The New York Times has a story today about how Donna Reed’s daughter, who worked for the investment company until it collapsed last year, took some time afterward to dig into an old trunk of her mom’s memorabilia from the World War II era. She learned that her mom also played a role as a pinup girl for many of our soldiers, not because of her sex appeal, but because of her public persona:

At 84, Edward Skvarna is retired and living in Covina, Calif. But in 1943, he was fresh out of high school in a mill town near Pittsburgh, newly enlisted in the Army Air Forces and training in Kansas to be a right gunner on a B-29 when he met Ms. Reed at a U.S.O. canteen and asked her to dance.

“I had never danced with a celebrity before, so I felt delighted, privileged even, to meet her,” Mr. Skvarna recalled in a telephone interview this month. “But I really felt she was like a girl from back home. She was from a smaller community, and we were more or less the same age, so I felt she was the kind of person I could talk to.”

Very cool story, especially for today.