one raised more briskly.

Cossette passed along other items of flag etiquette. He told students that the American flag should never be worn, such as sometimes seen when an athlete drapes it over his shoulders, but that clothes with the flag pattern are acceptable as long as no part of them was made from a flag.

Attendees of Friday’s assembly gave the new flag its first pledge of allegiance and observed a moment of silence to think of those serving in the U.S. military around the world, and their families.