Operation Shoebox aims to preserve WWII history
A prisoner of war in Austria for a year and a half during World War II, Michael Colamonico kept busy drawing in a notebook. He bartered with German soldiers to score crayon pencils and sketched visions of home: fighter jets, the Statue of Liberty, a pin-up girl bedecked in stars and stripes.
"In order to keep a healthy mind, I was active," he said. "I did whatever I could."
But after the war, he stowed the journal, along with newspaper clippings, photos and letters, in a shoebox. The war wasn't something he cared to discuss.
On Thursday, Colamonico, 86, of Huntington, visited the American Airpower Museum in Farmingdale, where a volunteer scanned much of the shoebox's contents into a computer.
It was the inaugural event for Operation Shoebox, a project aimed at preserving World War II-era imagery, in which the public is invited to the museum to scan personal archives onto a CD.
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"In order to keep a healthy mind, I was active," he said. "I did whatever I could."
But after the war, he stowed the journal, along with newspaper clippings, photos and letters, in a shoebox. The war wasn't something he cared to discuss.
On Thursday, Colamonico, 86, of Huntington, visited the American Airpower Museum in Farmingdale, where a volunteer scanned much of the shoebox's contents into a computer.
It was the inaugural event for Operation Shoebox, a project aimed at preserving World War II-era imagery, in which the public is invited to the museum to scan personal archives onto a CD.