Hearts beat true for the red, white and blue at the intersection of Vale Avenue and Deborah Jane Drive in Plum Borough.

Since Flag Day, nine homeowners have lined their streets with more than 600 American flags.

And these are no ordinary, off-the-store-shelf flags. Each one has had the honor of flying over the grave of a U.S. veteran for the patriotic period from Memorial Day, though Flag Day, to the Fourth of July.

Bob McCann, one of the original homeowners in the Regency Park neighborhood, started collecting the flags about eight years ago from the graves of veterans buried in two local cemeteries -- Woodlawn in Wilkinsburg and William Penn in Churchill.

"I love flags," says the U.S. Navy veteran, who served in the South Pacific during World War II.

"I think this is the greatest country in the world. I don't think it, I know it."

Every year, volunteers representing the Department of Veterans Affairs decorate the graves of veterans with the flags before Memorial Day at the two cemeteries owned by Inez Kress.

But Old Glory must be removed from each grave right after Independence Day so the cemetery can cut the grass, Kress says.

So McCann retrieves the flags, which otherwise would have to be retired. In some years, John Joyce has helped the effort, taking flags to decorate the intersection of routes 22 and 48 in Monroeville.

Once a neighbor joins McCann's patriotic effort, they keep the flags. This year, he was at his lowest level with only 30 flags remaining in his shed.

"That's going to pick up by a few hundred," he says, thinking ahead to next week's collection effort.

This is the first year the whole intersection has been decorated.

"It takes a lot of work," says neighbor Darrell Stockman, also a Navy veteran and long-time friend of McCann.

New neighbor Adam Embry, who manages S&T Bank in Penn Hills, didn't hesitate when McCann offered him flags.

"You've got to respect what those guys have done," Embry says.

Another new neighbor also joined the collective decorating effort. McCann hopes the flag fever is contagious as the colors spread through the neighborhood.

To firmly plant the flags in the ground, McCann first used a steel rod to poke a hole, then a screwdriver, graduating this year to a power drill provided by a neighbor. As a corner lot, he has flags lining two sides of his property, placed exactly 3 feet apart.

Embry smiles as he shares that McCann made fun of him because his flags were not placed with a precise yard in between them. Like Embry, Stockman doesn't measure either.

"Mine was a step-step," Embry says.

But any slight discrepancy in the placement of the flags is lost as the stars and stripes wave in the wind, in the land of the free and the home of the brave.