Nopuko's Store: Micronesia Books WW2 Books Micronesia Shirts Island Videos Cell Phones & Service Computer & Video Games Cameras & Photo		by Steve Young, argusleader.com, April 8, 2007 SHOREVIEW, Minn. - In the crystal blue waters off the South Pacific island of Yap, Patrick Ranfranz swims with the manta rays and speaks to the dead. Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children Hovering beneath the surface, Ranfranz scans the depths for a B-24 bomber that crashed into the sea and fell to the white, sandy ocean floor below, entombing 10 men, including his uncle - South Dakota farm boy John McCullough - 63 years ago this June.
		Sometimes he feels so near to the man he knows only from pictures and others' memories that Ranfranz calls to him through his mask. "Hi, John," he will say. "I know I'm close to you. ... and the others. I hope you're proud of the work I'm doing." "Work" doesn't begin to describe what this 40-year-old suburban St. Paul man has spent years doing. As a child, he would spin the globe in his classroom until he found Yap - a strange-sounding place famous for ancient stone money and, more importantly to Ranfranz, for its connection to his mother's brother. Through the years, that childhood wonder turned into a fascination with airplanes, history and the scant family takes of an uncle he never knew. Eventually, it became a passion, then an obsession. Now it possesses him so much that Ranfranz has created a Web site, missingcrew.com, and filled it with pictures, military records, maps, history lessons and blogs. It's all tied directly and	Patrick Ranfranz holds a model of a B-24 bomber similar to the one his uncle, Tech Sgt. John McCullough, was shot down by the Japanese near the island of Yap on June 25, 1944. (Photo by Elisha Page / Argus Leader)
		indirectly to the missing plane on which Tech. Sgt. John McCullough was an assistant radio gunner when it was shot down June 25, 1944, by the Japanese while Americans bombed an air strip on the island. Frustrated by the slow pace of government efforts to recover more than 78,000 service members missing from World War II, Ranfranz has begun to spend his own money as well - up to $12,000 in 2005, and a similar amount in 2006 - to fly to the South Pacific with his wife, Cherie, so they can search themselves. They will keep going back, he promises, until they find that plane and whatever lies inside of it. "My quest is to find John," Ranfranz says as he sits in the office of his Shoreview home, surrounded by folders and files, model airplanes and images on the wall of World War II aircraft. "I think guys like him belong home, especially if the military's motto is, 'We don't leave anyone behind,' " he continues. "I want to do this for the sacrifice he and others made, and to chronicle who they are. I don't want them to be lost to history. I really believe that a man is not dead until he is forgotten." Relatives divided about mission to find uncle It is a zeal that seems odd even to some of his own relatives. John McCullough was the fourth of 13 children born to a skinny Irish farmer named Hugh McCullough and his wife, Blanche. Two of the kids died in infancy. The rest of the clan ended up on a 1,400-acre spread south of Watertown in 1938 after the Depression wiped out the family's sodbusting dreams on the western Iowa prairie near Denison. Many of the McCullough siblings are fine with their nephew's search.