For most of Tom Dowlin's 44-plus years, he knew Dale Karger simply as a friend of his father's who ran an auto parts store.

Then one day he stumbled across that name on a World War II Web site. Could this be the same man -- one of the youngest American ace pilots ever at 19 years old?

"My dad said Dale did fly planes in the war, but he didn't know much more about it," Mr. Dowlin said.

He ended up spending three hours with Mr. Karger, talking about the war, going through combat video from Mr. Karger's P-51 Mustang and reminiscing about Mr. Karger's air combat victories, including a rare one over an ME-262, the world's first combat jet.

"I was in complete hero-worship," Mr. Dowlin said, his eyes wide. "I thought, 'How did I waste so much time knowing this guy and not knowing all this?' "

An amateur videographer, Mr. Dowlin taped an interview with Mr. Karger and turned it into a seven-minute clip.

A member of the Beaver Area Heritage Foundation, he was at a foundation event last year and started showing the clip to fellow foundation member David O'Leary. Then something strange happened.

"A crowd gathered," he said. Foundation members were transfixed by Mr. Karger.

The two men started thinking. The local veterans, members of the "Greatest Generation," were in their 80s -- at least those that remained were.

"They're dying off," Mr. O'Leary said. "We thought, 'We should get these guys on film.' "

As it happened, the Beaver Area Historical Museum also was planning a "Greatest Generation" show, featuring memorabilia from local World War II veterans. Mr. O'Leary and Mr. Dowlin ultimately decided to launch their project and include it as part of the museum show.

They spread the word that they wanted to interview veterans, set up a studio in the library of a local church and spent a couple of Saturdays collecting more than 20 hours of memories from 22 people.

A disc containing the interviews went into the museum's archives, and a copy was given to each of the participants. Mr. Dowlin and a friend of his, Eric Cooper, of New Brighton, are now creating a 30- to 40-minute documentary to premiere at the Beaver Area Heritage Foundation Charter Day dinner Oct. 25.

Both men found the interviewing process extraordinary.

"Some would sort of get this twinkle in their eye and say that this was the best time of their lives," Mr. O'Leary said. "All these young guys, out seeing the world, they loved it.

"Then the next guy comes and says, 'It was the worst time in my life. There was just so much killing. I couldn't sleep for years.' "

Mr. Dowlin said he was particularly moved by one man's pain. "He just had changed when he came home. One night his dad told him that he was afraid him and didn't want to leave guns around. When he talked about it, he started crying."

Mr. O'Leary said when he asked that man what his job was in the war, he got a spooky answer: "To kill Germans."

Another veteran, James "Zack" Wallover, of Beaver, still has the rifle he took after killing a Japanese soldier. That was on Iwo Jima, in one of the war's most ferocious battles, and the Japanese soldier had surprised Mr. Wallover and shot at him first. The bullet took the dog tags and a silver cross from around Mr. Wallover's neck; Mr. Wallover's bullet took the Japanese soldier's life.

Mr. Dowlin said such stories left him feeling strangely sad as well as proud.

"These men grew up in the Depression, fought in World War II, came home, rebuilt America, made America into a superpower -- these guys are amazing," he said. "But then you see them crying, and you realize they didn't have counseling, didn't really talk about it. They got on with living. But they've had this inside them all those years. I felt bad for them."

Mr. O'Leary said a number of the men said in their interviews that they had never talked about their war experiences before; others had opened up only in recent years. He said his own father was wounded in the battle for Attu, an island in the Aleutians, but never talked about it.

One place the veterans did talk, however, was in what the organizers called the "green room," a waiting room stocked with coffee and doughnuts. Mr. O'Leary said on the first Saturday, they had allowed 20 minutes for each interview, then found they were averaging about an hour. People waiting their turn started piling up in the green room and started talking.

"They sat there, drank coffee, ate doughnuts and told war stories," Mr. O'Leary said. "It was wonderful stuff. I don't think they minded that they were two hours late for an interview."

Mr. Dowlin said he kept trying to sneak into the green room with a camera, but when the veterans noticed that he was there, the talk would die -- as if there's a part of their world that outsiders can never really enter.

Still, the men said they felt honored to be allowed in as far as they were, and they felt honored to give something back to men who had served in such a cause.

"Yes, we are doing a service for the community and for posterity by getting these memories," Mr. O'Leary said. "But I felt also that we were doing a service for the veterans, honoring them. In a way, we were telling them, 'Your memories are important enough to be recorded.' I liked that."

Copies of the interviews will be provided to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., which has launched a national initiative asking people to record interviews with World War II veterans.

Mr. Dowlin said he is humbled to think his work will be looked at by people for generations to come.

"World War II was bigger than anything that came before it and was probably bigger than anything that will come in the future," he said. "When I get quite a bit older, I'm going to be able to say that I was around to talk to these guys."

Two clips from the interviews have been posted on YouTube. They can be accessed at youtube.com/watch?v=VY5gd06SQi8 and at youtube.com/watch?v=ZSBAG5_yITQ