[ARC5] First and Last Q-5er article

[gordon white]

Richard:

    Don't know where that profile of me came from, but it's pretty accurate.

No, I was never a licensed amateur.

     Getting involved in the Command set subject had two roots. First, I 
graduated from Mountain Lakes, NJ high school and Mountain Lakes is the 
next borough (New Jersey term for village) to Boonton. A lot of the 
A.R.C. people, at least the officials, lived in Mountain Lakes, which 
was pretty upscale, if not wealthy. I was already primed in the early 
1950s to recognize A.R.C.

     Next, when I moved to the Washington, DC area we were pretty poor. 
I made $110 a week as a reporter. (Scotty Reston said it was a wonder we 
got paid at all, our jobs were so much fun.) Joan made $3,000 a year as 
a schoolteacher. Not being able to afford a TV set we inherited one from 
my parents that did not work. Being a tinkerer, I went into it to see if 
I could fix it. Lucky I did not get up against the flyback transformer. 
Long story short, I did get it to work. That piqued my interest in 
electronics and I soon ran across a local surplus store which had all 
sorts of goodies. Being that the parents lived just outside New York 
City, I found "radio row" in downtown Manhattan, and that led to ham 
magazines which led to a piece about the command sets which I suspected 
had a lot of bad information in it, leading back to the A.R.C. people in 
N.J.

     A reporter just has to correct someone else's errors in print and I 
can be very thorough. When working for the Paterson NJ Evening News my 
editor realized my bent towards technical history - I'd volunteered a 
piece on the Conover Automobile which was built in Paterson before WW I. 
He set me to doing a piece on the Paterson locomotive industry, c. 
1850-1900. As the twig is bent so groweth the tree -

     Being in the Washington area there were a lot of resources - the 
National Archives and the Signal Corps and Navy files, etc. I just kept 
on digging and getting more and more interested.

     CQ paid me $100 a month, which, saved over 12 years, paid most of 
the college costs for the three kids.

     I retired from my last newspaper, the Salt Lake City Deseret News, 
for which I was Washington Correspondent, in 1991 and having been a fan 
of auto racing since my dad took me to the track in 1938 when I was 
five, I got into writing the history of American auto racing - seven 
books and counting.

     I am intrigued that there are so many fans of the Command sets and 
that they "found" me about ten years ago.

  - Gordon White