Sharing good news: Kudos to Bob Dion for preserving history

 

It's always enjoyable to share upbeat, positive stories on this blog, and this one is especially pleasurable to share.
My friend and colleague at The Sun Chronicle, Staff Writer George Rhodes, has a wonderful knack for doing historical interviews, especially those about veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and he’s done it again with this feature story on Attleboro resident Bob Dion.
Dion, a retired Attleboro police officer, has been keeping scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings about local news since 1953, when he was 25. Now 93, he has announced his plans to “retire” from his lifelong scrapbooking duties at the end of the year.
That will be a major loss to people who enjoy thumbing through the pages of history --- literally. Eventually, his copious scrapbooks will be donated to the Attleboro Historic Preservation Society, but for the time-being, his labor of love will be stored at the Museum at the Mill on South Main Street in Attleboro’s historic Dodgeville section owned by Gary Demers, another local historian.
Kudos to the society and Demers for their role in helping to keep history alive as it used to be kept --- one story at a time --- before Google and the Internet combined to destroy the newspaper business, subscription by subscription.
Above all, kudos to Rhodes for his masterful storytelling, and for his latest piece on Bob Dion.
And, above all, thank you so, so much to Dion, for not only serving his country in the Marines, but also for serving Attleboro for nearly 30 years as a police officer, and then for his meticulous devotion to keeping Attleboro’s history alive through the preservation of the newspaper articles.

Here’s the link to George Rhodes’ story that appeared in The Sun Chronicle’s Weekend edition of Dec. 18-19: https://www.thesunchronicle.com/news/local_news/pieces-of-history-attleboro-mans-decades-of-scrapbooking-provides-unique-look-back-at-citys-history/article_3644fbb8-bf73-5b6e-85a8-cef349e4570a.html

This story by Sun Chronicle Staff Writer George Rhodes appeared in The Sun Chronicle's Dec. 18-19 Weekend edition in Attleboro, MA.

Pieces of history: Attleboro man's decades of scrapbooking provides unique look back at city's history

BY GEORGE RHODES
grhodes@thesunchronicle.com 

ATTLEBORO --- For Bob Dion, it started in 1953.
He picked it up, scrapbooking that is, from his mom, Emma.

She kept scrapbooks of the big movie stars of the day — the day being the 1940s.
“She went for the movie stars,” Dion said.
That was her interest and there was plenty of material.
Movies were big and stars were bigger, and there were plenty including Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, James Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Gregory Peck, Vivien Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor, Vincent Price, Spencer Tracy, Lauren Bacall, Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner, Katharine Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Veronica Lake, Ava Gardner and Claudette Colbert.
His mom’s scrapbooks documenting the lives of the glamour gods and goddesses of Tinsel Town caught Dion’s eye, but he decided to focus on a different part of life.
For him, it was the local stories he wanted to preserve, the lives of the more common men and women.
The everyday was important to him.
Since he was a police officer, crime stories were at the top of the list, but local politics were important, too.
And anything else he deemed of interest went into the books.
He condensed the day-to-day life of Attleboro as recorded by local newspapers including The Sun Chronicle.Dion, who’s says his body is wearing down after nearly a century of use, looks more like he’s in his 70s than 90s. He’s slim and trim with a ready smile and quick wit.
There’s nary a wrinkle on his face, just like there are none on the stories he has meticulously cut out and glued into his scrapbooks.
His mind is supple and his memory sharp.
Dion was born Aug. 1, 1928, at the tail end of the Roaring ’20s, also known as The Jazz Age, and a little more than a year before the stock market crash of 1929, which plummeted the world into an economic depression the likes of which had not been seen before.
So he grew up in hard times.
As a 10-year-old he remembers the howling winds of the ’38 hurricane thrashing his hometown of Franklin as it cut a swath of destruction up the East Coast.
Those were the days before storms were named.
He’s been keeping scrapbooks for 68 years now, which means he started at the age of 25.
By then, he had already served a tour of duty in the U.S. Marines.
He quit high school in his junior year at age 17 to join up in 1945 just as World War II was finally coming to its end after six tragic and bloody years. The war saw an estimated 70 million die across the globe, and was followed by the birth of a terrifying new age — the nuclear age.
In the Marines, he was in the military police, so it was natural for him to join the thin blue line that protects the civilized from the uncivilized when his tour was up.
Dion spent three years on the Franklin Police Department before transferring in 1956 to Attleboro, where he patrolled the streets for almost 30 years before retiring in 1985 with the rank of sergeant.
His police career and his life covered the rapidly evolving times of the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War (and the protests and riots it spawned), the Nixon years and Watergate, the Carter years of inflation and the Iran hostage crisis.
It extended into the Reagan era, which saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union.
Now he’s been retired for longer than he served, but he’s kept cutting and pasting all that time.
In 2004, he was honored by the city’s historical commission for helping to preserve Attleboro history with his scrapbooks.
At the time, he had completed 50 scrapbooks, or 50 years’ worth. Now, 17 years later, he’s up to 68.

****

While he’s pasted many of the city’s stories into his scrapbooks for easy review, he has many of his own to tell.
Some made it into the papers and some did not, but experiences flow from his mind.
He said he was grateful he never had to shoot anyone during his time as a police officer, although from time to time he did have to draw his revolver — like the time a drunken man came out of a building brandishing a rifle and shooting into the air.
The man was convinced to lay the rifle down and peace was restored, Dion said.
And he’s still got the map of Attleboro he bought at Cooper’s News after he joined the Attleboro force. It’s posted in his archive room at his home.
Having just moved into town, he needed the map because he was unfamiliar with the streets.
That map does not show Interstate 95 because it was not built yet.
So that map is likely an historical relic itself.
Dion said one of his most memorable duties while serving in the APD was the detail work he did during the construction of I-95, the historic high volume highway built under the Eisenhower administration to replace smaller more congested roads like Route 1, which stretches in a long, winding black ribbon from Maine to Florida.
Of course, I-95 was not the only highway being built. Superhighways
were under construction nationwide, but it was the main one in this area, connecting Maine to Florida in a seamless stream.
But while it provided quicker access to points north and south, it sliced through neighborhoods cutting off one part of a city or town from another, and that made news and new routes.
He was posted at crossroads like Read Street and Clifton Street.
One time while on a detail there was an accident and a woman was bleeding so badly he had to put a tourniquet on her leg and get her to the hospital. She survived.
Another time, a friend drove off an embankment near the highway, plunging 30 feet to his death, and “broke every bone in his body.”
A happier memory revolves around the time when he was selected to escort then-Sen. John F. Kennedy around the city. That was in 1956, and it was a good experience.
“I took to him right away,” Dion said. “He was very personable.”
Kennedy was in town to attend an event at the Knights of Columbus Hall on Hodges Street.
When the event was over, Dion drove him back to the old Union Station in Boston and JFK, a man of the people, offered to buy him a coffee and English muffin.
During that excursion, Dion was charged with finding the future president of the U.S. a board on which to sleep on in the train. Kennedy’s notorious back problems required it.
He first injured it playing football at college and again when he served in the Navy during World War II.
A Japanese destroyer rammed Kennedy’s boat, the famous PT 109 (PT standing for patrol torpedo), which caused him to be slammed to the deck as the boat was splintered.
Kennedy became a hero and was awarded medals when he pulled an injured crew member through three miles of the Pacific Ocean by gripping a lifejacket strap in his teeth and swimming to an island despite his badly hurt back.
JFK sent Dion a note of thanks for his help during his trip to Attleboro and now it’s a treasured keepsake.
“He was a very nice man,” Dion said. “I was shocked when he died.”
The whole country was on that dark day on Nov. 22, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald shot him down in the streets of Dallas.
Dion was part of off-duty news, too.
He went to the first New England Patriots game at Schaefer Stadium in Foxboro on Aug. 15, 1971.
A monstrous traffic jam and clogged toilets made that game famous.
And during his police career, he was selected to get special training at the FBI Academy in Virginia in 1974.
He learned a lot, but it had a downside.
When he got home, he had three months of papers to comb through.
Dion retired in 1985. During his career, he raised a family with his beloved wife Joan, who died last year at the age of 87.
They lived in a 1950s-era home on Tufts Street, where he still lives today.
One of his sons, Tom, followed him into police work and lives next door.
Tom Dion retired with the rank of lieutenant.
While living through momentous times Dion was recording the less momentous events, the events that document the history of the city in which he lived.
He worked on the books daily — cutting and pasting, cutting and pasting, cutting and pasting.
Elmer’s was his glue of choice.
“It was a good hobby,” he said.
****
Scrap is defined as “a small detached piece.”
And that’s what went into the books, but they were all important detached pieces.
The stories are carefully pasted and smoothed so there are no wrinkles.

Each of the books has 90 to 100 pages and provides a concise history of each year from 1953 through 2021.
Photos were included.
During the interview for this story, Sun Chronicle photographer Mark Stockwell was pleased to see some of the first photos he took for the paper as a much younger man as he turned the pages of the scrapbook covering the year 1989.
Some photos he remembered and some he did not, but they were all there.
And so are all the important events, murders, car accidents, elections of mayors and others.
They have been compiled and that will continue until Dec. 31, 2021.
Dion is a little behind on pasting the stories into the books.
But he said the job will be done in a few months and then it will be time to quit, he said.
He’s hoping that the Attleboro Historic Preservation Society will take the scrapbooks and preserve them.
They are a good source for someone who’s looking for a story — if they know the year.
Even if they don’t, the books are easy to scan quickly — page by page.
When asked why the end has come, the answer was simple.
“Cause I’m old,” Dion said with his usual laugh and smile. “I’ve been doing it for a pretty long time.”
Janice Beck, secretary of the AHPS, said the society’s building, the old East Attleboro Academy at 28 Sanford St., now 178 years old, is not ready to store archival material quite yet. It’s been undergoing rehabilitation.
Until an appropriate place for storage is determined, Dion’s books will be put in the Museum at the Mill on South Main Street owned by Gary Demers, another local historian.
Beck said the books are invaluable.
“I was amazed to see the level of detail in these books, as well as the one room in his house that his wife, Joan, let him have for his archives,” she said. “Everything was so neatly kept and identified.”
Much can be relived in a short time by looking through Dion’s collection.
“Looking through Bob’s scrapbooks is like taking a ride in a time machine,” she said in an email. “Discover the issues of the day (some still the same). See pictures of people you know or have heard of here in Attleboro and around the world. Notice the difference in the words we used then versus now. What year did you first see ‘computer,’ ‘climate-change’ or ‘chai’?”
While scrapbooks are an old-fashioned way of storing information, they have not lost their value, Beck said.
“People may argue that scrapbooks are no longer necessary since it’s so easy to Google information or search through a digitized archive to find a particular story or image from the past,” she said. “That’s true. But you have to know what you are looking for when you do that kind of search. When you open one of Bob’s books, you’ll find things you didn’t even know you were searching for.”
George W. Rhodes can be reached at 508-236-0432 and at grhodes@thesunchronicle.comTop of FormBottom of Form