By Mike Bodine
Register Staff
10-18-2008

Yellow ribbons are once again gracing the store fronts, homes and schools around Bishop as part of Yellow Ribbon Month to honor U.S. soldiers overseas.
This year the ribbons have taken on additional meaning, as they have been dedicated to the memory of Lone Pine resident Corporal Wayne Marshall Geiger, who was killed in action during combat operations in Baghdad in October 2007.
The ribbons were put up by the local MOMS Club, the Mothers of Military Servicemen and -women.
Marilyn Nicholson, president of the MOMS Club, said the ribbons are not about raising money, but raising awareness and help keep soldiers in the hearts and minds of the community.

“It is our way of showing soldiers that the town of Bishop appreciates them and is grateful for their sacrifices,” Nicholson said.
According to Nicholson, some 1,200 bows were fashioned this year by MOMS officers Diane Grace, Jeri Rich, Debbie Turner and Michael Otoshi along with Marvie Kothman and friends in Big Pine and Aimee Banta and her grandmother.

Jeri Rich, MOMS Club secretary, tying yellow ribbons around the old Town and Country Shopping Center on West Line Street in Bishop. Photo submitted

The first day the club started putting up ribbons, Nicholson said six Bishop Union High School girls offered their help as did soldier Daniel Turner, home on leave from Iraq, and his friends. That next Saturday Arnie Palu of KIBS and some JV football players hung ribbons at the fairgrounds and along the Home Street School fence. Nicholson said she was so impressed by their dedication especially after coming home from an away game at 3 a.m. the morning before.
The history of the yellow ribbon and its symbolism is not so easy to pinpoint.
Gerald E. Parsons, the late folklorist and librarian for the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center, wrote an article on the subject in 1991.
He wrote that, “no single form of expression documented in the Archive of Folk Culture has stimulated more letters, more phone calls, more in-person inquires than the yellow ribbon.”
The buzz of inquiries began in the  early 1980s when yellow ribbons were being displayed everywhere in America in support of American hostages in Iran. Parsons reported that as he dug deeper he found assertions that the symbolic use of the yellow ribbon dated back to the Civil War and the song “Round Her Neck She Wore A Yellow Ribbon” recorded in 1938, and perhaps even earlier in different versions. In the last act of Shakespeare’s “Othello,” Desmadona sings one of the song’s lyrical ancestors.
Parsons found that one version or another of the song had been around for more than 400 years. A 1949 movie of the same name, starring John Wayne that is set at a time just after the Civil War, was “the only demonstrable connection between the yellow ribbons and the Civil War …and a rather weak one.”
Parsons, determined to trace the history of the yellow ribbon, found that the yellow ribbon was not a custom, or song, but a folk tale, a legend. The story had an oral tradition but was first written in a 1959 book on prison reform, “Star Wormwood.”
The story tells of two men on a train. One is a convict returning from a five-year sentence but afraid that his family will not want him back. The convict wrote his family telling them to hang a white ribbon on the apple tree next to the train station if they wanted him back, and if there was no ribbon the convict would know not to get off the train and seek a new life elsewhere. As the train approached the station, the convict was too nervous to look himself and asked the other man to look for him.
“In a minute he put his hand on his companion’s arm. ‘There it is,’ he cried. ‘It’s all right! The whole tree is white with ribbons.’”
In 1971, a piece in the New York Post  called “Going Home” described the story of an ex-convict who is watching for a yellow handkerchief on a roadside oak. The author, Pete Hamill, said he claimed to have heard this story in oral tradition.
In 1973, the song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” sold three million records in three weeks.
In 1979 Penne Laingen tied a yellow ribbon around the oak tree in her front yard in solidarity for her husband who was being held hostage in Iran, and the ribbon would remain until her husband came home to untie it himself.
“And thus,” Parsons wrote, “a modern folk legend concerning a newly released prisoner was transformed into a popular song, and the song, in turn, transformed into a ritual enactment.”
According to Parsons’ understanding, Laingen’s display was “the first announcement that the yellow ribbon symbol had become a banner through which families could express their determination to be reunited.”
Parson summarized that, “Ultimately, the thing that makes the yellow ribbon a genuinely traditional symbol is neither its age nor its putative association with the American Civil War, but rather its capacity to take on new meanings, to fit new needs and, in a word, to evolve.”