Web Site Takes Grunt Work Out of Military Family Moves

A hobby shop close to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas? A piano tuner near Anniston Army Depot in Alabama? Or a tax accountant ready to trek to U.S. Coast Guard Station Valdez in Alaska?

You can find them all on MilitaryAvenue.com ( http://www.militaryavenue.com ), a free Web site launched last month that bills itself as a localized, comprehensive directory for families relocating to any of more than 200 military bases and installations within the United States. Click on a location and find a school, a doctor, restaurants, directions, even the weather.

The site's creators say that each year about one-third of all military personnel move house. They traditionally rely on neighbors, phone books, whoever or whatever's at hand, to help them find a real estate agent, a movie theater or a place that repairs bicycles. Instead, MilitaryAvenue.com provides users with localized directories of more than a hundred community services.

To use the site, military personnel planning a move click on their branch of service from a menu formatted to look like a row of old-time street signs. A list of states and installations appears.

Let's say you're in the Army, being deployed to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. Up pops a nice photo montage, a greeting, the weather forecast and a map of "your community." The street-sign menu shows an alphabetized list of 21 types of goods and services needed by newcomers: apartments and child care, furniture, pet care, utility companies and houses of worship. Clicking on "home & garden," then "carpet cleaners," brings up a list of 14 companies ready to shampoo out the tracks your movers left behind.

As an added incentive for users and service providers, the company offers free advertising on the site to companies that provide exclusive discounts to military families. The goal, according to a news release, "is to create the Web's largest database of local military discounts and offers."

The site was designed by Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Internet entrepreneur Dan Kissinger and his father, Dale, a retired Air Force colonel who moved his brood 19 times during a 30-year career. Kissinger, 30, started a similar Web site in 1998 geared to Air Force families like theirs. He sold it to media conglomerate Primedia in 2000. When his non-compete agreement ended last year, he jumped back in, in a bigger way.

Kissinger, who noted that the family of five had once lived in Panama and that he went to high school in Iceland, said, "After seeing all the stress the moves put on my parents, I wanted to have an impact on military relocations and hopefully take some of that stress away by providing the resources we didn't have when we moved."

Three decades, 19 moves. Imagine the hours -- nay, weeks -- spent finding a decent pizza.

-- Elizabeth Williamson