Story Telling in Black and White

The bookstore sits tucked in the same Main Street block as Miss L’s Sandwich Shop and Glitz and Glamour Home. The store’s official name, the Acworth Bookstore, Coffee Shop and Military Museum, doesn’t begin to capture everything packed inside on the bookshelves and hung from the ceiling. It’s a bit book store, coffee shop, smoothie bar, museum, model airplane and ship display, kitchen essential shop, and more I haven’t explored. The Acworth store serves as a gathering spot for the town and from 10 am when it opens until 7 pm when it closes a steady stream of regulars come to browse, have a cup of coffee, or chat.

In the back by the coffee shop is a table and a set of chairs, one of which is a particularly comfortable winged-back chair known as “Jack’s Chair.” That’s where I found Jack Smith on a recent Saturday and where we talked, or rather, I listened. Jack, a 91-year old veteran of World War II (though that’s not the first thing he’d want you to know) is a story teller. He claims for most of the forty years he and his late wife Joy were married she had to prod him to talk. Since she passed, though, his stories gush, one leading to another and from the third a memory sparks a recollection and Jack spins a fourth. But, if you’re patient, Jack will come back around and finish the first story.

I’m patient and I treasure the few men and women who remain of what has been dubbed The Greatest Generation, and so I listen. The owner of the bookstore is of a like mind and helped Jack compile many of the stories he’d penned into a fictionalized memoir of his time in the Navy. I snapped up a copy of the memoir titled The Blowing Winds of Spring, a reference to the Divine Wind of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

From time to time over the course of the afternoon, a customer or neighbor, often a friend of Jack’s, dropped in to read the paper and enjoy a cup of the store’s fresh brewed “joe.” While Jack took a minute to chat with a visitor, I thumbed through the pages of his book and found a dozen remarkably realistic illustrations of World War II battles, ships, planes, and soldiers. It wasn’t until I saw Jack’s signature on the illustrations that I discovered another side of this endearing stranger.

Jack Smith’s interest in drawing began at an early age and later, after the war, he pursued a career in commercial art. When Jack wasn’t drawing for hire, he was drawing and painting anything and everything related to the military from the soldiers on the ground to the battleships and cruisers in the waters around Guadalcanal and Okinawa where he served. Most of Jack;s WWII paintings used iconic photographs from combat journalists as their inspiration, as shown in the illustration of a Marine running through machine gun fire in a WWII battle.

Over the years, his subjects expanded to include landmark buildings in Savannah and Charleston, roads around and through his beloved South whether Georgia, Florida, or South and North Carolina. Though passionate about his work, after Joy passed away in 2005, Jack put his brush aside. The spark that had propelled him forward all those years had dimmed.

When the last visitor had gone, I asked Jack to tell me about his artwork. He explained what I had at first thought were pen and ink drawings were instead paintings using a brush and ink technique he’d learned from a Navy sailor at Pearl Harbor. It was a technique he later perfected. The works are full of detail, whether of smoke billowing from the deck of a battleship on fire or jungle foliage rendered in bold slashes; and all require more than a passing glance to appreciate. And of course, there’s a story behind each painting.

Ah, yes, story. Hold on, I hear Jack weaving another and I have to go listen.

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Note: Rona Simmons hopes to publish a collection of Jack Smith’s art in 2017. If you would like to help make this project a reality please contact Rona Simmons for more information about her fund raising effort. rona_simmons@bellsouth.net