Riverbend Journal

  On our past Florida trip, we spent one very cold afternoon stopping at a couple of nearby pawn shops to see what there might be to see. As we walked towards the entrance of the store, our daughter had looked at that bookshelf and thought it would be perfect for her new apartment which she will move into during the summer between semesters of college. I thought it would too but there just wasn't enough room to haul it back to Iowa with us with five people and all our luggage. Besides, it was a bit on the rickety side too. But I am a woodworker. So in between my LEGO project, my genealogy research on the albums belonging to my great great aunt and designing the new bedroom furniture I promised my wife, I spent some time working out a design for a bookshelf for my daughter as an apartment warming gift of sorts. I stayed close to the design though I will vary the joints a bit and make the shelves fixed instead of floating so that it will be more sturdy for all those college textbooks...

  Spring of 1920 was Clara Kuck's last school semester in Great Falls and she decided to head back east for more college education in Boston. But for some reason, her photo album skips backward in time because there a number of pages featuring her cousin Leta and her daughters. Above is a picture of her cousin Leta who was the daughter of her uncle Frederick and aunt Katherine Brandau Kuck, Frederick is the younger brother of her father John Kuck and Katherine is the older sister of mother Elizabeth Brandau Kuck. Isn't it fun keeping things straight when brothers marry sisters! Leta Adelheid Kuck would marry Leo Grant Titus on 17 December 1912 in Seattle, Washington. Leta and Leo's first born was named after Leta's mother Katherine. She was born December of 1914 so I'm guessing the two pictures above were taken sometime in the spring of 1915. When I cam to this page, I spent a fair amount of time and comparing it to Clara Kuck's mother Elizabeth Brandau Kuck...

Generated by A.I. What's wrong with people? As I did with my eldest, I am now taking my youngest to confirmation classes that occur once a week during the school year. It doesn't start until 6:00 in the evening and lasts until 7:15 so there isn't a lot of light this time of year. It is about a 20 minute round trip each time I go downtown to the church and during the time of year especially, is over streets that are rough and full of potholes. Most people just rattle down them anyway, drop off their child, go home for the next 45 minutes or so and then repeat the journey. Since I would likely be doing the same thing at home as I do in my own car, I just dress accordingly and sit in my car reading using my backlit kindle paperwhite and save the fuel and wear on my vehicle. I have found that it is quite tolerable to read for 75 minutes without my car on for most days where the temperature is above zero degrees F. On the rare evening it is below those temperatures, I have been ...

  I always enjoy looking at old photos with cars, not because I'm a car guy because I'm about as far from that as one gets, but because it tickles something in my engineering brain, much like my small collection of vintage cameras on the bookcase downstairs. I like seeing all the mechanical aspects of it and the simplicity on how it works compared to modern versions of cars where you can't really see anything but the body panels.  Clara Kuck spent one of her Easter holidays while in Great Falls, Montana going to such places as Bozeman, Helena, Missoula and a town called Anaconda in March of 1920 according to a newspaper article I have found. Butte is along one of the sides of the giant triangle those towns form in reference to her starting point of Great Falls so I have no doubt that this picture is likely taken during that particular trip.  I wanted to identify that particular vehicle so turned to A.I. which promptly told me it was a 1911 or 1912 Packard or Peerless tour...

  A little over two years ago, our neighbor passed away. She and her husband had owned a lot of restaurants in a particular franchise that were quite popular back in the late 70's and 80's and were quite wealthy I think so they have a nice property which sort of dwarfs our modest house. Most people probably considered our neighbor sort of a snob from conversations I overheard but perhaps because we shared a physical property line denoted by those small bushes in a row, we got to know her a bit better. She was actually quite nice and often brought over chocolate chip cookies for our girls and I reciprocated with garden vegetables when they were in season. We occasionally talked over the "hedge" when we were out in our respective yards and any property line decisions we had to make were always made quite agreeably. But due to her economic status I guess, she was a private person and I respected that. Unfortunately though, dementia took her mind and we drifted out of con...

  The next photo to catch my interest was this photo 14 pages into Clara Kuck's album. Clara is the girl on the far left of this picture. What caught my eye were the letters at the bottom, S.P.E.'s and what did it stand for? I googled it but couldn't find anything that resonated. So once again I turned to Gemini A.I. and after inputting the picture, asked what it stood for. It gave me a handful of possible answers but the one that stood out was one that said in the late 19th century and early 20th century, right when this photo was taken, there was a Society for the Promotion of Education. It went on to say chapters existed and promoted women's literacy and higher education. Judging from what I know about Clara after this picture was taken, this is likely what she was referring too since she studied at four different Universities and taught at a fifth later on A.I. went on to tell me that the girls were all dressed in "middy blouses" paired with dark bloomers ...

During that last extreme cold snap we had, since we were avoiding the panic and ransacking of grocery shelves apparently happening in our largest urban cities, we decide to enjoy a nice warm fire and spend our time ransacking the pages of our current books and perhaps taking a nap or two. Our fireplace had frosted over quite a bit due to the extreme cold air in the chimney and the warmer moist air inside our house. Never the less, I stuck a few logs inside, threw in a couple handfuls of my wood scraps from various projects last year, and got it lit. In a matter of minutes, the moisture was gone and the heat was starting to heat up the room. Since I have to open the outside sliding door a bit while starting the fire until it starts drafting properly, the basement cools off a bit before it gets warmer. It is naturally a bit cooler anyway due to the property of heat rising. So while the basement family room was preheating, I decided to go back upstairs and make some biscuits. Biscuits wer...

  Clara Kuck's photo album seems to start with her time in Great Falls, Montana where she worked as a teacher of Latin, German, French and English as well as teaching dramatic arts. After her initial pages dedicated to seeing the local sights, she starts focusing more of her camera on things closer to home. I assume the above picture is of where she boarded during her initial time in Great Falls and local directories at the time seem to corroborate that. Clara is the center lady directly behind the girl on the swing. I ponder the use of the structure the swing is tied to as it seems overly built for a simple swing. Perhaps they used that as a older version of an engine hoist for working on vehicles since it spans the driveway? Maybe they were big hunters and skinned a lot of animals? Subsequent sleuthing however made that less likely. On a whim, I uploaded the photo into Gemini A.I. and started asking questions and one of the things it reported back to me was that the house was bui...

  I am at the point of crying uncle on this project. When I last wrote about it, I had assembled all (except one) of the sets I had instructions for and was trying to figure out the rest by finding unique pieces, searching for sets that used those unique pieces and then going by gut instinct and a bit of trial and error. I would print off all the parts used for the set and see if I had them. If I had all but maybe one or two, I would save the pieces in a labeled plastic bag and add the missing pieces to a growing online list. After I had a half dozen or more of these sets separated, I would place an order for the missing pieces which usually only cost me less than a $1 to order. The shipping always cost more. Once those pieces came in, I would assemble the sets using online instructions found on another site. I kept rinsing and repeating until I got to what you see above.  The one exception I alluded to earlier is the Space Shuttle Atlantis set you see in the back right corner...