A Colerain man who fought in the Vietnam War has spent his life wondering what happened to a fellow soldier he'd become close friends with.Thanks to his youngest daughter and the internet, he now knows the answer and finds new healing. Harold Lockett was 20 years old when he was drafted. He served in Vietnam from October 1968 to October 1969."I shut Vietnam completely out of my memory. I tried my best to because of the traumatic experiences I've had," he said. "This past Memorial Day, I had dreams that were so vivid I could feel the weight of my gear and my weapon. It was so vivid."Last summer is when his thoughts about sharing what he experienced began to change. He told one person then another about what he went through. He recalls sobbing as he told horrific stories of danger and loss. Now, he is finding healing through sharing."I was a good soldier," he said. "I have a story to hell."One memory he never forgot is that of his dear friend and fellow soldier Prentice Boyd Sr. from Texas, whom he met in Vietnam."We just connected. I think our upbringing may have been similar. I really don't know, but he had a really nice spirit and we just really hit it off," Harold Lockett said. He has a photo of the two of them at war, although he does not remember when the photo was taken or how he got ahold of it.On New Year's Eve, he shared the photo with his youngest daughter Kiva Lockett and told her about his friend. "He said, 'You know I remember he can do a great impersonation of Louis Armstrong. I just remember he had the prettiest white smile and that was like my best friend there,'" Kiva Lockett shared. Harold Lockett's last memory of Boyd is on what he calls his worst day at war. It was filled with danger, death, close calls and explosions.Kiva Lockett knew how much it would mean to her father to know what happened to his friend. She started scouring the internet and combing through social media."Then I just started going state by state to VA databases, and I was looking for fallen veterans first. Because at that point my dad didn't even know if he had made it out of Vietnam alive," Kiva Lockett said. "Just did a LinkedIn search and I saw a gentleman with the same name. I tried some different variations of the spelling from Texas and he appeared to be around my age."So she messaged him and shared the photo."He responded, 'Wow that's my dad. I've never seen this photo before. This is unreal,'" she recalled. She said she immediately called her dad and had to explain what LinkedIn is. He called Prentice Boyd Sr. within a few minutes. "It was just tears. It was just tears, tears. Man, I'm so grateful. It's so good to hear your voice," Harold Lockett said. "I always cared about him. It's bittersweet because he sounds pretty sad. I'm overjoyed. I am overjoyed. This is the best I've ever been in my life."The two caught up, shared stories and remembered how they bonded over music. They even whistled the song they used to whistle at war, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass' 'Don't Go Breaking My Heart'."Prentice was my affirmation. 'Yeah, Flash. That was my nickname. That actually happened. You did do this,'" Lockett said. "I'm a miracle. We're a miracle." Lockett said he just started sharing his war stories last summer and has only told them to two people so far. He said he is more inspired now than ever to share his stories with others and hopes other veterans will share their stories too.

GREEN, Ohio — Two Canton Township, Ohio natives are overjoyed to learn a fighter plane housed at a local museum has ties to their pilot brother, who went missing while flying a mission in the Vietnam War more than 50 years ago.

Barb Aman and Rich Schoeppner beam with pride as they look back at photographs of their older brother, Lt. Jack Schoeppner.

"He loved adventure. He loved speed," Aman said.

While his siblings admired Jack for his service to his country, most of their memories surround growing up with him in Canton Township.

Aman said her brother was a good guy, very smart and an Eagle Scout.

"He graduated at the top of his class at Central Catholic High School in 1961," Aman said.

Rich Schoeppner recalled the time that he accidentally rode a bicycle into a pool and struggled to get out until his brother saved his life.

"He meant the world to me," Rich Schoeppner said.

Lt. Jack Schoeppner got his "wings" as a Navy fighter pilot in 1966. He served two tours of duty in Vietnam and flew dozens of missions, according to relatives.

But on March 9, 1970, the F4 Phantom he was piloting along with Lt. Rex Lewis Parcels went down in the Gulf of Tonkin. They were reported as missing in action.

"Supposedly, where he went down is unrecoverable," Rich Schoeppner said.

Fifty-one years have passed. Both men are considered dead, but neither has been found.

"There's no closure when they don't come home," Aman said. "It's hard. I think your mind tells you that you know it's true, but your heart tells you something else."

The hope of finding any tangible connection to the fighter pilot faded over the decades. But then, something remarkable happened at MAPS Air Museum in nearby Green, Ohio.

The museum has a mission to preserve the history of military aviation.

"For me, it's the place for veterans to come back and feel it's a safe spot," said Valerie Kinney, one of the directors at MAPS.

In 2003, the Navy offered to loan the museum a 56,000-pound F4 Phantom fighter jet to MAPS. They gladly accepted.

Bob Jones | News 5 Cleveland

For 16 years, museum workers and volunteers didn't realize there was an amazing link between Jack Schoeppner and the fighter jet on display.

That all changed in 2019 when Rich Schoeppner began having conversations with people connected to MAPS. Thanks to Lt. Schoeppner's meticulous flight book, they realized that Jack had flown the jet that was on display at the museum.

"I was amazed. Totally surprising, couldn't believe it," Rich Schoeppner said.

Lt. Schoeppner's flight log indicated which jet he flew by serial number. He made notations before every takeoff and after each landing.

On March 6, 1970, three days before his death, Jack Schoeppner wrote in his book that he flew a jet with the serial number 155764 — the same number on the fighter now housed at MAPS.

For his family, it was an unbelievable coincidence — or perhaps, fate.

"We don't choose the planes. The planes choose us. For some reason, this plane was meant to be here," Aman said.

"He's finally coming home after 51 years," Rich Schoeppner added.

As it turns out, documents showed the jet at MAPS also went up to search for Schoeppner and Parcels when they disappeared on that fateful day in Vietnam in 1970.

The plane has since been restored, and the museum has added the words "Lt. Chops Schoeppner" on the canopy. "Chops" was Schoeppner's call sign.

Bob Jones | News 5 Cleveland

The insignia for Jack's squadron, the Freelancers, was also added to the back of the fighter.

"I couldn't ask for anything more," Rich Schoeppner said.

Bob Jones | News 5 Cleveland

But the museum indeed will do something more in the days following Veterans Day.

On Friday afternoon, a headstone will be dedicated in honor of Jack Schoeppner during a ceremony in the MIA section at Ohio Western Reserve National Cemetery in Rittman.

In addition, a dedication of the F4 Phantom in memory of Jack Schoeppner and Parcels will take place on Saturday from 3:00 to 7:30 p.m at MAPS.

"It's like he's coming home, and everybody will be able to remember his story," Aman said.

This story was originally published by Bob Jones on Scripps station WEWS in Cleveland.

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After surging in the spring, the prices of goods like lumber, corn and soybeans have come back down to Earth. Coffee is headed in the opposite direction.What's happening: Futures for robusta coffee, which is often used to make espresso, recently jumped as high as $2,024 per ton, their highest level in four years. Analysts are pointing to adverse weather in Brazil as well as COVID-19 restrictions in Vietnam."Brazil is the largest coffee producer in the world," Warren Patterson, ING's head of commodities strategy, told me. "They've been hit with quite a bad drought this year and it's been followed by frost," which has seriously harmed the country's coffee trees.Arabica futures for December are up 3% this month after climbing 18% in July.What it means: Companies like Starbucks buy coffee ahead of time and have hedging strategies in place to lock in prices. But J.M. Smucker, which owns the Folgers and Dunkin' coffee brands, said last week that rising costs will still affect its business, especially since it's already contending with more expensive transportation and packaging."As we came into the fiscal year, we were anticipating mid single-digit cost inflation as a percent of our total cost of goods sold," J.M. Smucker's Chief Financial Officer Tucker Marshall told analysts. "Now we're seeing high single-digit cost inflation."Consumers could pay some of the difference. JDE Peet's, whose coffee portfolio includes Peet's Coffee and Stumptown, said earlier this month that it had some hedging "in place" but was thinking hard about its pricing strategy.Another commodity that's been on the rise recently is oil. Prices are being closely monitored on Monday for effects from Hurricane Ida, which has now weakened to a tropical storm. More than 95% of the Gulf of Mexico's oil production facilities have been shut down, regulators said Sunday.Brent crude futures were gaining ground even before Ida hit, rising 11.5% last week thanks to optimism that China appeared to have the delta variant under control. It was the best week for the global oil benchmark since spring 2020.Economists often strip out volatile energy and food prices when they track inflation. But higher costs can still impact inflation expectations among businesses and consumers, which are closely tracked by central banks like the Federal Reserve.Fed Chair Jerome Powell indicated Friday that the central bank, which has been buying $120 billion worth of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities every month since the height of the pandemic to support the economy, will start pumping the brakes before the end of the year.Yet data on inflation — and how long it will persist — remains murky, as weather events and ongoing supply chain pressures throw new curveballs. That complicates the decision-making process for policymakers at a delicate moment.

Kelli Rearden spent her summers in college working in orphanages in Peru. That’s what drew her to become a social worker in the adoption profession. And it opened her heart to want to adopt internationally herself.

Kelli Rearden, Adoptive mom: “I wouldn’t marry Randall until he agreed that he would adopt with me one day.”

Early in their marriage, she’d browse the international “Waiting Children” site online, and when a picture popped up of a little girl in Vietnam, she couldn’t get the image out of her mind.

Kelli: “I just thought she was adorable, and I was just drawn to her.”

Randall Rearden, Adoptive dad and Baptist pastor: “Every time you looked at that picture, or we would get new pictures, you would just, you just couldn’t put it down.”

Other adoptive families had already expressed interest in the little girl, but the Reardens kept checking back.

Kelli: “I know it sounds crazy, like, how can you love a picture when you don’t know this child, but we really did, and I just knew.”

What they didn’t know were what challenges, exactly, they would be taking on. They saw the medical files for the tiny toddler Vietnamese orphanage nannies called Mai-Mai. They knew she was blind in one eye and had a heart murmur, that she was premature – born at 26 weeks – and that something wasn’t quite right with her brain.

Randall: “It was kind of scary to read that file for the first time, ’cause it was a Vietnamese medical report. It was a coin flip to, you know, whether these things were actually true or not.”

They had already committed to adopting this child. But they wanted expert advice on how to care for her once she got home. So, they sought out the International Adoption Center at Cincinnati Children’s, where they met Dr. Mary Allen Staat, who founded the center and has three internationally adopted children herself.

Kelli: “The first thing that she told me was: ‘She’s an amazing little girl.’ And I’ll never forget that. We had other doctors that just told us, you know, basically a doomsday story that was discouraging, and she saw her first, and she was very realistic and helpful and explained things, but she saw her for a person first, and so, that was very encouraging to us.”

Mary Allen Staat, MD, MPH, Director, International Adoption Center: “It’s so personal to me. You know, this is a great job for anyone to have as far as, you know, the joy that you get in helping families who are internationally adopting. But, for me, it’s incredibly personal. I really want to make sure all our families feel very supported from the very beginning until their kids are adults. My kids are now adults, and adoption is always going to be a part of their lives. And I want to make sure that we have services there for the families throughout their children’ lives.”

As it celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, the International Adoption Center has seen more than 3,000 children over the years and helped countless more families pre-adoptively.

Kelli: “I can’t even imagine if we had had– with all we had going on – if we had had to go find specialists on our own and make appointments and figure out all the things that Dr. Staat just referred us and showed us what to do and made all those appointments. It was kind of like a one-stop shop.”

Randall: “They treated our daughter, but they helped us so much.”

Dr. Staat: “It’s probably the most fun thing I get to do is to help families through the process of international adoption. We are there to help the family once they’ve decided to internationally adopt and to help them to feel comfortable with what conditions their child has.”

Ever since the Reardens came home with the daughter they call Gracie they’ve reached milestones they never expected. Gracie is spunky. She loves to play and jump. She can sign a little and is starting to say words.

She goes to kindergarten, and the family can’t wait to see what she does next.

Kelli: “When we were praying about her file, my mom, I called my mom to talk about it because we’re very close, and I knew that I would need her support if we adopted a child with special needs. So a few days went by, and my mom went to church on Sunday, and the pastor um, was saying, you know, some people can’t see that the Gospel is a masterpiece, just like this Picasso painting, and he put up a Picasso painting of this dark-headed little girl that her eyes, you know, Picasso paintings are crazy, but her eyes were like all over, and her nose was like moved over, and, you know, it looked a lot like Gracie. The pastor said, ‘She’s a masterpiece.’ And so, that’s the calling I always go back to, you know, that God, he made her exactly who she’s supposed to be. She’s perfect the way she is. And I have zero doubt that she’s supposed to be in our family.”

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