ATTLEBORO -- Imperial Japan took her class away and ended her childhood with the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in the middle of her senior year at Attleboro High School.

By Christmas of 1941 -- mere weeks after Dec. 7, the day President Franklin Roosevelt said would live in infamy -- the boys she knew as a wide-eyed 18-year-old girl had already started to enlist.

By the time Theresa Dion graduated high school, the classrooms were emptied of boys on the threshold of manhood. Even the school's principal and football coach answered the call to war.

She would remember them, though, even when she left school herself after a graduation ceremony whittled of graduates, and married Oliver Cameron, who would go on to own the electroplating shop on Wall Street until it closed in 1963.

Each day, when The Attleboro Sun was delivered -- and word of which boys had enlisted, and all too soon where they fought, were wounded or killed became hometown news -- the new Mrs. Cameron would grab a pair of scissors. `` Every Saturday, there were pictures of soldiers and veterans in The Attleboro Sun, and I would cut them out,'' said Cameron, who is now 80. `` I had a shoe box full of them.''

Whenever an item about an Attleboro soldier or sailor appeared in the newspaper, Cameron would stick it in a scrapbook for safekeeping.

`` Most of the pictures in those books are from my Class of '41,'' she said. `` From my freshman year in high school, a lot of them were my classmates, my schoolmates. I just liked the idea of saving them.''

The three yellowing scrapbooks are like a leather-bound time capsule of all the local boys and girls who went to war, those who returned, and those who didn't.

There are stories, many of them brief, about the missing, the dead, the prisoners of war.

`` I put a little gold star on the pages of the boys who died,'' Cameron said. `` Every now and then, I'd take them out and show them to people.''

Page after brittle page, the books trace the wartime lives of hometown heroes: The five Tracey boys of Hebronville, Robert and David in the Army; John, Edward and Joseph in the Navy.

The six LaPierre brothers of Dodgeville, Emil, Theodore and Armand in the Army; Arthur, Alphonse and William in the Navy.

The six Shockro sons of Carpenter Street, Raymond, Harry, James, Harold (`` Bud'' ), John and Edward (`` Red'' ).

There are fascinating tales. Marine Staff Sgt. Roland Perry of 46 Dorchester Ave. was aboard the first American plane to fly over the Truk cq Islands on a reconnaissance mission to photograph the Japanese fleet gathered below.

Army Pvt. Tony Correia of 618 County St. was shipped 5,000 miles to the outskirts of Salerno, Italy, where he was wounded.

The Purple Heart medal Correia received was made only a few yards from his home in downtown Attleboro.

The Rev. Brother Alfred T. Pion, a Catholic missionary, finally returned home to his 90-year-old father and 10 siblings at 13 Foley St. after more than three years as a Japanese prisoner of war.

Interspersed among reported deployments, notice of promotions and descriptions of exotic locales are the tragic stories of young men gone all too soon.

Seaman Alfred Johnson of 76 Orange St. was one of four brothers in the Navy who enlisted the day after Christmas 1941, only to be killed weeks later, the first Attleboro serviceman to die in World War II.

His Orange Street neighbor, Army Air Force 2nd Lt. Gordon Salinger was killed on his 50th, and what was to have been his final mission bombing oil fields in Romania.

There are about 800 clippings in all, almost all with accompanying photographs.

Cameron took the scrapbooks with her to Wareham when she left Attleboro in 1972. There, they stayed in a closet for three decades more. She returned to the city in October to donate her clippings to the Attleboro Public Library.

`` I've had them for a long time,'' she said. `` I thought maybe people could make good use of them at the library. They might be a good item for people to look through as a reference.''

Attleboro Veterans Agent Thomas Tullie said the scrapbooks could be invaluable to those World War II veterans still living, and could help them recall old friends and comrades.

`` It's priceless because these people aren't going to be around in 10 years,'' Tullie said.

Cameron brought the books to reference librarian Susan Hindersmann-Fiske.

`` Some of it moved me to tears,'' Hindersmann-Fiske said. `` Such beautiful boys. I taught for 13 years in the Attleboro school system. I recognized the names from the boys I had in class.

`` So beautiful. So young. So handsome. They could be today's boys.''

James A. Merolla may be reached at 508-236-0428 or email him at jmerolla@thesunchronicle.com.