BY BONNIE L. COOK, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER/MCT: PHILADELPHIA – Just before Christmas, Deveta Johnson saw something in the trash in Norristown, Pa., that looked like an old pile of grocery bags.

She looked closer and found a tattered photo album with hundreds of World War II-era snapshots of African-Americans, in wartime Europe and going about their daily lives in rowhouse Philadelphia.

"Wait a minute," mused Johnson, who had listened to her grandfather’s countless war stories. "This shouldn’t be in the trash."

Rare find

Her decision to take the album home and show it to her mother, Valoree Nelson, has preserved for posterity what might have been lost to a landfill. In mid-January, Nelson turned the album over to the Historical Society of Montgomery County, Pa.

"I walked there in the rain with my grandson," said Nelson, a retiree from Norristown.

Experts on historic collections who have seen the photos called the album a rare find and remarkable portrait of African-American life in the mid-20th century.

"African American history has been for so many years neglected," said Jeffrey R. McGranahan, the historical society’s collections manager. "You really get the sense that these were real people who went places and had family gatherings."

VE-Day image

The snapshots so intrigued McGranahan that he began searching for clues to the identity of the tall man who seems to be the thread that holds the album together.

The man appears in khaki uniform mostly in wartime France, surveying rubble, standing outside cathedrals, and climbing atop downed Nazi airplanes as though they were souvenirs.

In one photo taken on VE-Day, he’s in Paris with his G.I. buddies near lines of smiling women.

Museum experts believe the man was likely a first sergeant with the 389th Engineer General Service Regiment, Company E. They know that because the man and two G.I.s are posed with a telltale U.S. Army sign.

389th Regiment

The 389th Regiment, a racially segregated unit, landed in England in December 1943 and went to France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany before departing from France in August 1945. It was deactivated that November, according to military records.

The 389th began as a battalion. When reformed as a regiment in 1943, it supplied skilled labor to build hospitals, camps, roads, bridges, and railways. It also laid pipelines for water and gasoline.

"The general service regiments had more soldiers and less equipment, the theory being they would be more labor," said Troy Morgan, director of the U.S. Army Engineer Museum at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. "It was not unusual to have a Black regiment doing general service."

Another snapshot depicts the Ardennes American Cemetery in Neupre, Belgium, with white crosses marking the neat rows of graves. The photographer appears to be singling out the marker for Bernard E. McCabe, who died Nov. 30, 1944.

McCabe, a private first class in the 289th Infantry Regiment, 75th Division, was from Pennsylvania.

Names missing

What’s missing from the album are names and dates to tie the images together. And the story of how the album ended up in the trash on the 800 block of Cherry Street in Norristown.

"Who would put the book together and not put any names?" Nelson asked. "Who would throw away something like that?"

McGranahan thinks someone in a hurry ripped snapshots out of two different albums and threw them onto the pages of the makeshift book, made out of brown paper bags from Fiore’s Supermarket.

The grocery chain once had a presence in Norristown but closed its stores in the 1980s.

McGranahan is seeking the public’s help in finding the tall man’s relatives so the album can be returned to them. Barring that, he hopes to place it in a suitable museum.

"If there are no members of the family left, it would end up in a geographical repository that would be appropriate. Or, if it stays here, that would be good, too," he said.