Riverbend Journal

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. ************************* When we moved into this house a dozen years ago, I discovered some rodent residents in the attic space and bought some poison which I scattered out up there and they went away. I fortified the defenses such as repouring a severely buckled garage floor and put in a new door as well as stuffed steel wool into a couple perforations through the side of our house for various utilities. I declared victory and haven't seen a rodent in the decade plus years since. Last week, my wife said she spotted a mouse in the garage as she pulled her car in for the night. I assumed he must have gotten in at some point when the garage door was open during a yard work session but I wanted to take action before things got out of control. I found my bucket of pois...

  Now that the Laura Jane Harvey Murder series has drawn to it's conclusion, in it's place, for a few Fridays or so, I will post some stories about my great grandparents, the ones I knew the longest and the best, from the 100's of newspaper articles I found about them a couple months back. This one explains some mysteries now solved and others will be copies of letters written home by Victor during his time in France during World War I along with some selected photographs he took with his camera. Victor and Grace Smith Kuck I have always wondered how my great grandparents met. Unlike all my other ancestors, growing up in the same proximity wasn't involved. My great grandfather grew up and lived in Rockford and my great grandmother grew up and lived near Grand Mound. The were separated by 180 miles of cornfields, streams and hills. But yet my great grandfather stopped going to college, served in World War I and returned only to get married in less than a month after he r...

  Christmas tree in the old farmhouse

A couple weeks ago, I had an appointment to get new tires put on my vehicle. It is an AWD and I have learned, it really chews through tires, the price I pay for being able to drive on the horrible slick river bluffs all winter long around here. From experience, I knew it would be a fairly lengthy wait and also based on past experiences, an unpleasant one. Let me explain. The waiting room at the local dealership is a small room with 8 or so chairs arranged around two walls, a television on a faux fireplace on the third and the fourth side being open to the restrooms across the hallway. The television is forever blaring and people in the waiting room are always making lots of noise which means for me the book reader, I have a hard time concentrating. This wait started off as no exception. The television was tuned to some loud program excitedly talking about sharks who apparently ate someone who had been trying to record their night adventures. They would excitedly talk about some discove...

Perhaps as to be expected when a sentence that excited the general public wasn't carried out in front of the general public, McComb still lived on in the news for a time. Several people claimed that McComb was still alive in the days following the hanging and one woman who saw his body on display afterwards at the Court House claimed McComb had winked at her. Yet another woman claimed that McComb had laughed in her face.  The Rockford newspaper published a brief stating that McComb's remains had reached them three days later on the Monday following his execution and that they had been given to his relatives to commit to McComb's final resting place. I have found no word of where that final resting place ended up being.  McComb had been prophetic about future reported confessions because a couple weeks later, one of McComb's lawyers related that McComb had confessed over the course of many conversations they had over the courses of his trials. According to M. J. Williams...