Scrapbook holds memories sweet and sad

After Sept. 11, Jimmy Agner just couldn’t get the scrapbook out of his mind.

And now with Dec. 7 just around the corner ...

Well, it’s hard to believe it’s been 60 years since Pearl Harbor, since we got into World War II and just plain knew the atomic bomb would keep people from having any more wars.

No more wars?

Goodness, Korea was just around the corner. And then it wasn’t too long before Vietnam came along and then the Gulf War, and suddenly more than half a century had slipped by, and now this new kind of war is here.

And Jimmy just kept thinking about his scrapbook, wondering where it was. And who was in it. And if he’d recognize them now.

“Then one day my wife was was cleaning up a closet, and she said, ‘We’ve got to do something with this old book,’ and I said, ‘That’s my old scrapbook.’ I just couldn’t believe it. I took it down, and we had fun reading it.”

And sadness.

His scrapbook is like those big old scrapbooks everybody over a certain age had at one time or another. Kind of a cream color cover that looks like leather but isn’t with an Indian head in a full headdress embossed on the front and the pages tied in between the covers with what looks a like a shoe string for an old timey pair of — what’d we call ‘em? — oxfords.

Jimmy was still a kid back in those old World War II days, not quite 8 years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

He’ll never forget it.

“I was sitting on the steps in the hall at my grandma’s house,” he says, “watching them put up the Christmas tree, and the next thing I knew my aunt came in screaming and hollering that the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor and her husband would have to go to war.”

He probably bought that scrapbook for about a quarter at McClellan’s or Woolworth’s or Kress’. They were Salisbury’s three downtown dime stores where most things cost a penny or a nickel or a dime or a quarter. A few things cost a little more but not many back then.

“These two planes hit each other,” Jimmy remembers, and he cut the picture out of the newspaper, and maybe that was when he decided he’d keep a scrapbook.

Anyway, he did, he says, “and I collected pictures of guys in World War II. Especially those Rowan County guys that I knew who came into File’s Store down on Bringle Ferry Road, and most of them went into war, and some of them didn’t come back.

“My grandmother, Gertie Poole Eller, owned File’s store till the day she died, and I lived next door till I was eight years old and my dad built a house down the road further.

“I was in that store all the time. Olivia File told my mother she would take care of me, and she had a daughter, Ann, and we played together all the time. My mother was Ora Eller Agner. She died on Oct. 22, 1946, when I was 12 years old.”

By that time the war was over and his scrapbook was about full.

“A guy named Jimmy Austin or something like that had started delivering papers during the war, and I started cutting pictures out.”

Sometimes he cut out pictures of a homecoming or Rockwell High School’s baseball team — all of them dressed up in neckties — when the boys won a title.

And a picture of him and his sister, Peggy, for no special reason. They were dressed up, too, and all it said under the picture was “Attractive children of Mr. and Mrs. James Arthur Agner of this city,” and they were attractive. No doubt about that.

Here and there he pasted in a wedding picture or two and some picture postcards — and even a picture of Clark Gable and his wife, Carole Lombard, when she got killed in that plane crash.

But mostly he saved pictures of servicemen, one after the other, as though every one of them was a hero because, of course, they were, and he just kept cutting them out and putting them in that scrapbook all through the war.

“There’s Bill Russell,” he says, turning the pages now. “He was in the National Guard. And that young guy there, that’s Jack Athey. He’d come in the store and shoot the breeze and then he left. That’s Poole, and that’s Eller, and that’s Morgan, and that’s Broadway.”

And the four Willett brothers and sisters, all pictured together, who had all won Distinguished Flying Crosses, and David Bean who was liberated from a German prison camp and his brother, who came home from the South Pacific.

Flipping through the pages of that scrapbook makes you think the Post must have had a standing headline that said, “Brothers in Service.” On one double page are the Kesler brothers and the Eagle brothers and the Kirk brothers and the Cress brothers, and on the next page is a picture of John Morgan, who was 96 and the oldest Confederate veteran in Rowan, with his grandson, Clifford Morgan, who was in the Army.

When the war was over and Jimmy grew up and joined the National Guard and then went into the Navy in 1955, he left everything at the house. His books and that scrapbook and everything else. That was natural enough. It was home.

“And when I got back my daddy had remarried, and his wife threw a lot of my stuff away, but my sister, Peggy, had my scrapbook and put it up.”

By then she had married Joe Troutman, and she’d teased Jimmy that when he went in the Navy that they’d issue him a wife with a sea bag, and he used to tease back that, well, she was right. His wife, Velma, did come with the seabag.

He stayed in the Navy for 20 years. Then he came home, built a house, got a job with Salisbury Tractor and worked on small engines and “lots of lawn mowers,” he says, until it closed.

“Then I went to work driving a school bus and then for Brown Supply at Granite Quarry repairing lawn mowers again, and that’s where I retired from.”

He and Velma had two children, Karen and Rodney.

“And I’m a great-grandpaw now,” he says. “I’ve got four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.”

But that’s not what he came up to the Post to talk about. He came to talk about his scrapbook.

“I thought I might be news,” he says, flipping through the pages, “since this thing is happening. On Dec. 7 it’ll be 60 years since World War II started, and I heard President Roosevelt say, ‘This is World War II against terrorists,’ back then.”

He’s still flipping the pages.

“This was the Pepsi Cola man,” he says. “I can’t think of his name. I did know everybody in this book, but I’ve forgot them all now.”

But he’s not going to let Velma throw his old scrapbook away.

“I’m going to put it in my workshop,” he says. “She doesn’t go in there.”

And it’s worth keeping, he figures. It’s full of American heroes.

Contact Rose Post at 704-797-4251 or rpost@salisburypost.com .