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Historian gathers veterans’ war stories before they’re gone

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Stan Smith is a tireless man on a mission. The 89-year-old Rancho Bernardo resident devotes 30 hours a week chasing down the stories of the nation’s increasingly few World War II veterans.

Smith is San Diego’s only full-time volunteer field representative for the Veterans History Project, which was started by the Library of Congress in 2000 to gather and archive the stories of America’s war veterans. Although the project is open to vets of all wars, more than 60 percent of the more than 100,000 oral histories now in the collection at the American Folklife Center are those of World War II veterans. There’s a rush to capture their stories before they’re lost because WWII vets are dying at a rate of more than 500 per day.

Everywhere Smith goes, he carries along a stack of flyers and approaches “old, gray-haired men” like himself to see if they might have a story to tell. His goal is to record the stories of at least two to three veterans every week for the rest of his life. His principal reason is that he believes younger generations aren’t aware of the sacrifices made by these veterans.

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“These guys were getting killed in battle, starving in prison camps and freezing to death in Korea. People are forgetting. They should know the severity of what these old guys went through,” Smith said.

But there’s another reason, and it’s not one that Smith can talk about easily. Even 74 years later, the memory of his older brother Charlie’s death during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943 brings tears to his eyes.

Smith was only 15 when his brother died, and his mother refused to sign his enlistment papers for fear of losing a second son to the war. So today, Smith is paying that debt to his brother’s memory by making sure those like Charlie who served in wartime are honored and remembered.

“I missed all the action,” said Smith, who joined the Navy when he turned 18 in 1946, after the war had ended. “People say it’s wrong, but I can’t help regretting all my life that I wasn’t able to serve in the war. That’s why I interview these veterans — to hear what they went through. I was on a two-year cruise. It was nothing like what they saw.”

In the living room of his home in Rancho Bernardo, Stan Smith, 89, interviews World War II veteran Gilbert Nadeau, 90, of Escondido for the Veteran History Project.
(Howard Lipin / San Diego Union-Tribune)

Smith was born and raised in Washington, D.C., where his mom worked as a clerk for the Veterans Administration. At 15, he dropped out of school to help support the family as an errand boy. After a two-year stint in the Navy on the USS Salisbury Sound, a seaplane tender, he got a job at a real estate office. He supplemented his income modeling for magazines and newspapers and spent six nights a week drumming for big bands.

One wall of the home he shares with his orange tabby cat Kumquat is covered with photos of stars he met during his drumming days, including Nat King Cole, Frankie Laine, Gene Krupa, Sophie Tucker and Eartha Kitt. There’s even a 1954 photo of him and pal Tony Bennett on a visit to Cuba.

His first marriage, which produced a son, didn’t survive his years as a late-night musician. But a later, more stable 60-year career in real estate was more conducive for family. His second marriage lasted 27 years and produced four more children.

Smith was working as an appraiser for the federal government when he first visited Los Angeles in 1971 and was so smitten with the weather, he moved his family permanently to Rancho Bernardo the following year.

Four years ago, he was creating a memory wall for his brother in his home and called his congressman, Scott Peters, about getting a duplicate Purple Heart medal issued for Charlie, since the original was lost. That’s when he discovered the Veterans History Project.

Over three years, Smith conducted more than 25 oral history interviews on behalf of Peters’ office. Then last year, he transferred over to working with the Veterans Museum in Balboa Park. He submits his raw video footage to the museum and they edit it, label it and send a copy to Washington, D.C.

Volunteer Ron Melendez, the museum’s director of programs and exhibits, said there’s more that goes into the field representative job than just turning on a camera and listening. The interviewer needs to know their history as well as how to draw answers out of the speaker.

“Stan just took to it very well,” Melendez said. “He’s soft-spoken, he’s engaging, not threatening, not demanding and has a very nice attitude.”

Compiling the oral histories involves an on-camera interview that lasts 30 minutes to an hour. Subjects can bring along photographs, written documents and their uniform. Subjects need not have fought in a war to qualify, as long as they helped in the war effort, like a woman USO singer he’s interviewing this month.

Smith’s most recent interview was with Escondido resident Gilbert Nadeau, 90, who was a signalman on a landing craft support gunship in World War II. As the camera rolled last week, Nadeau told Smith how he grew up in Beverly, Mass., and spent a year trying to convince the Navy to take him after the Pearl Harbor attack. Nadeau, whose nickname was “Shorty,” is 4 feet, 11 inches tall, and in 1943, the Navy’s minimum height requirement was 5 feet, 2 inches. Finally, when he was 17, the Navy relented and he served with pride from 1944 to 1954.

“When we went into the service, it wasn’t a job, it was war,” Nadeau said during the interview. “Our main purpose was to get over there, get into it, get it over with and then come home and get on with our lives.”

After the war, Nadeau said he didn’t talk about his experiences — even to his children — for 40 years. It was only after attending an emotional reunion with his shipmates in the 1980s that he began opening up.

“Today’s schools aren’t teaching U.S. history. The kids don’t know anything about patriotism,” Nadeau said. “I think it’s important that the kids know something about World War II.”

Smith said it’s not unusual for war veterans to turn down his interview requests. Many are still traumatized by their experiences and don’t want to open up old wounds.

One of the toughest interviews he conducted was with Pearl Harbor veteran Stuart Hedley, 95, of San Diego, who was aboard the USS West Virginia when a Japanese bomb exploded in the ship’s powder magazine and tore 11 of his fellow sailors to bits. He escaped by leaping four stories from the ship into the flaming harbor then swimming underwater to safety. Later, Hedley was asked to identify what was left of his friends’ bodies. All he could do for some was place the men’s dog tags inside their mouths, Smith said.

“Sometimes someone will say they want to think about it, and I’ll call back two or three months later and they’re still not ready. Something too horrible is preventing them from revealing what they’ve seen,” Smith said.

Two of Smith’s daughters and a neighbor woman have helped him write the paper documentation for his interviews. But as his work ramps up, he’s now seeking a full-time volunteer assistant. He’d like to find a corporate sponsor to help in his recruiting efforts. And before he dies, he’d like to fly to Washington to visit the Library of Congress in person. In the meantime, he asks interested subjects to call him directly for an interview appointment at (858) 485-5398.

“I’ll do anything, Saturdays, Sundays, whatever. I’ll go to their home or they can come to mine,” Smith said. “I just want to get them on film because it’s just a matter of time for them and for me.”

pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com

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