According to today`s IoS, a YMCA helper from Georgia, USA (Moina Michael) was captivated by the poem In Flanders Fields. On 9/11/18 she was in NY, went to Wanamaker`s store and bought red paper poppies which she handed out, in memory of the fallen, to delegates at a conference she attended. In France, Anne Guerin had the same idea. I didn`t know that!

On this day, I feel it`s important that we don`t overlook the suffering of those who didn`t die but suffered the ill effects of the war for life. When I was at primary school we had a little shop close by that sold pop and sweets run by a fellow with one leg. We called him pegleg and he was the butt of much humour. Much much later, I found that he`d lost his leg at Ypres as an 18 year old, and I much regretted my childish behaviour. And there were tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands like him. Phil B

Apparently in the 1930s my grandfather said ‘remember the dead but do something for the living!’

Phil,

That is my information too.

"After reading McCrae's poem Moina Michael conceived the idea that the wearing of the bright red flower would be the most effective abnd eye-catching way of remembering the dead. At a meeting of YMCA overseas secretaries on 9th November 1918, two days before the signing of the Armistice, Moina Michael received a small sum of money to promote her idea.. (...) She decided to spend the money on 25 poppies. She would wear one of them while each of her secretaries would buy one with the same intent. This historic incident is thought to have been the first public and collective wearing of the poppy, with a view to remembering the war dead.
Some time later, a certain Mrs E. Guérin, Secretary of the French YMCA branch, suggested the industrial manufacture of artificial poppies (...) When she explained her idea to Field Marshal Douglas Haig he accepted it at once." etc.

(From : Herwig Verleyen, In Flanders Fields, The Story of John McCrae, his Poem and the Poppy.
1995, Publ. De Klaproos ISBN 90 5508 025 X, p. 36-37)

Aurel