I had an interesting experience yesterday. Actually, it all started about a year ago.

I was walking down Langdon St. in Montpelier VT and I spied a WWII enlisted man's army hat on the sidewalk. There is a coffee house at the end of the street where numerous young people wearing this type of clothing congregate and I suspected that it belonged to one of them but when asked, no one would claim it. At the time, I thought it would make a good addition to a halloween costume, and I put it in my truck to save for future use. It remained there for some months and moved from truck to garage during the next hoeing out of accumulated truck junk.

Fast forward to yesterday when I was hoeing out the garage in an attempt to create room for my car's winter abode (I have yet to use the mythical hoe in my garden!). I again found the hat, and this time noticed a name and dog tag number printed in the hat band; Nimtz 35161292. Finding more information about Mr Nimtz sounded like more fun than garage hoeing, so I took a little time to do some web searching.

It took about 20 mins to find a web site where I could get free army info using his service number. This gave me date of birth, date of induction, place of induction, stuff like that. I kept typing the name into google in different ways until I ran across an election record which stated that he was elected to the house of representatives in the 1957 to 1959 session. The Congressional bio. records supplied enough information to send me to the South Bend IN Tribune where I found a reference to the 12/13/05 news release from the S.B. mayor's office about the F. Jay Nimtz Award:

"This award was established to honor the late F. Jay Nimtz, a former U.S. Congressman,

long-time President of the South Bend Redevelopment Commission, and attorney and

community preservationist. F. Jay set the standard for community advocacy and commitment to

building a better South Bend. Created in 1989, the award is given by the City of South Bend and

South Bend Heritage Foundation to an individual in the community who has shown exemplary

public service through long and varied volunteer activities."

By now, I had learned enough about Mr. Nimtz that I wanted to find something better than halloween for his hat. So, I called the mayor's office. The woman I spoke with knew Mr. Nimtz, who died in 1990, and was quite excited about this find. She indicated that there are a couple of museums in the area that would be interested in having the hat and I sent it to her in the afternoon.

It's almost scary to me. Finding a significant amount of information about someone I'd never heard of, who lived a third of the way across the country, with only a last name and service number to start with was quite easy, particularly for a clueless web browser (me) who didn't really know what they were doing. Within about an hour, I had the man's full name, service history, political history, place of birth and had spoken with someone who knew him. 6 degrees strikes again.

Someone more knowledgeable about the process can probably do all this in less than 5 mins. If you are seeking anonymity, good luck. On the other hand, the amount and accessibility of information available "out there" is staggering. I guess I knew this all along, but my first experience in actually trying to use it was a real eye opener.