A polite suggestion

Loads of people are putting MP material on Facebook now. There are pages for individual missing persons (often put up by their families) and for missing persons from a particular city or state.

This is a great resource, but I have an idea of how to make it better: label the photographs with the MP’s name. If there are multiple people in the photo, point out which one is the MP, like “Joseph Smith with his brother. Joseph is on the right.” There have been several instances where I come across a good photograph of an MP, but there are others in the photo, and I can’t always tell which one is my MP and I don’t want to risk posting a picture of someone else, so I just don’t post it at all.

I was just looking at a Facebook page for missing people in a particular state. It had a trove of photographs, but as far as I could tell they weren’t labeled. I have no idea who some of those people were. Without their names, I don’t even have any place to start to begin my research and I certainly can’t post them on Charley.

Flashback Friday

[Edit: Whoops, dangit, this is Thursday. Oh well, enjoy your FB Friday a day early.]

I’ve been slacking a bit. I’ve had some super-important things going on in my life at the moment, but now my part is over and it’s a matter of “hurry up and wait.”

A request: in you guys’s Sunday selections, it seems like it’s always kids. I know missing children tend to tug at the heartstrings, but would it be possible for some more nominations of adults?

Anyway, Flashback Friday. It’s Ronald Eugene Westwick, an Ames, Iowa man who disappeared in 1979. Westwick was 34 but still lived at home with his parents. That may be because he had epilepsy, which was bad enough that he was classified as a disabled missing person.

Nobody seems to know what happened to Westwick, not even the folks at Iowa Cold Cases, which provides a wealth of information about missing persons. But there’s a gravestone for him at the Rose Grove Cemetery in Williams, Iowa. The only other thing I could find was this article from 1964, when Westwick was 19. He got his driver’s license suspended for a month because he was a “habitual violator.”