‘LITTLE MOE’ CAPTURED HEARTS, IMAGES OF GRANVILLE
‘LITTLE MOE’ CAPTURED HEARTS, IMAGES OF GRANVILLE
Quaint Town Honors WWII G.I.s With ‘Memories of the 1940s’
A Ken Beck Feature
A half-pint in stature but with a giant of a heart inside, 22-year old Vincent B. DeNardo arrived in Granville on July 4, 1943, one of a thousand G.I.s who trained in the area for World War II.
Affectionately nicknamed “Little Moe,” the Philly native returned for more than 20 autumns once the war was over.
He brought his camera, and by the time he stopped snapping, he had taken more than 1,000 photos of the quaint Jackson County village that nestled beside the Cumberland River.
Those pictures proved to be the nucleus for what became the Granville Museum.
“They’re street scenes that start in 1949 and go to the 1970s. Moe’s pictures are what really got us going in 1999 when we started the Granville Museum to present the history of Granville,” said Randall Clemons, president of the Granville Museum Board of Directors and a Granville native who now lives in Lebanon.
To honor DeNardo and the more than 850,000 military personnel who trained from 1941 to 1944 in Tennessee during seven separate maneuvers across 22 counties, Historic Granville holds the grand opening of “1940s A Decade of Change — Thanks for the Memories” on Saturday, April 8.
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