One girl, probably high school age, stepped out from the crowd.
As American troops marched through Liége, Belgium, on their way to the front lines in fall 1944, she walked alongside one of them long enough to ask whether he'd like to have a little flag. She placed the tiny piece of cloth -- folded into a bow and emblazoned with the American, Belgian and English flags -- in Francis Showman's hands.
The old soldier has never forgotten that moment.
"She gave it to me and she said, 'Good luck, soldier,' " recalls the 84-year-old retired firefighter, who was 21 when he received the miniature ribbon. He untied it and put it in his wallet. It's been there ever since.
"It's been with me every day of every year since she gave it to me," says Showman, who never had a chance to ask the girl's name and can't remember what she looked like. Their exchange lasted only three or four steps, a few seconds at most.
But the ribbon -- and the sentiment -- has lasted more than 60 years. It's endured too many wallets to count. When one wears out, Showman replaces it, always careful to put the ribbon, measuring about an inch, in one of its clear plastic windows.
He believes it brings him good luck. Just as the Belgian girl wished.
He carried it through nearly nine months as a prisoner of war in Germany, where he subsisted on soup made from sugar beet pulp and sawdust bread made from ground wood.
He's carried it on planes (hasn't crashed), through three heart attacks (lived through each one), and 56 years of marriage (still married, with three grown children).
He also carried it through 26 years as a Yakima city firefighter and countless emergency calls and fires.
"We've been married all these years without any problems. We have three kids, four grandkids. We've been very fortunate," says 77-year-old Rose, Showman's wife. "I'd like to think the flag had something to do with it."
Showman went to war in August 1944. He had wanted to enlist earlier with a couple of his buddies who were a bit older, but his parents refused to sign the consent form.
Now he's thankful for that: "If my folks had signed the paper, I probably would've been one of the casualties of the D-Day invasion."
Showman received his Army draft notice March 6, 1943. Two days later, he was sworn in. After basic training, he became a foot soldier with a 30-caliber Browning automatic rifle, assigned to Company L of the 115th Regiment of the 29th Infantry. They fought their way through France and Belgium and into Germany.
He estimates a week passed after he received the ribbon from the Belgian girl and before he was captured in early October 1944 during the Battle of Aachen. German soldiers kicked away his weapon and aimed their rifles, outfitted with bayonets, into his foxhole in the forest. There was nowhere to run.
Prisoners of war didn't get to keep their guns, money or shoes. But they got to keep their wallets. Showman hung onto his -- and his new good luck charm.
He never learned what happened to the other two soldiers of his three-man crew. But he was loaded into an overcrowded boxcar and taken to Stalag 7A, a forced-labor prison camp near Munich.
"We were a moving target," he says. "Trains were a favorite target of American fighter pilots, and the cars were not marked in any way to let pilots know there would be people (including American POWs) in there."
Showman held onto his tiny ribbon, and his train wasn't hit.
Barracks at the prison camp were infested with lice, fleas and bedbugs. It wasn't long before Showman was stricken with red, itchy sores.
But "There was nothing you could do about it," he says. "You just let them eat you."
POWs weren't given much to eat. And what they were given was substandard: "We had a lot of sawdust bread, bread made of sawdust," Showman says. "They ground up wood just like flour."
POWs also got watery soup: "It was not very unusual to see worms floating in it or different types of insects," Showman says. "In the beginning, we would pick them out. But as time went on we just said to heck with it and we ate them."
Every morning no matter the weather, German soldiers ordered the prisoners into the yard to be counted.
"A lot of these fellows were absolutely nothing but bones with skin stretched over them," Showman says. "Some of the weaker ones that couldn't stand for that long would fall face down in the mud and the guards wouldn't let you do anything for them."
Showman didn't stay long at the prison camp. Before Christmas, he was selected to work at a sawmill in the Bavarian town of Seebruck. Conditions were better there.
Still, Showman says, "There were German guards; they had their orders."
Showman and the 11 other POWs at the sawmill -- one Frenchman and the rest Americans -- worked 61/2 days a week, unloading and loading lumber, greasing machinery, sweeping up shop.
"You lose track of time," Showman says. "You have no calendar. You have no radio. You have no information. Time kind of just all blended together.
"Mostly you think about food," he says. "It's a strange thing. I never heard any word about females. Just food. And cigarettes."
Showman was liberated in early May 1945. He still has the telegrams that were sent home to his parents in Yakima, informing them their son was missing in action (Oct. 26, 1944), then a POW (Jan. 6, 1945), and finally "returned to military control" (May 27, 1945).
And, of course, he still has his good luck charm, tucked into a plastic cover in his leather wallet. When he travels with his wife and their friends, he says, they all want to sit near him on the plane.
But, he says, "I don't know if my good luck extends to them or not."
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