News and information cont'd... 

Al Kloess passed on to his Maker and into Blue Skies on March 3, 2005.  Our deepest sympathies to Marion and the Kloess family.

Bill Geise won his battle with kidney stones.  The stone crusher worked!

Airfest 2005 by the Wings of Eagles Discovery Center - formally the Warplane Museum in Corning, NY - is scheduled for July 23-24, 2005.  It will be a tribute to Women in Aviation and all the performers will be women.  The 412th Memorial plaque we presented to the museum during our reunion in the Corning area is still on the wall.  The Center is very active and alive and has over 1600 volumes of information available for research.

US Postal Service 2005 Commemorative Stamp Program

On July 29, a pane of 20 stamps (ten designs) entitled "American Advances in Aviation" built on the popular Classic American Aircraft collection  issued in 1997 will become available. Aircraft chosen for these new stamps illustrate American innovations  and technological contributions to military,  commercial, and general aviation during the 1930s, '40s and '50s. The following ten aircraft are featured on stamps:

• Boeing's 247

• B-29 Superfortress

• Consolidated's PBY Catalina

• B- 24  Liberator;

• Lockheed's P-80 Shooting Star;

• Grumman's F6F Hellcat;

• Republic's P-47 Thunderbolt;

• Northrop's YB-49 Flying Wing;

• Engineering and Research Corporation's Ercoupe 415;

• Beechcraft's 35 Bonanza.

• Hughes H-1 racer

• Boeing's YB-52 Stratofortress

The stamp illustrations and design were painted by William S. Phillips, an award winning  historical aviation and landscape artist who also created the artwork for the 1997 Classic American Aircraft collection. Phillips was honored in 1986 with a one-man show of his work at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and  Space Museum. In 1988 he was selected to be a U.S. Navy combat Artist.  - Our thanks to Bruce Lowell and David Schwartz for informing the Newsletter

Dongleberg Orphans Project

In the last Newsletter, we published the status of the project along with a request for 'free will' offerings.   The request for offering was to help defray some cost ($500) for obtaining archival pictures from the Library of Congress by Dennis Hayman. 

  We're happy to report that, to date, Bill Geise has received $270.  Our thanks to all who contributed.

Dennis sent the Newsletter the following comments:

"I mailed some pictures of the Christmas Party (1944) to Bill Mather and Felicia Zieff. Felicia is the daughter of Frieda Becker- who was a Dongleberg Orphan.  I told Felicia of the reunion, and she was very excited. She told me that in all likelihood she will be able to attend part of it.  She doesn't know about her mother.   I asked Bill Mather that maybe he could work on Frieda to come to at least one day or evening session.