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.
"I started when I was in high school in the late 1930s," said Shearer, a retired Red Bank optometrist. "I've always been interested in history. Usually [the clips] were about state or national news.
" I knew it was living history that would be in the history books someday, but I wanted to know what newspapers had to say about it."
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While he was in high school, Shearer dabbled in reporting, occasionally covering high school sports for the Cordele Dispatch.
As a young adult, Shearer volunteered for military service near the end of WWII. He was still in flight training when the war ended, but eventually spent 30 years in the Air Force Reserve and attained the rank of colonel.
After completing optometry school in Memphis, Shearer eventually moved to the Chattanooga area in 1955 and set up a practice in Red Bank where he worked for more than 40 years. His son, John, worked at the Chattanooga News-Free Press in the 1980s and 1990s, and clips of his articles are part of the collection.
The elder Shearer says looking at the newspapers brings back memories. When shown an article about the King assassination, he recalls hearing the news of the civil rights leader's death in 1968.
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"I was in my car, and I heard it on the radio," he said. "It was awful."
Many of the newspapers were collected while he was in Air Force training and represent different regions of the country where he was stationed. There are clips in the collection from the New Orleans Picayune, the Mobile Register, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the San Antonio Express and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among other newspapers.
There are parts of the collection that actually pre-date Shearer's clips. Some belonged to his father, Claude C. Shearer, who was a World War I veteran and banker who saved newspapers dating to the late 1920s.
The last clips in the collection are from 2009, and Shearer said it had simply become time to set the pastime aside.
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"Really, I just ran out of room to keep them," he said of his scrapbooks, "and I thought: 'Well, I have a nice enough collection.'"
Asked about plans by the Times Free Press to convert to digital-only editions Monday through Saturday, making it harder to collect clips, Shearer said he is optimistic about the change.
"I have macular degeneration, and I hear you can enlarge the print [on an iPad]," he said. "I'm looking forward to it."
Life Stories publishes on Mondays. Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com.