PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

Dear Fellow OMSA members:

Your Board recently concluded its mid-year April meeting in Washington D.C. and I want to share some of our decisions with you.

The biggest news is that our re-designed website is nearing completion. This effort, spearheaded by longtime OMSA members Peter Lomdahl and John Allgood, and Directors Chris Cawthorne and Jeff Floyd, is going to be the best thing to happen to OMSA for many years. Expect to see the new website up and running no later than July.

Director Adam Rohloff has volunteered to head a

technology committee to explore what we need to do

to have a digital version of the Journal available by

subscription. While I intend to continue to read a paper

JOMSA, some of our members have asked about a digital

version (at a lower subscription price), so we are looking

into this as an option.

Director Bill Brown has volunteered to head an ad hoc committee on planned giving and estate planning for OMSA members. For those of you who have some expertise in this area of financial planning, please contact Bill directly as he is looking for ideas on how best to proceed. All of us certainly can use advice when it comes to our collections and what will happen to them after we pass from the scene.

Your Board approved the publication of a new monograph on the Medal for Merit. This will be in print in time for the Convention in Jacksonville inAugust. The Board also approved republishing our Orders and Medals of Japan and Associated States; this monograph is a bestseller and will be back in print in about a month.

We also are planning to have an "OMSAAuction" at the Dallas Convention in 2012. We will be soliciting dealers and collectors at the Jacksonville bourse to donate items for the auction, and I have already offered a World War I Purple Heart from my collection to get us started. Monies raised from the Dallas OMSA Auction (which will probably be a live auction) will be used to defray the costs of future conventions. Remember, OMSA is an IRS 501(c)(3) organization, so your donations are tax deductible.

Your Board is recommending a few minor changes to

our Constitution, and these must be approved by you at

our August convention. First, we are proposing that we

delete the provision of our constitution that makes an

"immediate past president" automatically a member of

the Board. This provision made sense before we went

to staggered elections for the Board because it provided

continuity. What your Board proposes now is that we

amend the Constitution to create a new "Board Member

Emeritus" position. This would be a designation that

could be bestowed on former officers and members of the

Board whom the Board thinks are worthy and deserving

of such recognition.

The Board Member Emeritus could attend board meetings and function in an advisory capacity to the president. Your Board thinks that having this new Board Member Emeritus position will ensure that we still are able to take advantage of the retired board member’s advice, counsel and insights to aid us in our work for the society. Second, we need to officially change the wording in the Constitution to state that we are incorporated as a non-profit in Delaware (and no longer incorporated in California). We changed our incorporation to Delaware because California was imposing sales taxes on all of our sales (publications, ribbons, etc) and requiring more and more licensing paperwork. Delaware is much more friendly to a small non-profit corporation like OMSA.

Finally, and this is really important, our JOMSA editor

needs more articles. Remember that Dick Flory can only

publish what he gets, and he currently has only sufficient

material for about two issues. We urgently require

additional articles, especially in the three to eight page

range, and your contributions are welcome. To help to

alleviate this situation I would like to appoint an "Assistant

Editor" who would solicit articles for publication, help

potential authors to write suitable material, and otherwise

work to improve the quality and variety of what is

available for publication in the Journal. The Assistant

Editor would not be involved in the production of JOMSA

(that’s Dick’s job), but rather would work with potential

authors to produce articles for publication. Please contact

me directly if you are interested in taking on this new role

and making a difference in what we already know is a

first-class publication.

Regards, Fred

2 JOMSA

MEET THE AUTHORS

Jack Boddington served in the British Army as a

Lieutenant in India in 1946-7 and, after immigration

to Canada in 1956, with the Canadian Army Militia

retiring as a Captain. He has been retired for some 26

years from the position of General Manager of Parks

and Recreation for the City of Edmonton, Alberta. He

is a long-time member ofOM~A, OMRS and MCCofC

and is presently the President of the Life Saving Awards

Research Society (UK). His collecting interests are

eclectic with an emphasis on life saving awards. He is a

Governor of the Royal Humane Society and the Royal

National Life Boat Institution; Life Governor of the Royal

Canadian Humane Association and a Commonwealth

Vice President of the Royal Life Saving Society. He is a

Fellow of the Canadian Numismatic Research Society and

of the Canadian Guild of Authors and has written over 80

articles for OMSA (Literary Medal with two stars). He

was appointed a Knight of Grace of the Venerable Order

of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem in the British

Realm in 1992 and a Member to the Order of Red Cross

(Canada) in 1993. Now he swims to keep in shape and

plays with his medals to retain his sanity.

Fred Borch has been an OMSA member for more than 20 years and now serves as OMSA President. His latest

book, For Military Merit: Recipients of the Purple Heart

was published by Naval Institute Press in July 2010.

Steve Carr has completed his second JOMSA article with

Allen Menke. He has been interested in United States

medals and decorations since the late 1960s and special-

izes in "common" awards. He has a BS in Technology

from the University of Wyoming and an MA in History

from Purdue University (he loves military history). He

teaches Automotive Technology at Johnson County Com-

munity College, Overland Park, Kansas. He andAllen are

already working on a third article.

Ed Emering is an award-winning Chicago-based author

of historical books and articles and a photographer. He

has contributed more than 50 articles to JOMSA and has

also authored numerous books including three OMSA

monographs. He is currently working on his fourth OMSA

monograph due in 2012. Ed also maintains "The Medal

Hound" (www.themedalhound.com), an ever-expanding

free research service for medal collectors with interests

in those areas covered by the site.

Allen Menke, has always been a collector, starting in

second grade with his mother taking him to coin and

stamp dealers shops. He started collecting medals, badges

and patches seriously in 1978 and then scaled down to specialize in medals. A Marine veteran of the Viet Nam War, he is a Washington Army National Guard retiree. Near retirement he was called up to active duty and ultimately served a total of 30 years. He has also served in the merchant marine. His accomplishments in medals include being part of a research group with A1 Gleim in the 1980s and 90s; doing the United States campaign medal updates for Gleim’s Medal Letter; providing all the varieties and fakes of Dewey Medals for a JOMSA article with Doug Boyce and an OMSA convention exhibit; contributing to both printings of the Call of Duty and to the Planchet Newsletter; acting as a judge at conventions; and exhibiting a six-case display on the Legion of Merit at the Seattle OMSA convention. He currently collects United States decorations, campaign medals by types; North and South American and Philippines orders, decorations and campaign medals and award documents. His favorite specialty would have to be the Legion of Merit.

WOULD YOU LIKE

TO SEE YOUR

BIOGRAPHY

HERE?

SUBMIT AN

ARTICLE TO THE

JOMSA EDITOR.

Vol. 62, No. 4 (July-August 2011) 3

LETTERS TO AND FROM THE EDITOR

A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR:

As our President indicated in his message on page 2, currently we are very short of articles for the Jour, al. As I write this letter on June 4, 2011, the July-August issue has been prepared and only five articles remain in the queue for subsequent issues; this is barely enough for one more issue. It is not, though, just a matter of having sufficient articles for the next issue. In order to produce a well-balanced issue with a good mixture of articles on United States and foreign medals, the editor needs to have 10-20 articles to choose from. We also need articles of various lengths, and at the moment we are especially in need of articles three to eight pages in length.

As President Borch mentioned in his message, the position of Assistant Editor is being developed to help solve this problem. This person will be charged with helping authors to write and illustrate articles suitable for JOMSA. Anyone who would like assistance of this type should contact the editor with details. I would also point out that we have a "JOMSA Authors’ Guide" that can be obtained from the editor or from the new OMSA website that should be available to the membership by the time that this issue is delivered to members.

experience, it is the best reference on Gernaan decorations and medals that I have seen since I started collecting in the 1960’s. It has many details I have found nowhere else. I will refer to this work as "Hessenthal and Schreiber." Another great reference for this article would have been Der Preussische Ordens-Herold by F. W. Hoeftmann. It was published in Berlin in 1868. It contains the royal statutes of the Prussian King Wilhehn and provides details concerning the medals of 1864 and 1866.

Obverse and Reverse

The article confuses the obverse and reverse of most of the medals. Although Figure 1 correctly identifies the obverse of the Dfippel Storm Cross as the side bearing the image of the king, Figure 4 implies that the king is on the reverse of the Alsen Cross. The statute establishing the Alsen Cross on December 7, 1864 states, "The center of the obverse carries Our picture with the inscription ’Wilhelm Konig von Preussen’." In Figures 6 and 7 the obverse of the 1864 service medals is properly identified, but the medals for 1866 and 1870-71 are incorrect in Figures 9 through 17. In every case, the obverse is the side with the image of the King (or Emperor) or his monogram. (See Hessenthal and Schreiber, pages 377 and 378 for 1866 and page 108 for 1870-71.)

I look fo~-vvard to receiving your articles. Order of St. John

Dick Flory, JOMSA Editor

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR:

DOUGLAS AYKROYD WRITES: I read Allan

Wenzel’s article on The German Unification Wars

(JOMSA, July-August 2010, pages 3 - 14) and was quickly

absorbed in his account of German unification. Moving

into the description of the medals, I was impressed by the

quality of the photography. As I read along, I thought he

had made some discoveries which would have an impact

on my collection. I went back to my old references and

discovered that there were areas which needed to be

clarified.

References

The primary reference I have used over the years is Die Tragbaren Ehrenzeichen des Deutschen Reiches by Dr. Waldemar Hesse edlen von Hessenthal and Georg Schreiber which was published in Berlin in 1940. In my

The author identifies four types of crosses for both Dtippel and Alsen. The second and fourth for each are "Non-Combatants Cross" and "Doctors, Clergy, and Civil Servants Cross" respectively. Now this might be somewhat confusing since the decrees establishing the Diippel and Alsen Crosses authorize the "Non- Combatants Cross for "doctors, stretcher-bearers, clergy and other persons of non-combatant status." Then who are the recipients of the cast iron medals for "Doctors, Clergy, and Civil Servants?" The Diippel Cross and the Alsen Cross in black iron were authorized by the King’s order of April 18, 1865 to be given to Knights of St. John as well as doctors, pastors, litter bearers, and civil servants who were on the battlefields of Dtippel and Alsen in the service of the Order of St. John. This order, known to the Prussians as the Johanniter-Orden, had been disbanded in Prussia in 1811 and re-established by the King in 1852. The knights of the order were Prussian nobility. According to Gerd Stolz, a well-known scholar of this period, during the Danish-German war of 1864 the

Continued to page 37

4 JOMSA