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Showing posts from January, 2009

I'm Trying to Find an Island in the Pacific....

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Robert G. Cunningham asked. He had joined the Marines when he was 18 years old during WWII and had been a pilot with the Marine Bombing Four-Thirteen Squadron. He thought the island they ran missions from started with an A, maybe an E - - and eventually , thanks to Google, we found it - Emirau Island . You can see the runways from this satelite image. He was trying to write some of his memories. He showed me a small black and white photograph of a couple of shirtless fellows. One went on to be a professional baseball and football player - the other - he couldn't remember his name. I told him he needed to write the information on the back and gave him a pencil. We went back to look at a world atlas to see where the island was and he started telling me a story about two men who got drunk and were in a jeep on the runway and decided they were going to take off like a plane and drove the jeep over the edge and dropped about 200 feet - both were killed. Another story was how he was t...

Bob Marley

A young girl was at the desk with her mother asking for biographical information about Bob Marley, legendary reggae singer and song writer: she was writing a paper about him. I told her I had the opportunity when I was in Jamaica in 2006 to visit the Bob Marley's Birth & Final Resting Place at Nine Mile. (It took most of the day traveling on dangerous and winding roads through the mountains in a car driven by a Rastafarian to get to the remote and rustically baracaded site.) Our catalog revealed we had a biography in both the adult and children's section. I always recommend children's books - they are a fast and easy way to get the main points of a subject without getting buried in the detail. We also had a "Bob Marley: Songs of Freedom" songbook with lyrics that might be good to get an insight into his music. I found he was in our Wilson Biographies Database which I explained they could get to from home with their library card. I was a bit disappointed that ...