St. Peters man plants thousands of Memorial Day flags at Jefferson Barracks

ST. PETERS — Approximately 12,000 United States flags completely fill a Ford Ranger pickup truck, occupying both the bed and passenger space.

That was the scene last year. This year, Rickey Dinnella has 14,000 flags stored in a shed behind his St. Peters home, unsure if they will all fit in the truck.

Each Memorial Day, Dinnella takes the flags to Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, where he and a group of volunteers plant them on the graves of many U.S. servicemen and women.

Boy Scouts are responsible for planting flags on the remaining 170,000 graves.

Dinnella leads a team that covers the cemetery sections where his brother, an Air Force veteran and former member of the Air Force Bobsled Team, as well as his parents, are buried.

Members of the armed forces can be buried with their spouses at the cemetery, Dinnella explains. His father served on a patrol torpedo boat, PT-204, in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans during World War II. His PT boat instructor was John F. Kennedy, who taught after his own boat was struck and sunk.

Dinnella keeps the folded flag that covered his father’s casket on his mantle, under a photo of his father in uniform and the medals he earned.

Rickey Dinnella, age 64, spent 20 years in the Army and retired as a first sergeant. While serving as a military policeman, including guarding nuclear missile sites in Europe, he also worked as a recruiter for a few years.