NICE

In 2009, Reno, Nev., police Detective Robert Smith was given a battered suitcase from an auctioned-off storage unit. Inside he found hundreds of love letters from Maj. Lamont Haas to his wife, Betty Lou—from the moment Haas enlisted, in 1941, to the month he died in a midair collision over France, in 1944. Though Haas never made it home, Smith spent four years making sure his letters did. Betty Lou died in 1987, but recently Smith returned the suitcase to Haas’s daughter, who was 4 months old when her father was killed. Haas’s legacy was worth saving, Smith said. “I think he’s a genuine American hero.”