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Consumer Reports


Group plans to relive historic expedition

http://www.jewishworldreview.com | (KRT) Most of their hair has grayed, or disappeared. Some wear hearing aids. Others lean on canes. There are bum knees and bad backs among them, not to mention an assortment of pills being popped daily.

These men, mostly retired and in their 60s, have been working for years toward a journey that finally is about to start: the official re-enactment of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Bicentennial events will get rolling soon, and these men, re-enactors with the nonprofit Discovery Expedition of St. Charles, Mo., are at the center of the nation's celebration.

Their hand-built replicas of Lewis and Clark's three boats will have made one last public appearance in the St. Charles Fourth of July parade before heading to a spot outside Pittsburgh where, in late August, the boats will head down the Ohio River toward St. Louis. The 3-year journey will have begun … again.

The trip now is about honoring history, not making it. For the re-enactors, it is also about time. This crew is older, with an average age pushing 50s. On the original journey it was 27.

So while the volunteers will lunch on the river just as Lewis and Clark did - from beeswax-lined, 30-gallon wood barrels full of dried meat, dried fruit and parched corn - there will be an important difference this time: Mess call will be followed by a "medicine call" to remind everyone to take their medications.

Original recipes calling for sugar are using sugar substitute instead. All the jams and jellies on the trip will be sugar-free, too. And the crew has been encouraged to get special insurance policies to pay for flying them out of a remote area if they fall ill.

Lewis and Clark's expedition lost one man, to a ruptured appendix. But already time has claimed four members of the new group. A memorial plaque engraved with the names of the men who died will be carried on the boats "so they can make the trip with us," explained volunteer Peter Geery of St. Charles.

Geery, 62, has an acute understanding of the loss. He suffered a stroke in December. It was debilitating at first, but he's since recovered. Soon afterward, his wife asked him if he still planned to go on the trip. His response: "I'm either going on the plaque or I'm going on my feet, but I'm going."

He's going because the group needs him. He is in charge of scheduling the 260 volunteers who plan to spend some limited time on the expedition, which will take three years and 16 days, just as it did the first time around. Geery is one of a handful who plan to make the entire trip. The rest will rotate in and out.

"If we were going to be 100 percent authentic, I'd be 29 years old. But find me a 29-year-old to take my place and I'll move over," Geery said, knowing full well that few people could have shown the dedication he has over the past couple of years.

Jim Rascher of St. Charles, also plans to ride the entire time. The 68-year-old retired cabinetmaker and carpenter is in charge of the boats, which instead of relying on oars and sails, have engines.

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Together, Geery and Rascher lead the group. There was once a third man who joined them at the top, or really who led them - the man whose effort and skill are still sorely missed by the workers. Glen Bishop was 76 when he died in October 2001.

It was Bishop's dream to re-enact the Lewis and Clark journey. In the 1980s, he fashioned a 55-foot replica of the expedition's keelboat. He rounded up a crew and made a trip to St. Joseph, Mo. That boat was later destroyed in a fire. But Bishop just set about making another one.

He founded the Discovery Expedition and helped raise funds for the group's new Lewis & Clark Boat House and Nature Center, where the three replica boats are housed on the St. Charles waterfront. The Lewis and Clark Center, a museum dedicated to the journey, opened in the new facility July 1.

St. Charles is where the expedition got its start on May 21, 1804, after spending the winter at Camp Dubois in Illinois.

Inside the boat house, a memorial to Bishop rests on a shelf in the back of the work room. There is a photo of him, plus the hot plate, kettle and length of black plastic tubing that Bishop used to steam the wood ribs of his first keelboat.

Bishop recruited one of the younger members of the group to play Capt. Meriwether Lewis. Scott Mandrell, 37, is on a three-year leave from his teaching position.

For Mandrell, bicentennial events start this week. He will be in Washington, D.C. for the Fourth of July, and the next day he sets out on horseback for Elizabeth, Pa., just as Lewis did.

Mandrell recognizes that his relative youthfulness makes him an anomaly in the group. But, then again, he said, he's been involved in historical re-enactments since he was 9.

William Clark will be played by several people, including descendant Charles Clark of St. Louis.

The rest of the crew will be played by men who are iron workers, ministers, policemen, firefighters, teachers, conservation department workers and military officers.

Group members, who have made several trips retracing parts of the expedition, have never had a medical emergency on the water. Mostly, it's just sinus problems.

"We've used two Band-Aids in all the time we've been out," Geery said. "That's not a lot considering we're sleeping outside in all kinds of weather."

At the boat house last week, Geery and Rascher were going over last-minute details. Another worker sat on his knees painting the bottom of the keelboat. There was some discussion about someone else's less-than-perfect paint job, where the red paint didn't get into the seams on the bottom.

"Who's going to see it, the fishes?" one of them asked.

Standing with them was Jim Sonnenfeld, who has traveled from Centreville, Va., for each of the past three summers to help. He's a 62-year-old semiretired financial consultant. He heard about the expedition from a friend and decided to see what it was all about.

"You really see the country," Sonnenfeld said. "I'm on a river with the local people."

Sonnenfeld, who ran three miles just that morning and often plays tennis and basketball, brushed off any talk that he or the others may face problems on the river.

"I'll compete with any 30-year-old guy," he said.

The men gathered by the boat house's main gate as they shut down for the day. Most everyone would return in the morning to start again, except Sonnenfeld, who was leaving to visit relatives and then head east to his home. He planned to rejoin the expedition in late August in Pennsylvania.

"Well, Jim, I guess the next time I'll see you is in Elizabeth," Sonnenfeld said.

Rascher leaned against the gate and gripped his cane.

"I might be in a potter's can by then," he joked.

"I doubt that," Geery said to his old friend.

And the conversation quickly returned to all the work still to be done.

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© 2003, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services