Mark and I got back a week or so ago from a fantastic trip out East. We stayed in College Park, MD for five days, researching at the National Archives. We acquired many, many copies of Signal Corps videos from World War I. These we will use to do the rough edit of the film and once we know what we want in the final film we will order high quality copies. We also found many more wonderful Signal Corps photos while we were there. Here are four:
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| Phosphorus bomb at night |
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| Attack! |
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| Stringing Barbed Wire |
Elsie Janis and Mother
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While we were at the Archives we met again with Mitchell Yockelson. He was very helpful once more as we discussed our story and talked about the 27th Division and General John O'Ryan. He is a fantastic source of history and analysis. Thank you so much, Mitch, for all your help.
After our stay at the Archives, we headed up to New York City. There we spent a wonderful afternoon with Lee Alan Morrow, the fount of all knowledge on Elsie Janis. Lee obtained his Phd in theater studies and focused for his final thesis on the life of Elsie Janis. He has an incredible amount of documentation and stories on her life and was kind to let us copy items in his collection. We are so grateful to Lee for offering his help to get our documentary completed. We will continue to be in contact with him has we move forward.
From New York City we headed to Albany, New York, the home of one of our heroes, John Joseph Brennan. There we met Debbie Brennan Mahan, Joe's granddaughter, Jane Brennan, Joe's daughter in law and John Mahan, Debbie's husband. We spent a terrific morning and lunch with them. Debbie showed me the photos and diaries left by her grandfather. We had a great time and made new, wonderful friends. Here is the photo of me and Mark with Debbie and Jane. Thank you so much to the whole family for your hospitality and fun conversation!!! We'll see you again in the future, I'm certain.
