The Artifacts of War

Paul Penn gingerly turns a hollow bronze cylinder in his palm to reveal a delicate engraving of flowers delineated by a series of tiny surface punctures. This artillery shell casing, he explains, was impressed with the design by an American soldier using only a rudimentary tool — one that might have been used for airplane repairs — and a little spare time.

“Soldiers would take these and make works of art on them,” Penn says, referring to articles of military detritus like the casing. He waves his hand toward a lamp that sits atop a small rotating glass case. “This is a lamp made from an artillery shell projectile.”

Penn has been collecting war memorabilia since he was a teenager. His voice has a soft timbre as he brings each artifact to life with stories. Tall and stoic, Penn isn’t the type to celebrate the more macabre aspects of war. It’s more that a deep love for history became a hobby, and then the hobby became a job.

As a child, he was fascinated by his uncle’s battle tales, a fascination that, in part, compelled him to major in history at Three Rivers College in southeast Missouri. He began picking up “just a few items here and there,” a pastime that burgeoned into a collection that now occupies not only his booth at the Ice Chalet antique mall on Route AC in Columbia and another at the Yellow Moon antique mall in Jefferson City, but also the entire basement of his Columbia home.

A family affair

Near the center of a vast grid of square booths in the Ice Chalet lies Penn’s compact space, which contains a century ’s worth of objects marking some of the most lamented and exalted events in national history. Penn scouts estate sales, auctions and thrift stores with the tireless zeal of a true collector. He’s visited military battle sites in the United States and the Philippines. Penn’s wife, Elena, originally from the Philippines, encouraged Penn to make a profit from his hobby. Also a dedicated antique collector, she fills her booth, directly across from Penn’s in the Ice Chalet, with a wide smattering of antiques.

Elena, a short woman with smiling eyes and ruby-stained lips, works as a nurse at University Hospital. Her collection is bright and varied miscellanea — a row of translucent blue apothecary bottles, a tiny, elaborately embroidered yarmulke, a giant orange fluted vase, a vintage black wool wrap dress.

“I buy a lot of things just because I think they’re pretty or I just like them,” Elena says.

The orchestrated clutter of her booth gives a sense of warm domesticity, peppered with just enough bizarreness — petrified antlers, eerily chirpy angel figurines — to make it like the room of an eccentric grandmother. One glass case contains a pair of porcelain candelabras, cherubs poised at the base ofeach. Elena said she found them and discovered that they were labeled “Dresden 1941” — before the bombing of the German city during World War II. Elena appraised them at $650.

During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II, Penn’s in-laws, he says, were “treated rather severely,” although Elena says they have no reservations about her husband’s collection.

“The school my wife went to as a child was used as a POW camp during World War II,” Penn says. He says his in-laws don’t talk much about the war.

Painful memories

Penn is acutely aware of the sensitivity of certain military artifacts — he wrote disclaimers on the tags of the two Nazi-related items he sells, a crimson flag and helmet, both bearing one of the most readily recognizable and most hated symbols in history. Penn says he was once approached by two young men at a convention in St. Louis who he suspected were interested in swastikas for reasons not purely historical. He told them — politely, he says — that he didn’t care to do business with them.

Penn says other artifacts, too, are rare because of the painful memories they might trigger.

“There are very few items from the Vietnam War,” Penn says. “A lot of veterans didn’t bring anything home with them because they didn’t want to be reminded.”

But Penn did find a rare and unsettlingly intimate Vietnam item: a photo album, titled “A Memory of South Vietnam,” covered in Army-green leather and impressed with a gilded outline of the country. The album sits propped on a chair in Penn’s booth.

Penn doesn’t know who owned the album. He bought it at a consignment sale after the owner neglected to pay the monthly fee for a storage lot and never claimed his possessions. It’s only half-filled, and the majority of the photographs are heat damaged, with rainbow swirls obscuring their subjects. But untouched is an image of a soldier, with his dog tags hanging over a T-shirt darkened with sweat, narrowing his eyes as he draws on a joint. There’s also a Vietnamese boy, probably about 4 or 5, his dark eyes glowering up at the camera. In another, a soldier grins mischievously, pulling taut the pages of a nude centerfold. Penn says war memorabilia collectors are all interested in different objects for many reasons.

“A lot of ladies collect sweetheart pins — pins that soldiers sent to their girlfriends or wives while they were away at war,” he says, gesturing toward a small engraved pin beneath the glass of the display case. A small piece of string loops around the pin, attached to a tag that lists a number and a price, $18.

Wear and tear

Penn meticulously catalogues and tags all the items he sells and restores them when age and wear require.

“I’ve had to learn a lot — sewing, metalwork and welding,” Penn says. “You get mothing, dry rot, missing buttons with the uniforms.”

He restored a fan, now on sale in his booth, that dates back to the 1920s and, Penn says, it still works. Another oscillating fan, mint-green and arching up from a bulky scale, is part of a scale that Penn says would have been used to screen the military fitness of young men in small rural towns when there was no available doctor to give physicals.

Each artifact in Penn’s booth bears the freight of shared histories, from the deeply personal — a row of Zippo lighters, each emblazoned with a particular ship name, that once would have been cradled in the pockets of sailors — to the cold and mechanical — a plane repair manual whose paper, fragile with age, threatens to crumble. A rusty Prince Albert tobacco can promises “most delightful and wholesome tobacco.” Next to biographies of Gen. George Patton rests a row of austere-looking books: “The Blue Jacket’s Manual,” “The Officer’s Guide,” “The Machinist’s Mate.”

“It’s somewhat phenomenal just how involved the country was in World War II,” Penn says. “Hollywood, IBM, Smith-Corona — everyone was involved. Lipstick companies started manufacturing artillery.”

U.S. citizens then, he says, were far more invested in the war than people are today — economically and psychologically. He sells an old booklet titled “Best Wartime Recipes” that contains recipes for rationed food.

Even now, Penn says, Hollywood still has an influence on the war memorabilia market.

“Certain films pique people’s interest,” he says.

Avowing the past

As Penn speaks, he places his hand on the epaulet of one of the moss-colored jackets jutting from the rack that lines one of the booth partitions, and he gently jostles it back into place. The sense of order in the 30 square feet of his booth echoes one of the great military contradictions — regimented discipline amongst the melee of war.

For many veterans, memory — or the void created by its erasure — is the only remainder of war. But Penn says that for many of the collectors he has encountered who are also veterans, the hobby is more about avowal than exorcism.

“I read recently that World War II vets are passing away at a rate of about 1,000 a day,” Penn says. Many of his customers, he says, are either World War II veterans or their descendants who are looking for some tangible remnant of a war that now is approaching the twilight of national history. Penn recalls one veteran he met while setting up his booth at the Ice Chalet.

“He asked about specific patches,” Penn says. “I told him I thought I had a jacket that had those patches, and got it out of a box and showed it to him. He took the jacket, looked at the name tag inside, then pulled out his wallet to show me his name. And it was his jacket.”