Riverbend Journal

Back when I first was in communications with the Good Samaritan who mailed me the albums, I also reached out to contact the salvage store where they found those items. I was told that the items had been found in a house belonging to a hoarder and largely hadn't been sorted through though she was pretty sure there would be more things and that they would let me know when they were gone through. I wrote back and sent a couple pictures of the family I was interested in, John Kuck and his first two wives, hoping that they might recognize them and allow them to be separated for me to obtain at some point. They thanked me for the reference and then lapsed into silence. A couple weeks went by and I hadn't heard anything back so two things crossed my mind. First, I have done 25 years of research on this family and that is hard to transfer to a new stranger with just a few photographs. Two, at least two of the albums had already been sold to the Good Samaritan. How many other things wer...

  Unidentified woman I've debated on what to write or even if to write this post for awhile but think I will proceed anyway. It is likely the last post on Clara Kuck's photo album (I'll do some posts on her postcard album coming up) for awhile anyway. The subject I wish to write about might not be for everyone and the last picture I might be appropriate for impressionable kids around. Though it isn't too graphic, I do think it is a bit risqué, especially considering it was taken around 1918 when times were much different than they are today. So without further ado: The album has 146 pages of photographs with three to five photographs per page which equals a lot photos. If you take out all the photos containing male family members or married men, which aren't numerous to start with, you are left with maybe a handful out of nearly 500 photos that contain single men and of those, none are of just one man but usually a young man among a group of females. To me this stri...

  Along with the other projects I have been working on, I have been slowly designing new bedroom furniture to replace those we still have that I bought decades ago as a young single man with not much money. They have held up well despite being cheaply made and will likely still be of service to one of our children until they start obtaining those sorts of things. Although you can't really see the joinery, it is all there, the tenons, the dadoes, the figuring out how I am going to build it.  When I was a working engineer with access to expensive software, this job was a bit easier but after retiring and losing access to said software, I spent about a decade mostly sketching things on paper in a notebook, making lots of notes and then still spending lots of head scratching while I was mid-build trying to figure things out. The end goal was usually accomplished but it wasn't a terribly efficient way to progress and mistakes inevitably get made along a way.  "The difference b...

  Perhaps it is due to her theatrical leanings which she would later go to study for at college yet again, but my 2nd great aunt Clara never seems to look straight at the camera in most of the photos in which she is featured and put into her photo album. She is the one crouching, first girl on the left of the kneeling row in the upper left and bottom photos above and she is the half crouched girl in the middle of the scrum in the upper right photo. There is probably some psychological reason for that but not being a psychologist or sleeping at a Holiday Inn Express last night, I don't know that reason. I did do som e research though and found that the A.C.A probably stands for the Association of Collegiate Alumnae which was a prestigious group for college educated females back in those times. Among some of the things the organization stressed were  issues including standards of academic programs, isolation following the college experience, living wage for college alumnae and c...

  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...