Rachel Haynie wrote from her heart about everybody and everything that crossed her path.

For more than 50 years, she chronicled everyday life in hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles ranging from the recovery of a WWII airplane from Lake Murray to the return of General Wade Hampton’s silver.

Her papers, consisting of hundreds of notes, images and transcribed interviews, have been donated to the South Caroliniana Library where they will be preserved, catalogued and made available to researchers, genealogists and historians.

Although she wrote 12 books, the one closest to her heart was Our Zoo Day written in 2012 for her grandchildren, Penelope and Kate.

She called their Riverbanks Zoo adventure a “special book for special girls” and signed it “Grandma Bunny, who loves them very much.” When possible she dedicated her books to her granddaughters and her “beloved son Doug.”

The cornerstone of her other 11 books is the trilogy of Townes books, which includes Charles H. Townes and A Beam Straight to the Stars. The book commemorated his 99th birthday celebration that Rachel attended at the University of California at Berkeley in July 2014.

The second book in the trilogy is Charles H. Townes: Beam Maker. The third is First, You Explore: The Story of the Young Charles Townes, a children’s book about Townes growing up on a small farm in Greenville.

She was deeply affected by the loss of history, art and artifacts caused when General William T. Sherman’s troops burned Dr. Robert W. Gibbes’ house in Columbia. The home was a massive museum of art, documents, rare books, Revolutionary War artifacts, fossils and South Carolina and American history.

The destruction struck such a deep emotional chord with Rachel that she wrote Reconstructing Dr. Gibbes’ Study: A Biography of Loss. When she gathered a group of Gibbes’ descendants at the Richland Library to talk about the book in 2015, she told them she wrote it because she was angry about the senseless destruction of so many historic treasures.

“I’m still angry,” she told them that day.

South Carolina Myths and Legends and Myths and Mysteries of South Carolina explore unusual phenomena, strange events and mysteries in South Carolina’s history, and she described spirits and apparitions in Camden Ghost Stories & Legends.

As a spin-off from a chapter in South Carolina Myths and Legends, Rachel wrote Port of Brunswick’s Audacious Aviator: Paul Redfern about a Columbia pilot who disappeared on a record setting flight to Brazil in 1927.

Rachel always saw numerous story possibilities and sometimes a book in everything. When excitement rose in September 2005 about the recovery of a WWII bomber that had crashed into Lake Murray, Rachel’s mind was buzzing.

The rescue of the plane attracted media attention from around the world.

“There had to be one story for me,” Rachel said.

She claimed her story when she learned that the only member of the ditched plane’s crew who was still alive was living in Oregon. Not deterred, Rachel drove across the country to interview Hank Mascall.

Rachel turned her story into a book, Stalled, a narrative scrapbook collecting glimpses into an Oregon military couple’s WWII honeymoon in Columbia.

Deeply intrigued by aviation history, Rachel wrote Cornfield to Airfield: A History of Columbia Air Base for the 70th anniversary of the base’s opening.

She joined Dr. John Hammond Moore to write Capital Salute: D-Day Plus 70: Remembrances by Greater Columbia, S.C., WWII Veterans.

She wrote about Claude Buckley’s art in America Goes for Broke: Allegorical Currency Paintings, a collection depicting how the rich in America keep getting richer and the poor even poorer.

She left an unfinished book about Mrs. Sloan’s Dancing School. During Rachel’s last days, she expressed regret she had not finished it and wondered how her research and images could be used to finish it.

Since she had accumulated a vast amount of research, her colleagues and fellow authors are joining forces to try to finish her last book, which will be dedicated to her “beloved son Doug” and her grandchildren Kate and Penelope and will be the last gift “with love from Grandma Bunny.”

Editor’s note: This will be the first year Rachel Haynie will not be with us at the Saturday, Dec. 1, Authors for Literacy book signing for adult literacy tutoring. Rachel was an ardent believer in the value of literacy and source of ideas to improve the event. As a writer for the Chronicle, she was an enthusiastic fount of ideas. We miss her.