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“There it is,” Smith says, flipping through a scrapbook detailing the exploits of the 101st, who dropped behind enemy lines before the D-Day invasion and were present when Adolf Hitler’s German chalet was captured in May 1945. He’s come to rest on a page showing former Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower conferring with troops before dropping into France, his finger jutting toward the khaki-clad, sunglasses-wearing figure who would later become president. “He pinned my Bronze Star on me.”

Ike wasn’t the first president the Almira, Wash., native can recall meeting. Smith said his father was a carpenter employed on the Grand Coulee Dam project, a vocation the younger Smith would later mimic, earning the same pay as his father in lieu of graduating from high school in the heady days of the Public Works Administration. Long before he picked up carpenter’s tools, however, he remembered sharing a slice of watermelon with Franklin Delano Roosevelt on one of the president’s trips to the site.

“Watermelon was 10 cents, and there were these great big watermelons,” Smith said. “Finally, (Roosevelt) comes down and he said, ‘Hey, one of you kids, give me some watermelon!’?” Smith chuckles at the memory.

But work at the dam dried up in 1942 and Smith found himself eligible for the draft. He parachuted into France as a bodyguard for corpsmen with the 502nd Parachute Infantry Service Company based out of Fort Benning, Ga. Smith said he packed a Thompson submachine gun and quickly displayed a keen knack for requisitioning jeeps.
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