Technical Difficulties

We recently experienced an outage of one of our external hard drives. While we work to repair the issue and restore our lost data, we will need to take a short hiatus. In the mean time, please feel free to browse through some of our older posts.

Who taught you to love books?

Question:
Who taught you to love books?

Answer:
My Uncle Phil. And it is a bit of a long story, so first, here is a portion of the last (and one of the few) letter I wrote to him. He passed away a few weeks afterwords.

Because of you, I love to read. And this is the big one Uncle Phil. This is the biggest one of all. I can still remember going to your parent’s place when you were cleaning it out. You let me dad and I pick through some things and gave us a paper bag full of old books. It was some old series called The Hardy Boys. At the time I loved how they smelled more than the idea of reading them, but as I began to read them, my life changed. I found I loved to read. I could escape from the real world and solve mysteries. I began collecting more of the series. And along the way I discovered other books were out there that I liked to read. Books with dragons, magic, and heroes. I couldn’t tell you how many books I’ve read since the day I left with that paper bag. But I can tell you I had fun reading them. And the best part of all, my daughter loves to read now. At the age of five she still struggles with words, but I can see that look in her eye when she sits down with a book. It’s the same look I had when I started reading The Hardy Boys.

Now, some background on Uncle Phil. I usually tell people he married my aunt just because I like to see them make funny faces. So I will back up even more to give a bit more history behind the man.

Uncle Phil was born, well, a long time before I was. His parents were nice from the stories I have heard and they were both very intelligent people. Uncle Phil married my mother's sister, Diana. Uncle Phil and Aunt Diana were (and still are) the source of many good stories in my life. Whenever I traveled to, from, or through Chicago, there was always time taken out for a visit to their house in Homewood. A house I can still remember quite distinctly. Diana and Phil were the powerhouse on my mother's side of the family. I do not know if it was their personality, their grace, or something supernatural, but you could always count on having a great time there.

So when Uncle Phil's parents passed away, it was a sad time for him. And on one of our many trips west, my father and I stopped as usual at the "Diana & Phil Rest Stop." Uncle Phil was kind enough to take us both to his parent's apartment where he essentially let us browse through their stuff to see if there was anything we wanted. While I am sure everything that Phil and the rest of his family wanted was already taken, it still felt wonderful (and awkward) to be invited to somebody's house to pick through their stuff. It was like an estate sale where everything was free.

One of those items I picked to take home, somewhat reluctantly, was a set of musty books. Something called the Hardy Boys. To this day, I still love that smell of musty, old books. And to this day, I still love to read (even though my Kindle does not smell musty).

As time passed, Aunt Diana passed. Uncle Phil remarried to the ex-wife of my mother's brother. So the in-laws (or "outlaws" as Uncle Phil liked to say) got married. For me, it was no big deal. They were still "Aunt" and "Uncle," they were just married. I am sure others thought differently.

And that is the story of Uncle Phil. Although he impacted my life beyond teaching me to love reading, he will still be missed. But I am glad I can find him again whenever I want simply by reading a book.

Photos:
The UFO Team has several photos of Uncle Phil, but seeing as his death is still fairly recent, I have refrained from showing them as well as disclosing his full name.

References:
- Numerous facts were gathered from the private Richard Family Estate collection. These facts span numerous sources of information and contain genealogical data, photos, and newspaper articles.

Do you know Harry Kurtz?

Question:
Do you know Harry Kurtz?

Answer:
In the photo below, we can see Harry Kurtz posing with a beautiful horse. In the background, you can also see a sod house or building of some sort. Based on the other photos in our collection, the UFO Team is going to guess that this photo was taken between the late 1920s and the mid 1930s.

According to the 1930 Census, Harry Kurtz was born in Iowa around 1909. His father was born in Pennsylvania and his mother was born in Illinois.

Aside from that, we can only guess that he was a co-worker and friend of the Phillips family.

Photos:


References:
- 1930 United States Federal Census.
- Numerous facts were gathered from the private Richard Family Estate collection. These facts span numerous sources of information and contain genealogical data, photos, and newspaper articles.

What blizzard do you remember as a child?

Question:
What blizzard do you remember as a child?

Answer:
The past two months have brought an unprecedented amount of snow to the east coast. Fortunately, the UFO Team has managed to stay on the outskirts of most of these major storms, but we have also managed to accumulate enough snow to make us wonder if we still live in the Snow Belt of north-western Pennsylvania.

So aside from this year's memorable storms, the one I remember most as a child was back in the mid 1980s. I am sure we got out of school (usually anything over two inches of snow results in a closure) but what I remember most was having a snowball fight with my Dad and building a snow fort. I believe this was also the year I built a snow bear (instead of a snow man). Needless to say, I had lots of fun being a kid in the snow.

Photos:
While I know there are photos of the storm I remember as a kid, they are stored in some secretive UFO location and cannot be accessed at this time. So instead, I'll share other photos of snow in our collection.

The HL Ranch in 1923:



Sledding down a hill:





A young couple in a buggy:



References:
- Numerous facts were gathered from the private Richard Family Estate collection. These facts span numerous sources of information and contain genealogical data, photos, and newspaper articles.

Who were your childhood heroes?

Question:
Who were your childhood heroes?

Answer:
I had a few people that I idolized when I was a kid. From singers, to actors, to family members, to friends, there were people that were popular and I wanted to be just like them. Case in point, I seriously wanted to be like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie Commando. Just watching him kill the bad guys and rescue the good guys made my day (as did Stallone, Norris, and others).

But all of these people were not really heroes to me. These were just people that were "cool" and I wanted them to be my friend. The real hero I idolized was my great uncle (as in he was my father's uncle), Uncle George.

Uncle George (Neil George Richards) served as the tail gunner on a B-24 that was shot down in September of 1944. The story I was always told was that he was shot down and got shot in the butt with a crossbow by a Russian woman. How much of this is true, I have no idea. But in September of 1944, he was indeed shot down over Russia. As their plane took fire from the ground, he bailed out over water:

My chute would not open at first but did just about the time I hit the water. Next thing I did was to get out of it and inflated my Mae West so I could stay afloat.

And he was "captured" by a woman, but there is no account of any shots fired (by crossbow or otherwise):

Just as I had reached the top of the cliff I was covered by an armed Russian guard which happened to be a girl. She pointed her gun at me and loaded it then hollered and three more girls came up. They had guns with bayonets on them which they also pointed at me.

Regardless of what happened and how the story was told, Uncle George was always a hero to me. He rarely spoke of his time in the war and only had a few modest displays of his mementos from the war.

Photos:


Neil George Richards is on the far left




References:
- 1409th AAF Base Unit, European Division Air Transport Command, Historical Record Report, Ball Project.
- Numerous facts were gathered from the private Richard Family Estate collection. These facts span numerous sources of information and contain genealogical data, photos, and newspaper articles.

Do you know Fred G. Gies?

Question:
Do you know Fred G. Gies?

Answer:
We do not know Fred, but we did find a little information about him that seems to pan out based on the photos we have. Fred appears to have been born March 1910 in Nebraska to parents of Russian and German origin. He and his family eventually ended up moving from Lincoln, Nebraska to Keystone, Nebraska. The link to Keystone is clear in one of the photos below.

We also found another reference to Fred on the Keith County, Nebraska GenWeb site, where it appears the coordinator, Susan Anderson, is related. We attempted to contact Mrs. Anderson but were unsuccessful.

Photos:






References:
- "NEGenWeb--Keith County--WELCOME!" RootsWeb.com Home Page. Web. 28 Jan. 2010. http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nekeith/.
- "Walter Message Board." Web. 28 Jan. 2010. http://erikas.cc/walter/walter.htm.
- Numerous facts were gathered from the private Richard Family Estate collection. These facts span numerous sources of information and contain genealogical data, photos, and newspaper articles.