One military widow’s treasure could have been trash in Fayetteville, N.C., if not for a tug of curiosity in the mind of a busy real estate agent working to flip a cluttered town home.
Elly Watts, a licensed real estate broker and owner of Watts Realty, nearly discarded decades of personal belongings that detailed a military couple’s love story found in a house she bought. The belongings showed service to country and community, and signified a historical marker as part of an overseas war and the civil rights movement at home that followed.
“I was just going through old boxes and found all of this stuff,” Watts told Military.com. “I was going to have my contractors throw it all away, but something just told me to take a look.”
What she found in a shed attached to the town house was a trove of pictures, love letters, keepsakes, military awards and memorabilia belonging to the late Mary Perry Allen, a young, African-American U.S. Army wife to her late husband, retired Maj. Warren Allen, a Korean War veteran and Ranger Hall of Fame inductee.
Maj. Allen was a soldier who served in the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, the U.S. Army’s first all-Black airborne unit nicknamed “The Triple Nickles,” and based at Fort Benning, Ga., before relocating to Fort Bragg, N.C.
“I found numerous, numerous newspaper articles of him, a Hall of Fame award, tons of pictures, even the ashes of her dogs,” said Watts. “But also, a book manuscript that Mary Allen had started to write years before her death in 2016, at the age of 97.”
That incomplete manuscript chronicles her husband’s military service, the developments of the Korean War, the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement, and the couple’s love story before and after Maj. Allen’s death in 1973.
“I found her husband’s flag, folded in a triangle,” Watts said, recalling what was left behind. “It brings me to tears. So many love letters between the Allen’s, dating back to 1951 during the Korean War. They were all neatly put away.”
A Military Couple’s Life Almost Gone Forever
Watts purchased the Fayetteville town home in February with the idea of renting it to a young military couple who might be stationed at Fort Bragg. She had no idea the former owners many years prior were the Allen’s, and that the memories of their life together were stacked in boxes that looked like trash.
“It’s a 70-year-old town house in a neighborhood called Winding Creek,” Watts said. “The house had changed hands several times with different renters over the years. Back then, this used to be ‘the’ area. It still is, but just like everything, after time, the neighborhood kind of changes.”
Watts said her intuition that there might be something in those old boxes was a matter of divine intervention. Turns out, Mrs. Allen worked as a real estate agent in the 1950s while her husband was deployed overseas. Watts being a real estate agent herself seemed to be more than a coincidence.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ She was a real estate agent, and I’m a real estate agent,” said Watts. “I get so choked up just thinking about it. It’s like this was all her doing.”
Watts now feels a responsibility to do something special with the couple’s treasure trove of belongings. She’s been contacting local museums and historical societies, military posts and civil rights organizations, hoping to find a suitable place to chronicle and display the couple’s life story.
“There’s [sic] so many boxes that I haven’t even gone through yet,” she said. “I have everything. A lot of awards, newspaper articles, tapes, pictures, home videos, lots of letters and personal belongings. I just want it saved for historical preservation.”
Completing an Unfinished Book
There’s also some unfinished business, in the form of Mrs. Allen’s incomplete manuscript.
“She wrote on a piece of paper that she had typed up that she wanted to write this book and finish it and then sell it before she dies,” Watts said. “I feel like I have to finish it for her and get it out for her. It’s almost like it’s my duty.”
It all could even become a movie one day, Watts added, especially when she thinks about one artifact she found that left her in tears.
“There was an article in the Washington Post about her husband having a prayer book with him during the war, and how the book saved his life when he was hit by shrapnel,” Watts said. “Based on what I read, he said the shrapnel hit the prayer book instead of him—and saved him. He only needed stiches.”
Watts not only found the article, but the actual prayer book still tattered from the shrapnel.
“That’s the one thing that made me break down crying,” she said. “And to think I was just going to discard it all.
“I’m so glad I didn’t.”
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