Man's precious family photo album has gone missing

Somebody has it. Nevada Smith, a lieutenant commander in the Coast Guard, a search and rescue helicopter pilot, has that gut feeling.

“I find things,” he said, “I decode things, I break things down. We go to Alaska and look for a guy and say: Is he hunting for mountain goats? He’d be on the top of the mountain. Is he hunting for deer? He’d be at the bottom of the mountain.”

So simple.

But this is Portsmouth where a parking lot is flat and a missing photo album can’t send up any signals to say, “Hey! I’m over here!” And so that leaves Smith looking. One week. Two weeks. Three weeks. Four.

The album is out there. He just has to find it.

This fiasco happened because Smith wanted to fulfill a lifelong dream of seeing his grandfather’s war stories in print. His granddad was in the Marines in World War II and fought on Okinawa. From the time he was in the seventh grade, Smith was aware of the book his granddad wrote. He had typed up his granddad’s manuscript himself when he grew older, and now he had a plan.

On Aug . 20, he called his mother in Roscoe, Ill ., and said, “Mom, send me all those photographs you have of Grandpa and Grandma a long time ago.”

Smith’s mother has always been a meticulous album-maker, so they both knew which album he was asking for. When he was a kid, she made chronological albums of each year, starting with his brother’s birthday on Jan . 26 and ending with Smith’s own birthday on Dec . 28.

“This album was different,” said Smith, who is now 40. “It’s what I call Photo Album Zero with all the pictures in it from before my mom and dad were married. Some go back to the 1870s. It stops in the early 1960s when my mom and dad were dating when they were like 15 years old.”

The album arrived a few days later in a box cushioned with Styrofoam packing peanuts.

So on Aug . 26, a Tuesday, after loading up his gear and the album, Smith drove from his home in Chesapeake to work, in Portsmouth. Late that day, he stopped in at High Street Copies & Graphics, a company helping him put together his granddad’s book.

He left about 20 photos at the shop that evening.

“For the rest of my life I’m going to wonder why I didn’t give them all of them.”

If only he had.

“I was carrying a gym bag, a book bag and this big photo album and I was going to my van,” he said, “I’m 6-foot-4 so it’s easy for me to put things on top. It’s like a shelf. I do this all the time. I put things on top of the car and then I load.”

And of course we know what happened next. The gym bag went into the champagne Dodge minivan parked in a big asphalt commuter parking lot on the corner for Court and Bart streets near the Downtown Tunnel on the Portsmouth side, where a lot of the Coast Guard guys park. So did the bookbag. But the flat white album with little flowers all over it must have stayed on top of the van.

“That’s where I parked and that’s where I dorked up,” Smith said.

Smith can picture in his mind only too well what must have happened next. He has gone over and over it in his mind and is convinced the album never made it out of the parking lot.

“I would have put it right on the edge of the roof, and the first thing you do is you back up. And I would have backed up to the left. And I think it would have fallen off there. And then you go forward and go to the right, and it would have fallen off there, too. And then you take another turn right, and there would have been another opportunity for it to fall off, and then you go. … ”

It’s like a bad movie in his head.

“This is all I think about,” he said. “I don’t get a mental break from this thing. I dream about it.”

Still in there, in the missing album, is a picture he loves of his of his father and his father’s brother when they were teenagers. And the rest? About 70 pictures going back to the mid-1800s. All of them taken in central Illinois, all priceless. “I keep asking myself why I didn’t just copy them all,” he said.

In the weeks since, Smith has put up a poster and left flyers on cars in the commuter lot, called the lost and found at the Hampton Roads Transit office and looked online on craigslist. He’s called the evidence department at the Portsmouth police headquarters and he’s called antique stores.

Nobody has seen his album.

His wife, his kids, his brother, his co-workers, even, all the way back in Illinois, his father, too, encourage Smith to keep looking. “I call my dad every night and give him the latest update and my dad says, 'Yes, yes, yes, OK,’ ” Smith said. It’s all he can say since, in the background somewhere, Smith’s mother may be listening. So far, she has no idea what they’re talking about. And that’s the way Smith would like to keep it.

“There’s no motivation for me to tell my mom,” he said. “She’ll just be sad, too. I’m hoping I can ride this out forever and never have to tell her. There’s no closure now and I need closure on this. I feel like somebody kidnapped my child and I don’t know where it’s at.”

Krys Stefansky, (757) 446-2732, krys.stefansky@pilotonline.com