BELFAIR — Their rendezvous at the Airport Diner was planned, but Brittany Nave had never met the man to whom she was returning a piece of history.
Gazing around the diner, she spotted an older man with combed-back silver hair. When she approached, he told her was “looking for someone with information for him.”
“Like this?” she asked, handing him a small book.
Gordon Lecair knew the handwriting inside, because it was his own. The book is a diary of his 1943 experiences in the Army, and Nave had found it in a Bellingham antiques shop.
“I’m glad to have it,” Lecair said.
How did it get to Bellingham? No one knows.
Lecair, a 1942 graduate of Bremerton High School — where he once helped the senior Bill Gates run for student body president — served in the Army on New Guinea and in the Philippines. He ran a downtown Seattle engineering firm after the war for decades, retiring to the serene shores of Hood Canal in the 1980s.
Nave, a Bellingham resident and history buff, went with her grandmother, Betty Nave of Poulsbo, to Penny Lane Antiques in early December. On a shelf she found the leather-bound journal, with gold-edged pages and embossed gold lettering on the cover that said “My life in the service.”
It was typical in those war years for service members to keep diaries, a practice encouraged by the government to document a remarkable period of conflict.
She knew the diary was important.
“Antiquers kind of have that sixth sense,” she said.
She paid $10 for it, then set out to find its owner or, at minimum, a place it could be preserved. She found a 2010 obituary for Lecair’s wife, Cleo; that confirmed that he lived in Belfair. On the Kitsap Sun’s Facebook page, she asked if anyone knew him.
Local residents Joseph McNeal and Elizabeth Case saw her post and found a former neighbor who knew how to contact Lecair.
The diary is a day-by-day account of Lecair’s service — where he lived, what his duties were, even when he got his shots. Inspiring quotes fill its margins; it opens with a picture of President Franklin Roosevelt and closes with one of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
Lecair said he thinks often of those who served, especially three members of his Bremerton High School class who died in the war.
“That bothers me to no end,” he said of those who died.
Still, he is thankful he got his journal back.
“It was very nice of them,” he said. “They were very courteous.
