Dear Folks, It's been a tough row to hoe to finally get my veterans project in proper format and printout to share with the Town of Porter, the Village of Youngstown and the Town of Porter Historical Society. Last night I worked my HP printer to death for almost 2 hours printing out 200 word documents of the Verterans Personal Pages one right after the other. Finally after 10:30 the printer said I quit and did just that. No amount of coaxing could get it going again. And I had only 22 more documents to print out before I was at the end of the over 1000-record printout. It was so frustrating. But after a good night's sleep, the printer was up and running again this morning, the 22 remaiing records were printed out and as far as the total time it took for me to print out all of those documents it was 11 hours. I wanted to give the Town of Porter Supervisor an idea of the vast volume of the valuable collection of personal information we now have regarding veterans who served from the Revolutionary War all through the years to those who are still serving on active duty. The stories some of those pages tell in only a few words paint a vivid picture in your mind of what they went through. I managed to drag the numerous notebooks to the Town Hall (it's a wonder I didn't need a dolly to haul them all!) only to find that Mert the Town Supervisor was in a meeting. Oh well, time wasn't wasted. I kidded around with the Town Clerk and his new temporary intern Lori who quickly realized that I'm really not of sane mind! After a bunch of laughs and even serious talk, Mert finally came out of his office and I sent him right back in there lugging all my notebooks behind me! To back up a bit, Mert had already decided that the Town would display panels in the Town Hall listing all of the names of our veterans. However, I couldn't imagine why the Town would want to store the huge amount of Personal Pages just in case someone might ask for more information about a particular veteran. But he really surprised me when he was eager to get a copy of all the pages, set them up in proper notebooks and display them on a proper table in the hall under the listing of veterans names and suggested that the Town call it their Veterans Corner. That pleased me a lot. Although I hadn't thought of it that way myself, I realized that what he suggested was what I really wanted in the first place. First to publically display all the veterans' names and then to give the public access to the more personal details of the individual veterans' service. Am I finished? Not by a long shot. I knew that there were major errors in individual names and so I had bookmarked them to be corrected. In addition, I realized that there were duplications of individuals depending on what source I had been using at the time. This evening I spent a couple hours scrubbing both the database and the Personal Pages and then when I took a last glance over each list, wouldn't you know I didn't get past the "C"s when I found not only a duplication in the database but . . . . . but you don't need to know the details about what I didn't find in the Personal Pages. So it appears that with further diligence on my part tomorrow I'll reach the end of the veterans tunnel at least for now. Mert got so excited again today about the whole project that he told me that he personally knows of more veterans who haven't been listed and now he's determined to hand out questionnaires to them to add to our list. Will it ever end? I certainly hope not. vee

Vee, what you have accomplished is above and beyond the call of duty and I think the town should bestow a medal on you for your efforts. Great job and well done. Charles