First off a THANK YOU to all the volunteers who have signed up for something this year. I had about 31% of registered volunteers sign up for something. Your enthusiasm and dedication is much appreciated and does the Chapter proud.

Volunteers spent a day at the Exhibit Center in January, February and March. The Moose Peak Lens was finally completed and now work has begun on what has been tentatively identified as the lens from the American Shoals light. This lens is in much worse shape with many frames slightly warped from years of lying around in crates on shelves. Many of the prisms have also been damaged over the years. With the help of information gained in our meeting with Jim Woodward of the Coast Guard, volunteers are working on re-aligning the brass frames. So far, the technique has worked fine and progress is being made on what looked like a very daunting task.

The Liebrechts continue to copy the inspection records from the National Archives. This data has proved to be very useful to the Coast Guard and the second phase of that project has begun. Marie Vincent has designed an Access database to store all the information contained in the inspection records. Once completed, the database can be used to facilitate research. Gail Fuller, of the Coast Guard Exhibit Center, has indicated it has already proved extremely useful for research with only a fraction of the data input. So far we have four volunteers putting in data.

We also spent a day up in the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. We got a lot of work done in one day. We painted the officer’s quarters, the ceiling in the Wardroom, polished the brass in the wheel room and did an inventory of the blue prints on the lightship. (Boy were there a lot of them!) It was a beautiful day weather wise and we had a lot of fun.

The history project is once again in need of a coordinator. Duties would include assigning histories to volunteers, getting completed histories back, editing them and then forwarding them on to the Coast Guard. This project has been stalled for over a year and needs a dedicated coordinator. It should take approximately four hours per week to coordinate once you have the lists in order. Anyone willing to take on this task, please contact anne.puppa@erols.com. This is an extremely valuable project and any help would be appreciated.

Special Thanks to:
Archives Photocopying: Lauren Liebrecht, Paula Liebrecht.
Baltimore Maritime Museum: Lauren Liebrecht, Paula Liebrecht, Rebekah Haynes, Hugh and Vicky Melton, Dave Redden, Martin and Lindsay Shaw, William Simms, Marie Vincent, Jerry Waters, Barbara and Lawrence Witucki.
Database Input: Diana Chappell, Marie Vincent, Jerry Waters
Exhibit Center: Amy Dailey,Hugh and Vicky Melton, Gail and Gene Rolls, Marie Vincent, Jerry Waters, Tom Wade.
Histories Project: Sandy Clunies, Nancy Kassner, Matt Jenkins, Ruth Rosenthal