As you will notice, our annual Our Heroes magazine is inside this week’s edition of the Faribault County Register. This is the 20th edition of the always popular magazine and we hope you enjoy it.

Over the past 20 years we have featured a lot of veterans from Faribault County. They have been local veterans of the many wars the United States has been involved in, from the Civil War, to World War I and II, to Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War and others.

This year’s magazine is not totally different from those previous 19, but it is different in a few ways. Some of those differences are how we chose the subjects of the stories, how we learned their stories, and how those people were involved in the military.

At our staff meetings we talked about the idea of doing stories of the five soldiers on one side of the new Freedom Rock in Winnebago. However, it turned out that we already had featured stories about the men featured on one side of the rock in some of our past 19 editions of Our Heroes.

So, our reporter, Fiona Green, did research on the other two persons on the rock. Her two stories, on Gladys Owen and Kermit Chafee, are fascinating looks at two very different types of military careers.

I think you will find them very interesting, whether you knew either one of them.

Reporter Kevin Mertens gives us a look into the lives of two Hassing brothers, Jim and Maynard, who served in the military during World War II; one who died years ago, and one who is still with us at the age of 94.

Again, you will learn a lot about these two men, maybe some things you never knew before, even if you are well acquainted with them.

My story is also a bit different. It is about a veteran from Faribault County who is purported to have been the only Faribault County soldier who was kept in a prisoner of war camp in Korea during the Korean War.

You may or may not have ever heard of Russell Richardson, but again, his is a very interesting story.

It takes a lot of time and research to find out the background of these heroes stories we write.

Fiona was able to tap into the wonderful items at the Winnebago Museum and got help from family members and friends of the two veterans, like Tom Owen, Leora Scholl-Johnson, Richard and Maryjean Miller, and Collette Meidinger.

Kevin, of course, was able to interview Jim Hassing himself, and got a box full of information from his daughter, Sue.

My story idea came from A.B. Russ, who had a couple of newspaper clippings from 1953 about the big welcome home for Russell Richardson.

However, it took a lot of research time to try and find out more about him. I learned some about his life in the Army, and who his family was at the time.

It was difficult, to say the least, to find out what happened to Russell after he was welcomed home. It was almost as though he had dropped off the face of the earth. Did he stay in Blue Earth? Did he marry, have children, have a job, or did he die young?

I learned his two sisters had stayed in the area, but then I found out both had died, one only a year ago.

Finally, I got some help from Lola Baxter of Winnebago, who I asked if she had any information on the family. While I could not find anything about him, she found Russell Richardson’s obituary and I learned he had moved to Tennessee. I was then able to finish writing the last “chapter” of the story of Russell Richardson.

The same goes for the love story on page two of this issue. The idea for it came about from another newspaper clipping from A.B. Russ. The rest of the story came from researching the lives of Jimmy and Marie Farrar. Even with the Internet, it is not such an easy task.

That story was meant to be in the Our Heroes magazine, but we really did not have room for it. Besides, the hero in this case, Jimmy Farrar, was not from Faribault County. However, his wife, Marie, was from Blue Earth.

We hope you find their love story interesting; I sure did. And we hope you find all the stories this week in the Our Heroes magazine to be good reads.

And, as usual, we dedicate the magazine to not just the veterans whose stories are inside it, but to all of the many veterans who have served our country over the years, especially those from Faribault County.