President’s Message

MAY 2024

John Waldsmith Will Truly Be Missed

This past weekend, April 26 to be exact, Paul and I drove back from Michigan to Cleveland to attend the funeral of John Waldsmith, held on Saturday, April 27. OSPS was also represented by Leslie Feagan, John Bueche, and George and Liz Themelis. Long-time friends of the Waldsmiths, Leonard Walle and his wife Jean, drove down from Michigan to attend John’s Celebration of Life. Len has known John for many years as he has been a member of the National Stereoscopic Association and is now on the board of the NSA. It was a pleasure to see Len and get to chat with him after the funeral. He made the long roundtrip from southeastern Michigan that day to be able to honor his very good friend. John’s two living brothers (a third one passed away several years ago) talked about their love for John and told some very touching, funny and interesting stories about him. We learned a lot about his life, work, time in the Coast Guard, and favorite hobby, stereoview collecting. OSPS will be planting 3 trees and making a donation to the NSA in his honor. We will truly miss you, John.

This will be one of my last chances to encourage each of you to register for and attend the 2024 NSA 3D-Con in Wichita, Kansas. We will start the week off with an Excursion to a Wichita Wind Surge baseball game where we will dine on hot dogs, hamburgers, chips, salads, and more before the game starts. The city recently installed a new Wichita Baseball Museum at the stadium, and we will have unlimited access to it while we are there. During convention week there will also be Excursions to a Wildlife Park, a Swedish town, an Air Museum, a Salt Mine, a hands-on Zoo and a beautiful Botanical Garden, complete with life-size LEGO builds. This is the 50^th Anniversary of 3D-Con, so the Wednesday night dinner will be a party with fun and prizes. Of course, there will also be 3D Theater with lots of entertaining videos, educational and informative Workshops, a beautiful Art Gallery and several stereoview Exhibits. And don’t forget about the wonderful Trade Fair with many vendors and thousands of items for sale. I hope to see you at the end of July in Wichita.

Our club’s program this month is a presentation by George. He will talk to us about XXXXXX

Our competition for May is “Open.” Please make sure you get your images into the uploader by Sunday no later than noon.

A couple of weeks ago, we had our annual OSPS Officers’ Meeting. Many things were discussed, and a list of the monthly programs and club competitions for the 2024-2025 season will be published in the June Stereogram. We still need to confirm a couple of the programs with the presenters and make sure we have complete descriptions of the competition topics.

We will be meeting this month and in June at Buehler’s. I look forward to seeing all of you for this month’s meeting. George will be sending out the Zoom link for the on-line attendees sometime in the next few days.

Barb