The American flag waits in Mission Valley.

On a recent vinyl foray in Portland, we acquired Republican Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen’s Gallant Men from 1968. On it is his rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner as well as his description of how Francis Scott Key wrote the lyrics.

I remember when television stations did not run programming all night; at the end of their programming day, they’d run some sort of station identification before shifting to static. That often included the American flag over patriotic music, a promise that they’d be back by dawn’s early light, I suspect.

• • O say can you see by the dawn’s early light,
  • What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,
  • Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
  • O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
  • And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
  • Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
  • O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
  • O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
• • On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
  • Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
  • What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
  • As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
  • Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
  • In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
  • ’Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave
  • O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
• • And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
  • That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
  • A home and a country, should leave us no more?
  • Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
  • No refuge could save the hireling and slave
  • From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
  • And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
  • O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
• • O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
  • Between their loved home and the war’s desolation.
  • Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n rescued land
  • Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
  • Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
  • And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
  • And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
  • O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!