When 97-year-old Wayne Shearer was a boy, he delivered newspapers in Cordele, Georgia.
He noticed how some of the reporters for the Cordele Dispatch, the town’s afternoon daily, carried themselves with a certain swagger.
By the time he was a teenager, Shearer took up a hobby most people would associate with middle-aged and older adults: He began saving historically important newspaper pages.
He has front pages with news from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, the moon landings and hundreds of other notable local and world events. The clips, generally front pages in pristine condition, fill several oversized scrapbooks he keeps stored in a cabinet in his den.
He calls it his collection, and it is the fruit of a hobby he would continue for parts of seven decades. His scrapbooks have clips that date from before World War II to 2009.