Riverbend Journal

This is the first of four letters that my great grandfather wrote about his time serving during World War I and the photographs were taken by him. Victor Kuck Kelly Field 24 Sep 1917 Dear Friends: I have often thought of writing you, but for some reason or the other I have not been able to find time. I suppose you realize a boy would rather wash dishes than write letters. I am at the YMCA writing this. It is about 1/2 mile from my tent. Whenever we write after dark we go to the Y, or write by candlelight. Let me say right here that I will always be a YMCA booster. They furnish us our stationary and reading matter, beside staging all boxing and wrestling bouts and arranging for music entertainments. I was sworn in August 15th at Ft. Logan, Col. About 150 of us took the oath at the same time. While there I did my first kitchen police work. A very nice name, but such work! We had to help cook, wait on table and scrub floors. I bet I could show a lot of women how to save a lot of work in t...

Note: We have gone on a small mini vacation and depending on my level of relaxation and access to my iPad (my girls like to use it for their entertainment), your comments my be slow appearing as too my comments to them. ************************* A week before Christmas, I finally found the time to check something off my list, a rather lengthy list at that. I drove 20 miles south to a county historical library that I had last stopped at maybe a half dozen years before when I found myself there with a couple hours to kill. During that time killing, I discovered they had shelves of obituaries clipped from the local newspaper, like maybe 60 linear feet of shelving full, all neatly stored in plastic sleeves organized in 3 ring binders and helpfully indexed, as long as you knew the year of death. At the time, I didn't know the years of my ancestors death, comprising an entire huge branch of my family tree, and so wishfully told myself that I should compile a list and come back someday. T...