» On 3/01/2025 12:05:00 AM Mountain Standard Time, Alan wrote:
Heroes in the family. 

My late stepdad, John E. “Jack” Cauley (1930-2021), earned a Silver Star in Korea in August 1950, for conspicuous gallantry in exposing himself to enemy fire as he knocked out a tank with a rocket-launching bazooka. He also received multiple Purple Hearts for his service in Korea, 1950Sep12 & 1951Jan30, when he was seriously wounded in action by missiles.

My late uncle, Harley Stuart "Hal" Baird (1921-1997), earned a Silver Star in World War II, for gallantry in action against the enemy while serving as a combat crew member of a B-17 bomber in the Battle of Midway between 3 and 7 June 1942.

Another late uncle, Harold Octave “Hal” Buzzell (1932-2007), hiked the 2,190-mile Appalachian Trail in 1993 (northbound), an impressive feat for a 61-year-old.

Labels: fam

 
» On 2/09/2025 08:05:00 AM Mountain Standard Time, Alan wrote:
The family that flies together... 

Tap images to enlarge:
1990Feb03, Tehachapi, CA:
Me & The Bro (Chris), takin' the ol' jalopy up for a spin.
Facebook: facebook.com/10160542203247477
Sailplane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grob_G103

The top certificate (front & back, which shows Orville & Wilbur Wright) is actually 3 FAA Private Pilot licenses: (1) Airplane, Single Engine Land; (2) Glider, Aero Tow; and (3) Glider, Ground (Winch) Launch. When a pilot has both 2+3, the FAA truncates them into a simple "Glider." The round blue DoT logo (upper right) means the holder is qualified to fly by reference to instruments.

The bottom certificate (black logo) is a Ground Instructor, Basic.

1975: My brother and his instructor, our Dad, on the day of his first glider solo. Chris was the youngest person in the country (14yo) to achieve this feat. What a kid!

Chris now has the same licenses that I have, plus an FAA Mechanic license, Airframe & Powerplant. Yep, he flies 'em and fixes 'em.

Chet, on the other hand, had enough licenses to choke a horse:
AIRLINE TRANSPORT PILOT - AIRPLANE MULTIENGINE LAND
COMMERCIAL PRIVILEGES - AIRPLANE SINGLE ENGINE LAND; GLIDER
Type Ratings: A/LR-JET (Learjet) ~ A/DC-3 (Gooney Bird) ~ A/IA-JET (Westwind)

FLIGHT INSTRUCTOR - AIRPLANE SINGLE AND MULTIENGINE; INSTRUMENT AIRPLANE; GLIDER

GROUND INSTRUCTOR - ADVANCED; INSTRUMENT

Another pic of Chris from that article.

Chet & Chris:
1972, July - Schweizer sailplane.
1981, June - Cessna airplane.
Flight instruction from father to son.

After I spent ten years fighting my father tooth and nail when he forced me to fly powered planes, he finally found a small soaring club that provided a lot of enjoyable family-outing weekends. Chris and I worked on accumulating enough hours for our flight tests, Chet would go up with one or the other of us, and Ma would sit contentedly in her lawn chair, watching her men have fun in the sky. I think it was one of my Dad's proudest moments, when Chris and I earned our glider ratings on the same day. I went on to get 3 more FAA licenses, and Chris carved out an amazing career in aviation. But it all started two decades earlier, when Chet took a huge risk and sold one of the freezers from his tiny grocery store to buy a small used airplane and take some lessons. (Pic: Xmas 1989, giving Ma a ride in the Grob @ Tehachapi, 2 years after Chet passed.)

Also: The Last Lesson.

Labels: fam

 
» On 1/01/2025 12:05:00 AM Mountain Standard Time, Alan wrote:
A boy named Sue & a wife named Fear. 

(Armchair Genealogist Dep't.) Several years ago, I signed up for a free subscription at MyHeritage, which has a powerful matching service. When I put in the birth/death dates of my close relatives, MH began providing suggestions, based upon other families' entries in their database. I eventually discovered my lineage could be traced back several hundred years!

So I started looking up my long-lost (think "unknown") relatives on FamilySearch and Find a Grave. After what seemed like an eternity of climbing around in the branches of the ol' family tree, I finally ended up at the memorial page of Captain Benjamin Burgess (BB, portrait below), who was born in 1751, lived to the ripe old age of 101, was a Revolutionary War veteran, and had a wife named Fear. ("Æt" on his gravestone stands for the Latin word "aetātis," meaning "of or at the age of." And in his obit, #273 in the 1865 Burgess Genealogy, O.S. means Old Style, Julian calendar - England and its colonies didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752, when 11 days were dropped after September 2. [I'm planning to impress all my friends, during the next Trivia challenge. 😉])

So BB is my great-great-grandmother's grandfather! To see the generations, scroll down to Cap'n Ben's "Children" section and click these names, as they appear in the "Children" section of each subsequent page: Thomas, Henrietta, Frederick, Ella, and Chester, who's my Dad. Later, I went back even further and found Thomas Burgess Sr. (born in 1601), who is BB's great-great-grandfather... which means he's my direct ancestor, ten generations removed. FOUR centuries. Wow. But meticulously tracking down, verifying, and cross-checking each connection was driving me a little bit nuts. In fact, my new book will be coming out soon: "Zen and the Art of OCD Genealogy." 😉

When I was young, one of my aunts in Maine was researching family history, but she was supposedly stymied by a fire that destroyed all the vital records in a New Hampshire town office. This was back when all transactions went through snail mail, before the internet. After I heard that a grownup was unsuccessful, I figured a kid like me had no chance of doing any better. So I basically lost interest in Genealogy for the next 60 years. But websites like MyHeritage, FamilySearch and Find a Grave are suddenly making things easier. I've even considered starting a "Genialogy" service - "researching your bloodline with a smile." 😉

PS: My wife and I were recently FaceTiming with son Jenő in Hungary, and he had dug up some incredible documents about his grandfather's years in a Siberian gulag. They were for his daughter Lilla's homework assignment, a family tree. So I emailed a link to the first draft of this Genealogy essay, and he replied: "I showed the picture, only the picture [BB] to Lilla and asked her: Who do you think he looks like? And she immediately said: Alan."
So I wrote back: "Spank her. Now. 😉"

Labels: fam