Riverbend Journal

  Photo Credit Above is a picture of Handsome Falls which was later renamed to Rainbow Falls. Lewis and Clark named it the former on their way by back in the early 1800's and sometime later, it was renamed to Rainbow falls by the time my 2nd great aunt Clara ventured there in the early 1900's. In fact, by the time Clara Kuck got there, a newly constructed dam and power house had been completed. Being a big fan of Lewis and Clark and have read their journals in unedited and edited formats over the years, I have always wished I could have seen it when the Missouri River was still free running. Even with the dam, I've thought that someday I would like to stop by and see what remains of the lower part of the falls, the upper part being covered by the impounded waters of the reservoir behind the dam. These days, according to the Google Earth image down at the bottom of this post, only a trickle of water goes over the lower part of the falls now. But the above picture taken when ...

  John Kuck Family Home 1897 I blogged about this photo a couple weeks ago when I first saw a low resolution picture of it laying on the Good Samaritan's couch out in Colorado Springs. Now that I have the albums scanned at a much higher resolution, I can actually make out a lot of details that I couldn't before. This allows me to zoom in and see who those people are on the front porch which I couldn't make out previously. Clara, Elizabeth and Paul Kuck On the back of the photo, it says it was taken in 1897 and is of John Kuck's home which I knew already from the previous photo. But knowing the date it was taken lets me calculate that Clara Kuck was around 16 years old, her younger brother Paul would be around 9 years old and their mother Elizabeth would be around 40 years old. Knowing all that I think the young lady holding up the bike is Clara, Elizabeth is the woman with the fancy hat standing on the front porch and younger brother Paul is in the background closer to ...

  Clara Kuck's Photo Album My first order of business upon receiving the albums belonging to Clara Elizabeth Kuck was to preserve them. I started with the photo album by carefully taking apart the album which was fairly easy since it was one of those expandable ones of the era but did require some gentleness since it is over 100 years old. Once apart, I did a high resolution scan of all 75 pages front and back along with the covers front and back. I did this once before with my great grandfather's World War I photo album which was in much worse shape and eventually put all the scans into an online book using Shutterfly that allowed me to see the exact layout and all the pictures as the original album but in new condition. I'm not sure I'll do that with this book but at least I have the option. I would have liked to be able to remove the photos from the album and do individual scans of some of them but time has welded them in place and the fragile pieces that hold the ph...

  I'm not one for political memes and usually actively avoid them. I find them full of misleading half truths meant to stick it to one side or the other as a coping mechanism to make our own views appear superior and do little actual good by being shared. Thus I never share them and actively avoid reading them. Last year, I even culled my blog list of some blogs that were starting to rely more and more on sharing these sorts of memes. On very rare occasions though, a self deprecating one comes along, slips through my active culling process and is one that tickles my funny bone. This one did all those things and so I will break my rule just this once.

Here in the Midwest, unless you live literally under a rock, you have heard that we are in the midst of a large storm. The news would have you believe that we are running to our grocery stores and ransacking them. They have shown empty store shelves for the last three nights now on the evening news including some stores with lines out front of people waiting to get in. That is not how the 95% of open space outside of a few large urban areas on the maps behave. Yes there are a couple bare spots of shelves in the grocery store largely due to people not smart enough to understand the irrational fear that is being created and used to attract people to watch a particular news broadcast. Nobody wants to watch a reporter standing in front of a lightly populated store showing shoppers picking groceries from full shelves while telling the viewers that a big storm is on the way and people are just taking the usual precautions. That doesn't sell advertising spots. Instead, they have to hunt a...

  With three exceptions, I have found and assembled all the kits I have instructions for. Two of the kits still remain unassembled because I was missing pieces that have since been ordered. The third kit, the tall standing robot one in the back right of the above photo is a different story. As I go along and have fewer and fewer pieces to sort through to locate each proper piece, the process is speeding up. Eventually though, I had either assembled or were waiting on parts for all the kits that I had build instructions for or could remember owning. But as you can see in the picture below, I still had a large gallon sized baggie full of blue bricks and I assume that most of them belong to space themed sets that I no longer have build instructions for nor remember owning.  However, the Bricklink.com website has a feature that when you select a particular part, you can hit a button that will show you a list of LEGO builds across all it's lines that the singular part has been used...

  I went outside to check the mailbox and was surprised to see a rather large box sitting on my front porch. I hadn't ordered anything that would have come in that large of box had I? I looked at the mailing label and saw that it was from Colorado Springs, where my great great grandaunt's photo album had been located in a vintage and antique shop. The box was large enough to hold 20 such albums so I just assumed as I carried it inside, that it had been well packed. It had but it contained not one thing but four different items. It had the photo album, an album of postcards from her travels, a sort of school annual and a large photo of the Gamma Delta Sorority from Carleton College in Minnesota. The latter photo is 18 inches tall and 24 inches wide so way too big to fit in my flatbed scanner so I am only able to scan a portion of it. I scanned the portion that contains my great great grandaunt Clara who is in the front row, second from the left with the brooch pinned to her left...

  Clara Elizabeth Kuck Foot Clara Kuck was the youngest daughter of my 3rd great grandfather John Kuck. As a quick refresher, John Kuck's first wife Mary was my direct ancestor but she and five of her children died of diphtheria within months of each other between December 1878 and May 1879. John would remarry to the younger sister of his younger brother's wife and have three more children, the middle being Clara seen above. Note, until recently, this is the only picture I had of Clara as an adult. Clara graduated high school and took up teaching nearby in Sibley, Iowa, still living in her parent's house in Charles City, Iowa. Unlike the rest of her full and half siblings, Clara wasn't in a rush to get married and start a family and was still single at age 27 when her mother died in 1910. But the death of her mother definitely spurred her into action and the following year she obtained a passport to go to Germany and sometime in 1911 left. According to her passport, she...

  After returning from our Christmas/New Year vacation, I received a small manila envelope in the mail that allowed me to complete my first Space LEGO project, the Mobile Recovery Vehicle. The instructions that came with the set don't have a name for it, just the set number 6926, but online sources have it listed as a Mobile Recovery Vehicle. I started this one first for one big reason. Of all the build instruction booklets I have, the one for this set was in the best shape. I also remember it the most from the all the sets so perhaps it was a favorite of mine when I was a wee boy. I'm guessing I was drawn to the beefy large tires which were a novelty for LEGO at the time. All my other sets had much smaller tires which when you are tearing them apart and creating new vehicles, means one must design a much smaller vehicle. With big tires, one could build vehicles that were quite large and more fun to design and play with. After doing and initial sort of the LEGOs to get the Clas...

  One of the reasons I write about my family history or post parts of it online in various formats, is because doing so is very much like fishing. You never know what or who might come along and read one of those posts and take a bite of my bait. A few days ago I received a message on one of these places from someone who was seeking information about my great great grandfather's sister, a person I have written about on this blog in the distant past. In subsequent correspondences, I learned that this person had found a personal photo album of this sister in a box of things that were bought at an estate auction and was currently in some sort of place that resales old things. Rather than see the pictures plucked from the album and sold one at a time, she bought the entire album and was looking for a home for it. I of course volunteered to be that home but as of this writing, I have yet to hear back. Even if she decides to hold onto it or rehome it with someone else, I hope she will at...

  With the extreme cold weather in Florida, and our plans to spend lots of time at the beach dashed, we adapted our plans as best as we could. On one day, we drove to a place called Turkey Creek which I would have sworn was called Turtle Creek to the point that when we arrived, I thought we were at the wrong place and had to look it up on my phone and reassure myself that indeed all the information I had saved said Turkey and not Turtle. It is a fresh water creek that flows from somewhere to presumably into the Gulf of America (which the Apple Map App now refers to it) and during warmer times is a place where people bring floaty things and float on the current for maybe a half mile or so. Indeed, the bottom was nice and sandy and it would look mighty refreshing on a warmer day. Being that it was in the trees though and it was sunny despite being cold, we found it warm enough that we could hike the mile long board walk along it and enjoy the fresh air. Another day found us at an Air...

  Above is a picture of what I referred to in my previous post in this series and shows a number of completed sets of the Space LEGO series, which is what I grew up with as a child. When the first sets of these came out in the late 70's, man had already stepped on the moon but the reusable space shuttle was still a number of years away from reality. Talk in all the magazine of the time was of future colonies on the moon and even on other planets such as Mars. LEGO decided to capitalize on that by coming up with the Space LEGO series. After doing some initial research, I discovered a website www.bricklink.com that is geared towards people like me, who have never really let go of LEGOs. On one of it's many pages, they have one dedicated towards all the sets produced so one can get an idea of what the scope is if collecting is the goal. While I'm not sure collecting will be my goal as I don't have the room to required to store these things, it did provide some scale and de...

  ...you were correct, though the picture above is not Florida. Leaving on the Saturday after Christmas, the roads were full of traffic and it wasn't the most relaxing drive. Thus when we got on the south side of Nashville to the suburb of Brentwood, we pulled off the road for the night.  My apologies to Bob for not reaching out as I know this is his neck of the woods. We were tired and just needed to decompress from the miles and I know you likely had family around anyway. We ended up attending a Saturday evening mass at a nice church in Brentwood, getting some Chinese food at a nice restaurant across the street from our motel and calling it a day. The next day we did make it down to our destination of Florida. Long time readers may recall that for nearly a decade while my grandparents were alive, I made the journey to the panhandle of Florida where we would rent a house on the coast for a week for a reunion of sorts with my grandparents, parents, brother and his family. It w...

A.I. generated photo of my flat tire and where I was last week, though the flat tire and beach weren't at the same time. Just a couple days before our expected departure, we were on our way to Christmas Eve mass and I glanced down at the digital cluster display and noticed that one tire only had 11 pounds of pressure in it compared to the others with 36 pounds. I have only 3600 miles on these tires so I was pretty sure it wasn't the tire sensors themselves. When I pulled into our parking spot at the church, I walked around and yes, it was definitely very low.  I have been cursed with tires of late it seems. On my previous vehicle, I have blogged about the expensive run flats that come on it because the all wheel drive (AWD) feature of it means there is no room to store a spare tire. Run flat tires, while handy to have, are super expensive to replace. On my first long road trip, I was pulling over to a curb in a no parking area in downtown Charleston, South Carolina for a quick,...

  If there was one toy that defined my childhood, I would quickly pick LEGOs. By far, I spent more time playing with my LEGOs than I did any other toy. In fact, if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the hours that I spent playing with them didn't measure just in hours, days, weeks or even months but rather probably was on the magnitude of a year or more of my entire life. With no television and no modern day distractions, I often spent my waking childhood winter days in the old farmhouse situated on the living room floor by the wood stove, raking my LEGOs back and forth looking for the next piece to finish my latest creative build, much to the annoyance of my parents. LEGO never fully went away out of my life. I credit them a part of my marriage as well. During one of my first dates with my future wife, we got to talking about them and how we both loved playing with them. When our children were born and became of the appropriate age, visits to the farm would often involve dr...