wheelgunner

If any of you out there wish to know more about Kent Lomont...."the early years"....I'm your man. I had the great good luck of meeting Kent in 1958. He was 13 and I was 12. I was one of the kids in his neighborhood on the south side of Ft. Wayne ,IN who "worked", if you can call it that, for him casting wheel weights into alloyed bullets for sale as far away as Africa. He "paid" us in ammo, which we loaded ourselves. So many rounds of our choice for each hour's work. He supplied the powder & primers, we cast or swaged the bullets and he let us shoot any guns he or his dad ,Al, owned. I spent nearly every hour I wasn't in school in his garage or basement or at the range with Kent until 1963/1964. We also logged countless hours hiking, camping, canoeing and other things which should probably be left unsaid. Yes, he was a degreed chemist. He started at Indiana Institute Of Technology in Ft, Wayne but graduated from Purdue's main campus in West Lafayette,IN. He worked for maybe 10 years at Kitgo in ,I believe, Bluffton,IN as an organic chemist. I followed a similar path, 4 years at IU and 2 years at Purdue and was also a chemist . I spent 36 years working for Uncle Sam ( DOD) doing classified research on weapons systems. I worked and went to school full time with my employer picking up the tab and I stayed with them all 36 years. We put some remarkable things in SE Asia and I worked for them from 10 Jan 66 to 10 April, 2002. Kent's full name was Kent Allen Clement Lomont. Kent went to St. John the Baptist Catholic elementary school and Bishop Luers HS and chose St. Clement as his Patron Saint for Confirmation. I have about a thousand unbelievable stories about him.....maybe I should pass them on to John Ross who could turn them into a [censored]-of-a book. I really can't believe he is gone. I guess I just don't want to. Jim R.