Greetings loyal airmen. If any of you attempted to stop by Hangar 27 last weekend, you may have discovered we were nowhere to be found.  Let me apologize for that and explain what happened.  Our site is managed by Scott, my oldest son and he carries it on servers he has set up in his home in Bethel, Conn.  Well, last Satuday afternoon Scott's house was struck by lightning!  Thank God, there was no major damage to the structure of the house itself or any major electrical appliances.  But still, the jolt of juice from Mother Nature got into his lines and fried all his server connections and thus down went our site.  As it was a weekend, Scott's attempts to get any kind of customer service assistance was futile and the best he could do was wait until Monday when a technician from his provider arrived and put in new lines.  By Monday evening we were back on the world wide web once again.  A mere bump in the road, although I'm guessing Scott has been shopping for new electrical grounding systems so that this never happens again.  Lightning is really scary stuff.

As most of you familiar with me know, I once wrote a play which told the story of how my mother and father met shortly before the start of World War II.  Their romance had to be put on hold while Dad went off to fight in the South Pacific and the two actually fell in love in their letters to each other over a three year period.  I wrote the play years after Dad had passed away because my own children, so small at the time, never got to really know him and that was something I wanted to correct.  So by the gift of my imagination I was able to bring those events back to life for one memorable weekend in a small theater in Springvale, ME for my family.  Part of my message to the audience that first evening was to not let their own individual life stories simply die with them.  To share them with their children and grand children so that they would live on and become a living heritage.

When doing the production, we needed to do up a poster and I remembered a truly wonderful portrait of my mother taken when she had just turned seventeen.  This was the same year she met my Dad and they started dating, 1942.  I found the portrait and we used it for our poster.  Gabrielle Marie Richer at the age of 17, so lovely and so optimistic about what life would bring her.

This past week I had the opportunity to revisit many of those themes when I was asked to show a video tape of the play to the residents of the Wentworth Home in nearby Dover, NH.   Mom is now a resident there having moved in eight months ago.  She's 83 and her health made independent living no longer feasible and so with our help and support, she found this truly marvelous home and applied for residency.   The care of seniors in our country today is a crucial topic as more and more Americans, through the wonders of modern medicine, are living longer than ever.  And I'm sure all of you airmen of heard the horror stories of some of these so called “nursing” homes where old people are merely dropped off to and forgotten.  Those places do exist and need to be exposed and either corrected or put out of business.  The care of our seniors should be a top priority in our society if we wish to call ourselves civilized.  We all owe them safety, security and the best care possible.  All of these attributes are present at the Wentworth Home and we were so thrilled when they accepted Mom's application.  The change in her life these past eight months has been remarkable.  She is exercising daily and has become more active and outgoing than ever.  It's as if she were a plant needing water and sunshine and that is what this facility and its staff have provided her soul.  Not to discount that she now has 40 new friends, all of whom share her enthusiasm for life and its continued adventure.

The picture above was taken a few weeks ago after a group of these fun loving “kids” went bowling.  Gabe is the good looking one in the red blouse.   Trust me, loyal airmen, spend just ten minutes with these people and they will have you laughing till your ribs ache, so full of the joys of life are they, every one of them.  And as I said, this is only a small group of the entire company.

A side note, Mom was worried because we were going to show the play tape on their big screen TV after lunch and she knew lots of her friends might nod off when the lights went down.  I told her not to concern herself, that I was well aware of how comfortable the body becomes after eating well and how easily it is to take an unintended nab.  If they fell asleep during the presentation, so be it.  I wasn't going to complain.  Well, to my utter surprise not only did they remain wide awake and alert during the entire two hours, but they loved the play and all of them in attendance made sure to shake my hand and tell me so.  Of course it helps that the story was all about their generation and they appreciated it for what it was.  I ended my afternoon with them once again urging all of them to tell their life stories to others. Not to let them be lost.

And that's my message to you loyal airmen today who have seniors in your family, be they grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles.  Get them to tell you their stories.  Please.  Get a tape recorder and sit down some afternoon and interview them.  Learn what America was like fifty, sixty, seventy years ago.  Get their personal accounts of the Great Depression and World War II.  Document their lives so that one day, after their gone, you can share them with your own kids.  Trust me, there is no greater treasure you can give them then the story of their ancestors.  Only by the lessons of the past can we truly understand the present and challenge the future.

Ron – Over & Out.