In 2020 at the Battleship North Carolina, President Donald Trump annoucned the designation of Wilmington, North Carolina, as America's first World War II Heritage City. This culminated in a 12 1/2 year public-private partnership project through the US Congress conceived, organized, and led by the author, a volunteer. Selection criteria: a city's contributions to the war effort; and its legacy preservations. The National Park Service administers this program. To tell this story, the author weaves articles from the "Wilmington StarNews" - a Gannett newspaper in the USA TODAY Network - into an anthology or compendium, of life, culture, and harsh reality on on the area's home front. He either wrote them or served as a writer's principal source. They read as a memoir of wartime Wilmington and a tribute to its Heritage City preservation, and his life growing up there during the war.