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It’ll all happen Friday, July 4, our Independence Day.

In Greensboro’s Sunset Hills neighborhood, Scott Harkey will slip into his white shirt, his “Harkey For President” Styrofoam hat and his favorite fashion statement from Converse: red Chuck Taylors.

Harkey collects them. He did have 13 pairs. He now has nine in white, black and red.

He plans to get buried in his pair of high-top white Chucks. He keeps those shoes in the store bags. Double-wrapped. Today, those shoes still smell new.

But Friday, on the Fourth of July, Harkey will become, as he likes to say, “Mr. Patriotism.’’ With the help of his red Chucks.

On the Fourth of July of an even year, Harkey wears a high-top on his right foot, and a low-top on his left. On odd years, he wears a high-top on his left foot, and a low-top on his right.

Huh? Let Harkey explain.

“It’s to even out the wear and tear,” said Harkey, a 46-year-old father of two who runs Windshield Glass in Greensboro. “But you gotta get a little goofy for the Fourth of July.”

Downtown, Marilyn Baird will carry her signs.

She’ll meet dozens of marchers at 9 a.m. Friday in front of the Greensboro Cultural Center and hand out her handiwork: cardboard arrows she and six others created with scissors and paint last weekend.

The arrows run from 4 inches to 14 feet. And they’re painted red — or “minimum wage red,” Baird and her friends say.

Call it democracy at work.

Baird and her friends will march during the annual Fourth of July parade to draw attention to their campaign to make Greensboro the state’s first city to raise its minimum wage.

Greensboro’s minimum wage is $6.15 an hour. Raise-the-wage supporters want it to become $9.82, an hourly figure that will give it the same purchasing punch the minimum wage had in 1968.

In January, the Greensboro City Council said “no” to raising the minimum wage or putting it on the ballot. But with 8,000 petition signatures of support, Baird and others won’t give up.

They’ll do anything to get it on a ballot for local voters to decide — from approaching state legislators to putting together a Raise the Wage String Band.

“I’m persistent because it’s the right thing to do,” said Baird, a 57-year-old grandmother of two. “People aren’t being paid enough to take care of their families, and we have senior citizens — and I’ll soon be one — who have to make tough choices: pay rent or buy medication.

“And if we don’t do it, who will? If not us, then who?”

On a hill near Wendover, Carl Beeson will think about the names.

He’ll soak in the city’s annual fireworks display Friday night, with his partner, Nick Weaver, and their two children. And as fireworks rainbow the sky, he’ll remember the names — particularly the three from Greensboro.

It made him angry. But it made him understand.

Beeson teaches knitting at Yarns Etc. in downtown Greensboro, and nearly two months ago, his business partner, Tina Feir, turned her storefront window in downtown Greensboro into a makeshift memorial.

She wrote down names on a blackboard. She taped sheets of names to her window. She included names with ages, hometowns and home states.

She called it her “name project,” her way of remembering American soldiers who have died in Iraq since the invasion began five years ago.

A few Saturdays ago, Beeson helped Feir take down her display for a potential project for a New York book designer. He stuck sheets into a scrapbook and wrote down so many names his left hand cramped.

At last count, Feir’s memorial had 4,101 names. Three of those names came from Greensboro. One was 19.

“This (taking down the names) helped me identify with those soldiers more than just hearing, 'Three more people got killed in Baghdad today,’” said Beeson, 30, a payroll analyst for American Express. “This made it more real.”

Our fun-loving America. Our persistent America. Our pensive America.

It’ll all happen Friday, July 4th, our Independence Day.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com