Adventures of an album

By The Daily Progress

Published: October 3, 2008

It was a winding trail back to Nevada — Nevada Smith, that is.

Lt. Com. Smith — a search-and-rescue pilot in the Coast Guard — had received the album from his mother so he could copy photos to illustrate a book his grandfather had written about his experiences as a World War II Marine.
He put it on the top of his minivan in a Portsmouth parking lot and drove off.

That evening, another man saw it in a gutter. He picked it up and dropped it in a trash can near a bus stop.
Later a third man looked in the trash can for a newspaper. He found the photo album, and turned it in to a library in case someone came looking for it.
One month later, the man happened to be reading another newspaper — this one with a story about the heirloom. He called the commander, got no answer and hung up.
Lt. Com. Smith saw the number on caller ID. There was no message but something told him to respond. Bingo.

“I got cotton mouth and my hair shoots up on my head,” he said, describing that moment.
Turns out, the finder had spent time both in the Air Force and the Marine Corps and had an uncle in the Marines who fought on Okinawa, just as Lt. Com. Smith’s grandfather had.

What a long, strange road of coincidences and serendipities.