Last July, Barrie Schwortz reported having met up with an old friend from the 1978 STURP project, Rudy Dichtl. Now we hear from him from a blog at an interesting website, the Ozark Medieval Fortress near Harrison, Arkansas.
I never met him, but I have so much respect for the people of STURP.
In the spring of 2010, while visiting Europe for several weeks. I was in Provence, France for a week and stayed at the Bed & Breakfast. Touring around the local area, I came upon the town of Lacoste, the same name as on the label of those polo shirts with the alligator logo. As it turned out, the owner of the polo shirt company owns most of the hotels and restaurants in this little French town. The same company also owns the town castle, which also happened to be the former home of the Marquis de Sade. I wrote home about my interest in the castle and my son immediately wrote back that there was a French castle being built near Harrison, Arkansas. I visited the Ozark Medieval Fortress (OMF) Website and was immediately enthusiastic about volunteering as an apprentice stone mason. Later in the year, I drove down to visit the OMF castle project, and found that all of the people on the site were charming and very friendly. I told them that I would return in the spring of the follow year. On 1 April 2011, I arrived on site.
I am an Electrical Engineer, a Physicist and a Scientist. I have served in the US Air Force as a Staff Scientist for 20 years and retired as a Lt. Colonel. I am now 71 years old, retired and hope that my life continues to be one adventure after another. I am one of the formative members of and a scientist with the Shroud of Turin Research Project, STURP Inc. that studied the Shroud in Turin, Italy in 1978. Working for Ball Aerospace Corp. in Boulder, Colorado as a Senior Project Manager, I lead a group that worked on satellites and the Star Wars Program. I was hired as a management consultant for a Canadian satellite company and lead a group of over 200 engineers, and assemblers. Later, I was hired as a Technical Manager for the Antarctic and did research on the Aurora Australis, i.e., the Southern Lights, for the National Science Foundation (NSF). For three years, I was a professor of Physics at the University of Colorado and for seven additional years I served as a research associate in the area of Arctic science data capture and Internet presentation.
