Richard "Dick" Karns

Richard “Dick” Karns is another one of those people in our community who has provided long and distinguished service to our chapter as a dedicated volunteer.

Dick was born in 1938 in Alton Memorial Hospital to Opal and Thomas Karns. In addition to his parents, he has an older brother and a younger sister. His sister, Joyce Kirby, is also a volunteer for our chapter. He attended elementary school in Hartford and graduated from East Alton/Wood River High School in 1956. He then joined the United States Navy and served on the USS Howard W. Gilmore, a Fulton-Class submarine tender, at Key West, Florida until 1959.

Upon returning to the Alton area, Dick worked at several jobs before being employed at the Alton Boxboard company (the predecessor of Jefferson-Smurfit) as a laboratory technician. Dick worked at Alton Boxboard until his retirement in 1998.

Dick was married in 1964 to the former Marilyn Holland of Wood River. Marilyn retired in 2001 after 37 years as an elementary school teacher in the Roxana School District. They have two daughters, Jennifer and Jill, and five grandchildren.

Although Dick had been associated with our chapter as a blood donor for many years, he formerly joined as a disaster volunteer in March of 1999. After taking the required training, Dick deployed on his first disaster assignment as a Mass Care technician on Hurricane Floyd in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and Tarboro, North Carolina. Since that time, Dick has deployed outside of the chapter to seven different disaster relief operations. He has also assisted our chapter by delivering meals and staffing a shelter in disaster relief operations within the chapter area to include the Mississippi/Illinois River floods of 2001 and 2008, the power outages caused by the wind and ice storms of 2006, and to the evacuees of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Dick also participated in numerous disaster drills in our chapter area involving the St. Louis Regional Airport and the Operation Prairie Thunder Terrorism Exercise in 2006.

As with Richard Gonzales and Carl Carmody, Dick’s most memorable disaster assignment was his deployment to New York City as part of the national response to the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. Dick initially worked at the disaster headquarters in Brooklyn, but later deployed to Secaucus, New York to work in a Red Cross warehouse that was supporting the disaster operation at Ground Zero. It was a particularly heart-wrenching experience, as not only could Dick view the fires still burning at Ground Zero, but also was working with local volunteers who had lost family and friends in the attack on the World Trade Center.

All of the above, pales, perhaps, in light of what may be Dick’s greatest contribution to our community. Dick donated his first pint of blood in 1966. Since that time, he has donated 188 pints, which translates to 23 ½ gallons of blood donated! One can only guess at how many lives he has touched with those donations. And he continues to donate blood and plans on continuing to do so until he is no longer able to give.

But Dick doesn’t restrict his contributions to just being a disaster volunteer! He also functions as one of our chapter’s unofficial “handy-men.” He installed the shelving in our Health & Safety CPR room when we moved into our new chapter building in 2000. He has also done numerous repairs to our building and even donated a toolkit for use in our building. He also built a drop-box for ERV drivers to deposit ERV keys and other paperwork after-hours and a portable holder for a small cooler and paperwork to be used in our ERV on local and national deployments. He also made a generous contribution to our chapter to help us purchase our present facility in 2000.

It isn’t all work and no play for Dick. He enjoys visiting with his grandchildren and hobbies such as bowling, restoring old cars, and woodworking. He also volunteers several days a week as a guide at the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center in Hartford.

Our chapter is proud and honored to have Dick as a volunteer and a friend and hope that he continues to be with us for many years to come!

Carl Carmody

Carl Carmody of Carrollton is another one of those remarkable people that our chapter has been blessed to have as a dedicated volunteer and friend for nearly 15 years.

Carl was born near Berdan in Greene County in 1924 to Florence and Ed Carmody. He was the only boy in a family that also included three girls. He attended country schools in Greene County and graduated from St. John Catholic High School in Carrollton in 1942. He went into the United States Navy in 1943 and served with a Landing Ship Tank (LST) unit until the end of World War II, leaving the Navy in 1947. He participated in the battles of Tarawa, Kwajalein, Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. After leaving the Navy, Carl worked part-time at The Telegraph in Alton while farming. He began working fulltime at The Telegraph in maintenance in 1950 and worked there until his retirement in 1989. Carl was married to the former Loretta Ukena in 1950, and has 1 daughter, 3 sons, 10 grandchildren, and 8 great-grandchildren.

Carl’s long involvement with first the Alton-Wood River, and then the Southwestern Illinois Chapter, began in March of 1995 after attending an Introduction to Disaster Services class. He was looking for an opportunity to give something back to the community and became interested in the American Red Cross and its humanitarian mission. He began his service to our chapter by volunteering to staff an information table at local health fairs, work shifts at a local homeless shelter our chapter helped support, and by being a member of the Chapter Disaster Action Team (DAT). He also donated his time in making repairs to the chapter buildings and vehicles, and installed cabinets when we moved into our new chapter house in June of 2000. He took an active leadership role in our local disasters, helping with the supervision of feeding operations and Emergency Response Vehicles (ERV) in support of the visit of Pope John Paul II to St. Louis in January of 1999 and the Mississippi River flooding in 2001 in Calhoun County. He also assisted with the clean-up and movement of chapter equipment and supplies from our old chapter house to our present location in 2003, and with the movement of disaster supplies and equipment to a temporary storage area in the Spring of 2004 when they could no longer be stored at our former chapter location at 810 Main Street.

But Carl did not want to limit his service to our local community. To serve the American Red Cross nationally, Carl became a member of the Disaster Services Human Resources (DSHR) system in January of 1996. His first national disaster assignment was a one week assignment as a Mass Care Technician on Disaster Relief Operation (DR) 892, which involved damage from multiple tornadoes that had struck near Decatur, Illinois in April of 1996. Since that time, Carl has responded to thirty-eight disaster relief operations that include; tornadoes in Alabama and Georgia, hurricanes in Louisiana & North Carolina, wildfires in New Mexico and California, flooding in Illinois and Arizona, ice storms in Arkansas and New York, and transportation disasters in Illinois and Rhode Island. He also assisted with the special relief operation in New Jersey involving the resettlement of refugees from Kosovo in June of 1999.

Richard "Vic" Gonzales

Richard “Vic” Gonzales of Godfrey is one of those remarkable people that our chapter has been blessed to have as a dedicated volunteer and friend for nearly fifteen years.

Richard was born in San Felipe in Guanajuato Estado, Mexico, in 1934 to Reyes and Atanicio Gonzales. He came to Alton with his parents when he was eight months old. Richard grew up in a family with seven brothers and two sisters. He attended Alton schools and served in the United States Army from 1957 to 1959. Returning to the Alton area after completing his military service, he worked variously at the Owens-Illinois Glass Company, the Illinois Terminal Railroad, and finally, at the AMOCO refinery in Wood River, from where he retired in 1995. Richard is well known for his support of community activities in the Riverbend area, particularly with youth in sports, and worked as a sports official for many years in the Metro-East area.

Richard started his journey as a chapter disaster volunteer in April of 1995 when he attended an Introduction to Disaster Services class here at the chapter. After taking the prerequisite number of classes, Richard joined the DSHR in September of 1995. His first assignment as a DSHR member was as a Mass Care Technician on DR 774 in October of 1995 that was issued for the disaster relief operation involving Hurricane Opal in Southern Alabama. Since that time, Richard has been on no fewer than 51 state and national disaster relief operations involving hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms, flooding, large apartment fires, terrorist attacks on September 11th, air disasters, and the Kosovo refugee resettlement operation. He was even featured in a training video on American Red Cross Emergency Response Vehicles (ERV’s) that is used to train ERV drivers nationwide.

Richard was one of the first disaster volunteers to respond to the September 11th tragedy, arriving the Friday after the attack at the Pentagon. For the next three weeks, Richard supervised the deployment of the Red Cross Emergency Response Vehicles to the various feeding sites located in and around the Pentagon. These sites were responsible for feeding the thousands of firefighters, military personnel, rescue workers, and law enforcement personnel deployed at the Pentagon. After getting a brief rest, Richard returned to the Pentagon a week later to supervise the Red Cross canteen located in the Pentagon for a period of three weeks. During this time, he met Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. At the conclusion of this second tour of duty at the Pentagon, Richard received an American flag that had flown over the Pentagon as a symbol of gratitude for his service from the Pentagon staff. Richard also served for an additional six weeks in New York City in support of the relief and recovery operation involving the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

He also has given talks to various community and business groups on the mission of the American Red Cross in support of our local annual United Way Campaign. He also assists our chapter’s Blood Services Coordinator by helping out at blood drives in the chapter jurisdiction whenever he can. Richard performs maintenance duties around our chapter building such as cutting the grass and weeds. He also has supported the community by picking up supplies for the Crisis Services Food Pantry in Alton, Illinois. He has been honored previously for his volunteer services by the Illinois Service Council of the American Red Cross with the 1997 Prairie State Excellence in Service Award and the 2001 Prairie State Award for Distinguished Volunteer Service. In recognition for his community service in the Riverbend, he was chosen to be the Grand Marshall for the annual Alton Halloween Parade of 1998 largely because of his volunteer service in the greater Alton community.

When not out on disaster operations, Richard has helped out on the chapter Disaster Action Team (DAT), staffed information tables at health fairs, served on the Chapter Board and as chair of the chapter disaster committee, and assisted wherever he can at the chapter in making repairs. He has also served on the State Red Cross DSHR committee. He was one of five finalists for the first ever Jefferson Award for Public Service in the Riverbend sponsored by the Telegraph.

Richard certainly epitomizes the ideal of the volunteer that an organization must have in order to accomplish its mission. The staff and volunteers at the Southwestern Illinois Chapter of the American Red Cross are proud to have Richard Gonzales as a volunteer and friend of the chapter!