Slide show at library prompting memories
By: Dick Brinster
HIGHTSTOWN Photos of local World War II heroes that once graced a wall in a place known as the Sweet Shop are surviving long after the death of the old soda fountain and most of the soldiers themselves.
Horace "Doc" Embley, who owned the store at the corner of Mercer Street and Rogers Avenue, photographed 94 servicemen during World War II. Those photos are now part of the growing collection at Memorial Library, and things have been learned even recently about how and when some of the soldiers, sailors and airmen died.
Among the survivors in the post-Sweet Shop photos is Ernie Thompson, a Bronze Star winner who says he and his World War II companions prefer to recall the lighter moments of their service time rather than the grim ones.
Drafted after his first semester at Bucknell University in 1943, Mr. Thompson recalls the initial lesson he learned from a sergeant about complaining while in boot camp.
"We were standing in line and I turned to the guy next to me and said, ‘We’re in deep (trouble),’ and the sergeant yelled, ‘What!?’" Mr. Thompson said. "I knew things had changed."
Little did Mr. Thompson realize how much. Eventually, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. It was Hitler’s last offensive of the war.
"That was an experience you’d never forget cold, snow," he said. "I didn’t take a shower for three months. You hardly had a chance to brush your teeth if you had a toothbrush."
Curtis Crowell, a trustee of the Hightstown Library Association, says Mr. Embley, known as Doc because he also sold over-the-counter drugs, is believed to have taken many of the photos himself. Several were snapped outside the old Hightstown Theatre building, which is recognizable in the images.
The Hightstown Library Association is always trying to add recently discovered images of men in uniform. It has images of eight of 18 locals who died in the war.
Included recently was its first photo of a female who served in the Women’s Army Corps the late Catherine Kelty, who died after the conflict. Also added was a photo of former Hightstown policeman James "Jimmy" Jackson, who served in the Navy and also is now deceased.
Those photos are now part of a total that has risen to 105, with Mr. Crowell working on posting them as part of a slide show presented in a program each Memorial Day at the library just above the waters of Peddie Lake.
Horace Owen Embley ran the Sweet Shop for about 15 years until he and his wife, Virginia, moved to Florida after the war. He died in 1954 at age 50.
Virginia Embley later sent two volumes of the photos to Kathryn Dennis, publisher of the Hightstown Gazette. She gave them to the Library Association after publishing the images in her paper before her death, 11 months ago at age 90. The exhibit opens with the 1920 song, "I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time," a tune sung right to this day but extremely popular during the war.
"The room gets pretty filled up," Mr. Crowell said. "A lot of people knew these guys and grew up with them."
Mr. Crowell gets a thrill each year listening to the chatter of the elderly viewers as photos of some of the servicemen they knew come on the screen. Frequently the talk is of not of the war but baseball, truly the national sport before the National Football League came to the fore in the 1960s.
Mr. Thompson, now an 83-year-old retired sales manager who served on the Borough Council from 1967 to 1973, can relate to that. He was a member of the Southenders, a group from South Main Street who began playing fast-pitch softball in 1940. After missing the war years, he resumed playing until 1979.
Mr. Crowell said that in those days men and boys played baseball every Sunday afternoon, so there was always talk in the audience about the ability of one player or another. One who always used proper grammar has been of particular interest to the audience of old ballplayers.
"This one fellow in part they remember because when there was a fly ball to the outfield he would say, I have it, I have it.’" Mr. Crowell said. "They all thought that was uproariously funny because in baseball you’re supposed to say, ‘I got, I got it.’"
There are plenty of reminders in the photos of those lost and perhaps long forgotten.
The first of those faces to grace the show is John Campbell, reported missing in action in March 1943, when he disappeared while piloting a B25 over North Africa.
Robert Cutinelle was declared missing in action in May 1944, when he was lost in the Pacific. He was a 1937 Hightstown High School graduate.
Also lost from that graduating class was George Dennis, brother of Kathryn and the youngest of seven children, who spent a year at The Peddie School and graduated phi beta kappa with a degree in journalism from Syracuse University in 1942. He became an MIA in December 1944, and his death was confirmed four months later.
His father had been the municipal clerk in the borough for years, and was also publisher of the Gazette, Mr. Crowell said.
"When he died, the family was largely devastated and it was a blow from which the family, particularly their father, never really recovered," he said. "Kathryn would often speak of George.
"She recalled in particular of the night she and her sister were at home and got news that he had been lost. Their father had already gone to bed, and Kathryn and her sister, Elizabeth, agonized late in the evening over how difficult it was going to be to tell their father about George’s loss in the morning."
During the war, a military vehicle stopping in front of the home of a relative of a serviceman followed by a corresponding knock on the door was never good news.
So it was for the family of Edward Hutchinson, killed just 17 days after the Allies invaded Normandy in June 1944. The Hightstown High School graduate of the Class of 1933 was, at nearly 30, far older than most of the soldiers who came ashore on D-Day at Omaha or Utah Beach and fought Hitler’s forces in the hedgerows of Normandy, where he’s buried.
Mr. Hutchinson, who earlier fought in North Africa and Sicily, also worked at the Sweet Shop before his induction into the Army in 1941.
Stanley Johnson became a professional in the Navy when he left his job at Decker’s Dairy in 1936. He was declared MIA, according to a Gazette story dated Nov. 4, 1943.
"He died in a submarine somewhere in the Pacific," Mr. Crowell said.
Charles Nehrer was 42 when he entered the service and died two year later in the Brooklyn Naval Hospital.
Charles Richardson reportedly was lost at sea on his return from a base where he was part of the American Volunteer Group such as the Flyer Tigers who fought for China against Japan before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
"Some of these men served in the Pacific while the war was still shaping up and many disappeared over China or in the ocean in battles we knew very little about," Mr. Crowell said.
Red Stahl died in June 1944 on Saipan, but the depth of his heroism was not known to his family for more than a half-century, Mr. Crowell explained. One of his relatives found out reading a book by someone who served with Mr. Stahl.
"He apparently charged a machine-gun nest and was lying in a trench in front of the nest but badly wounded," Mr. Crowell said. "There was a subsequent explosion from a grenade that apparently blew his leg off and he basically bled out."
The library, now part of the Mercer County system, was dedicated on May 30, 1954, Memorial Day weekend.
The Sweet Shop is now the Slowdown Café.

