FORSYTH - When the author of a new book about Marilyn Monroe went hunting for rarely seen pictures of the star, it was only natural she'd look to Forsyth.

That's where Dicka Wagner lives, guarding carefully the half-century-old photographs of her late father, taken with the late, great, tragic star, whose fame seems to have a half-life longer than plutonium.

Wagner's father Dick "Jiggs" Robison was a state trooper from Shelbyville and one of the officers assigned to guard and escort Monroe when she dropped into Bement like a Hollywood angel on Aug. 6, 1955. She judged a beard competition and gave a speech about Abraham Lincoln and told a crowd, whose collective blood pressure would have been enough to put a man on the moon, that "Bearded men seem romantic to me."

Sometime during the day, she had her picture snapped signing a local autograph, and then there was the dramatic picture taken with Robison and a fellow state cop, Dixie Davis. It's vintage Monroe, a smiling Davis on her left arm and a positively beaming Robison on her right. Robison clearly has said something funny, and Monroe's head, thrown back in laughter, is looking right at him.

That was the picture the Herald & Review ran big when we wrote about Wagner and her photographs in April 2007, and it jumped right out at author Jenna Glatzer. She had been busy sifting through the Internet, looking to find gold - pictures of one of the most photographed women in history that hadn't already been exploded across the public eye countless times.

"I was searching like crazy," said Glatzer, who lives in New York. "I used keywords like 'When I met Marilyn,' or 'When my dad met Marilyn,' just in the hopes of finding people who had little, interesting personal stories and pictures that hadn't been told or seen. I found just a few, and Dicka's was one of them. I loved the story, and she added a lot to the book."

The Bement story and pictures get a generous treatment over several pages, and the story made such an impression on Glatzer that she even included Robison in the dedications of the book, which is called "The Marilyn Monroe Treasures." Glatzer says Robison and another man she came across in her research are "the kind of people I wish I had known."

The 175-page book takes an unusual approach to the Monroe story, telling her life in both pictures and reproduced copies of original documents that are tucked into sleeves that can be pulled out: the certificate of Monroe's marriage to Joe DiMaggio and her Screen Actors Guild card, for example. Reproduced on another page is Monroe's hasty signature, exactly as it was signed in Robison's police notebook while he drove her all the way to Chicago to catch a plane to New York.

"I just love this book; it's super, super," said Wagner, 57. "I love how the author has used the pictures, and, oh my God, it just makes me cry to think how proud, proud, proud my dad would be if he could see this now."

Robison never had his pictures published but carried them around in his squad car and would show them off to anyone who'd take a second to look. But fate didn't give him too long to treasure his brush with stardom: He died of a heart attack in 1970 at the age of 46 - just eight years after Monroe died on Aug. 5, 1962, a date almost seven years to the day since her Bement visit.

Wagner's mom, Dorothy Bullington, who remarried after her husband's death, said everyone in town knew the Monroe story. She remembers Robison as such a popular character in Shelbyville that the three florists in town ran out of flowers on the day of his funeral. And longtime Robison friend and former Circuit Judge Bob Broverman, who also is quoted in the Monroe book, recalled the state cop as a "beloved" man, with many admirers.

He said meeting Monroe was one of the highlights of Robison's life. "He said she was just like a common person, easy to talk to," added Broverman, 77. "But, boy, she was a looker, and she just had that aura about her, like she's got a kind of halo. You can see it in her pictures."

Glatzer's noticed it too, and it shines out of the pages of her book. "She just had that magic, ethereal quality," she said. "It's something that makes people feel like they want to know her, to understand her and be protective of her, and they want to be close to her."

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