"Rick Research"

[S.ChrisKelly]

http://www.kaiserscross.com/60401/481643.html

 

From the website [edited]:

 

"To GMIC [Gentlemans' Military Interest Club - online forum] he was an asset, a gem. Where Rick laid his hat, interesting collectors congregated. Rick and his knowlege were a magnet that attracted questions and collectors like no other. 

 

Rick was a big man, with a big heart, and on occasion a short fuse.

 

Richard "Rick" Lundstrom was killed in a car accident on the morning of September 17, 2013 only a few hundred feet from the modest home he shared with his aged mother and had lived in almost his whole life. He was 57 years old.  

 

A native of south West Massachusetts, Rick was from an old and distinguished Yankee family, a fact he took great pride in.  

 

A professional genealogist and historian, Rick obtained both a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in history and was about to go start a Ph.D. program at the University of Massachusetts under Harold Gordon, when Gordon suddenly dropped dead.

 

Gordon had been in Germany before the war and watched the rise of the Nazi party in Bavaria. Later he served as a German expert with US intelligence during and after the war. His office was filled with rare original interviews and documents, including dozens of Bavarian state police personnel files on the Nazis collected in the the 1920s.

 

Gordon's speciality was the Reichsheer officer corps and he had known well many of the men who would lead the Wehrmacht under Hitler. As Rick once said, Gordon would say things like, "Oh, I met him at Von Epps' goddaughters' house" or "That guy was a real Son of a Bitch. He got a girl pregnant and then blamed a half-Jewish salesman so that poor bastard got beaten to death by the SA and the girl was abandoned."

 

Rick spent the better part of an afternoon ransacking the basement of the library at UMass [after Gordon's death], but found almost all the remaining Gordon ephemera had been thrown into the trash decades before. In one cruel blow, Rick lost his Fellowship, his Mentor and his future as an academic historian.  

 

Rick began to collect medals at an early age after the loss of his father. He became interested in the imperial German army after reading a number of early books on the subject and later joined OMSA. He wrote a number of articles for the OMSA Medal Collector Magazine, notably on the rare Chinese Expedition clasps awarded during the Boxer Rebellion and awards of exiled Royal Houses.  

 

He later resigned from OMSA after the then Secretary crudely insulted him after he had blackballed the membership application of a well known dealer who had deliberately sold Rick a crude fake EK1 as a "late war example". As Rick said, "I was a 13 year old child and saved up my paper money for six months for that medal and that S.O.B. ripped me off. He knew it was a tin fake and took advantage... and then they got mad when I pointed it out?" He refused to ever reconsider rejoining OMSA, stating, "that door is shut".  

 

Rick served as a Senior Moderator at the WAF [Wehrmacht Awards Forum online] with his best friend, Rick Versailles, until 2005, when he moved over to the GMIC. His magnificent articles on ribbon bars can still be seen on both sites. He transcribed and published a number of medal rolls with Daniel Krause and at his death was working on several projects.  

 

Rick was a quiet, shy man. Almost always cheerful, he was happy to offer his encyclopaedic knowledge of history to anyone who asked and did so with wit and a friendly grin. He resented being taken advantage of and despised bullies of any type. It bewildered and infuriated him when he was unilaterally attacked by those who did so out of ego or because they disagreed with his assessments of objects on the internet. Often his attackers had a financial or egotistical axe to grind and it must be remembered that Rick never made any money off of his efforts, never dealt in militaria, nor charged for his services. "Its all for history" said sardonically.

 

He was generous, honorable and kind and often took care of elderly neighbors and stray animals in his neighborhood. He was fluent in German, could read Sütterlinschrift with ease, and was self taught in Russian and Latin. He joked his French was "goat-like", but he read Napoleonic documents with ease. He loved murder mystery novels and bad puns."  

 

Please visit the forum at http://gmic.co.uk/

[Otter42]

So sad to lose a humble champion for the naive collectors, I'm sure he's missed by many! Thanks for sharing his story with us.