“Ask Flags Displayed on Streets Saturday” was a normal headline back in 1939, when verbs and subjects frequently got a bit confused and sometimes swapped places. In this case, the subject of the sentence apparently got bored and went home.
Actually, I suspect the two factors at play here were: 1. The difficulties of printing presses and headline spacing, and 2. The willingness of people to untangle odd syntax.
“Legion requests flag display” would probably be the headline now, or something similar.