One family’s sacrifice on display in Bellefonte

Gail Franklin For the CDT

BELLEFONTE — A foot-tall stack of tissue thin letters written in a beautiful script by a mother seeking connection with her missing son is tied with a red, white and blue ribbon.

CDT photo/ Nabil K. Mark

Patti Long, of Howard, created an exhibit of her family items at Centre Crest in Bellefonte for Veterans Day. Long’s exhibit is to honor her father and brother, both veterans, and others who served.

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Remember to wish happy Veterans Day to all who have served

The documents represent the loss of Maj. Lewis P. Smith II, an Air Force pilot from Bellefonte who never returned home from the Vietnam War. They are on display, along with other wartime memorabilia from the Smith family, inside a glass case in a hallway at Centre Crest nursing home where residents, staff and visitors have begun to gather and contemplate.

The exhibit was put together as a Veterans Day tribute by Patti Long, who was an eighth-grader in May 1968 when two men in suits came to her front door to tell her parents that their son and her older brother could not be found after his plane was shot down over Laos.

She remembers answering the door, she said, but she couldn’t immediately absorb what it meant.

While her brother never came home, their mother, Elizabeth “Betty” Smith, remembered him by writing a letter every night, making a carbon copy to keep and mailing the originals to the military.

Long, who works as a hairdresser privately and at Centre Crest, begins her family’s story with photos taken in the mid-1930s when her father, Earl Smith, joined a cavalry unit. She has included rations cards, a mess kit and trinkets sent home during World War II.

On the opposite end is a framed photograph of her brother, Lewis Smith, and a copy of his biography that was read in September at a POW/MIA recognition ceremony at Penn State where the Smith family received his 1964 college class ring, which was recently and unexpectedly found by a villager in Thailand.

Residents especially seem to connect with old photos of soldiers marching down High Street to board a train that would eventually take them to war, and one resident told Long she remembered the day another photo was taken.

Earl Smith was a Bellefonte general contractor who served as a sergeant in a field artillery unit during World War II and in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. Long’s mother died in 1998 and her father in 1999.

She has never put together such an exhibit and admits it had been too painful to go through the boxes of old memories until now. Soon, she said, she would like to catalog those hundreds of letters her mother wrote.

For now, the inherited items tell one family’s story of life during war.

One of the more intimate items is a small collection of “V-mail,” or WWII victory mail, sent when Long’s parents courted each other and then, as far as she can tell, married in the early 1940s at a military base in Mississippi.

Earl Smith, with a hint at humor, wrote on May 13, 1945, to his wife, “Darling, I expect to come home soon, but don’t be disappointed if you get a letter from me saying that I am in India or China.”

In one letter he enclosed a $35 stipend he received and which her mother would live on for the month, Long said.

“What do we spend $35 on? One tank of gas?” she reflected. “I think you have to get to a certain age to appreciate what’s there.”

Long said the recent return of her brother’s class ring, and her excitement that the Bald Eagle Area Marching Band will participate this week in the Veterans Day parade in New York City, helped convince her to display the items.

It seems to have created a buzz at Centre Crest, and Long said she’s happy the items have helped others remember the veterans in their lives.

“Numerous people have come up and they go on and on and on talking about it. There was a name in (the display case) and it was (a visitor’s) uncle and she was talking to her mom about her mom’s brother. It’s been like that all week,” Long said. “I honestly had no clue that it was going to have that much of an impact on people. I feel good about it.”