This is a photograph of Lewis Guido’s combat flight crew on their graduation day in 1944. They were trained and deployed as a replacement crew assigned to the 465th Bombardment Group stationed in Pantanella, Italy. Guido is the first person on the left in the front row. (Photo Provided)

Lewis P. “Lew” Guido was just 18 years old when he went off to war in 1943. A native of western Pennsylvania, Lew joined the Army Air Force, serving with the 783 Bomber Squadron in Europe.

He was not unlike thousands of American soldiers who went to battle during World War II. Reared in a devoted Catholic faith, Lew’s mother wanted to make sure her son would keep his faith close to his heart as he took flight.

So when writing to him, she included a Catholic prayer book among the pages of her letter. The small prayer book was titled a “Catholic’s Pocket Manual: A manual of prayers and devotional exercises.”

The book included a beautiful depiction of Jesus Christ and carried the words “The Lord Be With You” in large letters. Lew carried that prayer book throughout his entire military stint in the war.

Fast forward years later, and Lew came home to his beloved Pennsylvania roots where he married and had a son, Domenic, and daughter, Laureen. Lew joined Bricklayers Union No. 9 of Pittsburgh where he worked for 30 years.

Lew stayed true to his church and was a member of the Christ the King Parish in Leechburg, Pa., where he served as an usher. He was a proud veteran and a member of his local VFW. His first wife, Elaine died in 1973. He then married Angeline Casalone, with whom he spent 29 years before his passing in 2005 at the age of 80.

The story of Lewis Guido did not end with his death. It came alive in a sprawling warehouse in Triadelphia, W.Va. years later. The warehouse is the site of the Appalachian Christmas Project (not to be confused with Appalachian Outreach.) The Appalachian Christmas Project is in association with Bethlehem Alliance Church.

Appalachian Christmas Project, led by Diane Reineke Stout, accepts donations to give to the underserved across West Virginia. It strives to improve lives by providing basic human needs such as hygiene products, clothes, baby supplies, furniture and household items. The Project serves year-round.

Earlier this summer, three Appalachian Christmas Project volunteers, Melinda Thompson, Raili Litos and Thea Gompers, were working in the warehouse. Raili discovered a small, worn prayer book in a box of miscellaneous items and showed it to Melinda and Thea.

“When I found amongst donations the beautiful pocket book, I felt it was talking to us,” Raili said. “Somehow it wanted to find its way back to home.”

Shown is a photo of the Catholic prayer book sent to Lewis Guido from his mother when he went off to war in World War II. (Photo Provided)

Melinda noted, “Sometimes we find very personal, meaningful items that I’m sure were not intended to be given away. When that happens, we do our best to respect the person and their

history, and try to find the rightful owner.”

Thea offered to take the book home and try to track down Lewis Guido. It took some doing, but Thea, a former reporter for this Wheeling newspaper, put her news skills to use. After doing some Google work, she found Lew had died in 2005, leaving a son and daughter.

Further research showed the son was also deceased, but Thea discovered Lew’s surviving daughter, Laureen Wiley. She lives in Columbia, Maryland.

Thea reached out to Laureen and left a voicemail. A few days later Laureen called back and said she believed the book might be her dad’s. Thea emailed photos of the book, the inscription by Lew’s mom, and the military card inside. After seeing the photos, Laureen wrote back: “That is indeed my Dad. I recognize his handwriting and my grandmother’s. It just hit me that he was so young when he served in the war.”

Thea then mailed the prayer book to Laureen.

“I still get goosebumps to know we were able to reunite the prayer book with Mr. Guido’s family,” Thea said. “It was truly humbling to hold the book and feel a kind of connection with

that young man from 1943. We were honored to help get that book ‘home’. It’s a memory we’ll all cherish.”

How the book ended up at its destination in Ohio County is still a mystery. His daughter believes it was mistakenly donated to charity when other family members cleaned out Lew’s home after his death. She said she was thrilled to have it back in the family.

After receiving the prayer book, Laureen’s husband Craig set about building a shadow box for Lew’s medals and the beloved prayer book. Laureen said she also has her father’s military uniform, a picture of his flight crew and other papers.

“I was trying to track everywhere he went from the time he enlisted when he got his draft notice. He didn’t want to go into the Army so he enlisted in the Army Air Corps,” Laureen commented.

She said her father didn’t talk much about his time in the service until he neared the end of his life.

“Those men who came back from the war didn’t talk much about it,” she said. “They just put their noses to the grindstone and got on with their lives. The one thing my dad did say was that you didn’t make friends so much because you didn’t know who would make it back from a bombing mission.”

After the war, Lew didn’t fly again until he was in his late 50s. He told his family that he felt he had used up all his luck in the air over Europe. However, in the late 1980s, he reconnected with some of his former crew mates.

Laureen said her father was a first generation Italian American, who “was raised very Catholic and grew up in a company mining home in Western Pennsylvania.” Until the military service, she surmised that Lew hadn’t been further from his home than Pittsburgh.

“I just think about how he was so young, naive, not exposed to much of anything of the world and then he was overseas in Italy,” she added.