Valorie Swiger, best known for putting up hundreds of yellow ribbons in South Portland after her son was killed in action in Iraq in 2007, died of pancreatic and lung cancer Thursday. She was 64.

Although Ms. Swiger was well known for the yellow ribbons, her daughter said, she affected even more lives by providing a home for over 100 foster children – adopting five of them – as a single mother.

Valorie Swiger, whose son was killed in action in Iraq in 2007, puts up a yellow ribbon in South Portland. File photo/Gordon Chibroski

“She slept on a couch for 30 years” because she gave up her bedroom to foster children, Angel Cole recalled Saturday.

“She had a big heart. She just had so much love to give,” Cole said. “We weren’t rich, but there was always someone who needed a place to stay or somebody who needed something more than we did.”

Swiger was an oasis of calm – most of the time anyway – in a house full of activity, her daughter said.

“It was always crazy and busy. There was always something going on,” she said. “She took it all in stride.”

Cole said she, her siblings and her mother were aware of the bittersweet nature of foster care. They would take care of children, sometimes for only a night and sometimes for much longer, but had to say goodbye if the child went back to a parent or was adopted by another family.

“There were heartbreaking times, for sure,” Cole said. “One sister was with us for five years and we thought she was going to stay and it ended up working out that she was able to go back to her natural mom. But that was hard.”

Swiger was a determined woman who wouldn’t let things stand in her way, said Dan Fortin, who with his wife, Diane, helped with the yellow ribbon campaign.

In 2003, Ms. Swiger and Diane Fortin spent hours putting together about 200 yellow ribbons to honor those who were serving in the military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then Ms. Swiger and Dan Fortin went out and tied them on hundreds of utility poles around South Portland.

“We turned the town yellow!” Dan Fortin remembers Ms. Swiger exclaiming.

But the city banned the practice, worried that city property could be used to display controversial symbols and some residents complained that the yellow ribbons represented a tacit endorsement of the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq war.

But Ms. Swiger and the Fortins put them up again in 2007, after Sgt. Jason Swiger and another South Portland High School graduate were killed in action.

Ms. Swiger and Fortin agreed to stop putting up the ribbons after the city said it would erect a memorial to the fallen in all wars.

But Diane Fortin said the monument itself became a focal point for the debate about the Iraq war and Ms. Swiger was disappointed in the result – a small monument in an out-of-the-way spot on Ocean Street, near Mahoney Middle School.

Dan Fortin said that after initially making the bows themselves, he and Ms. Swiger found a way to purchase them already tied. But by that time, the deal had been struck with the city to stop putting them up.

“I’ve still got some out in my garage,” he said Saturday. “We were going to put them up for Valorie, but we figured we’d get arrested.”

The Fortins said it was always clear that, no matter what the cause or other demands on Ms. Swiger’s time, it was the children who came first.

“Those kids went without nothing,” Diane Fortin said. “Those kids had it all. She sacrificed.”

Related Stories