[Elecraft] WOT: Johnny Cash

[COLIN WHITMORE]

Way Off Topic: This was sent to me by a fellow ham. I thought you guys 
(gals) might enjoy.

Cheers,
N0YGY

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Saturday afternoon I was listening in the 3-meter band to WUMB UMass Boston 
radio, 91.9 MHz, when they had on an old interview with the late Johnny 
Cash. He was asked how he got started in his career, and a great CW story 
emerged.

Cash was born on a small cotton farm in NE Arkansas. They were very poor, 
and the whole family worked the fields together. Their only enjoyment was 
they did have a radio. Whe they came in from the fields, they could listen 
to Earnest Tubb, the Carter Family, Gene Autry and so on. Johnny had a great 
singing voice, but the family was too poor to afford a guitar so he just 
sang. His ambition for life was to sing on the radio.

In 1950, he enlisted in the Air Force. Aptitude tests showed he had great 
capability for Morse Code, probably due to his musical mind set he thinks. 
He went to the usual AF places like Lackland and Keesler, graduating first 
in his class in CW. Then they selected him for high speed intercept operator 
and he aced that class. Then they sent him to learn Russian language and 
Russian code. He was doing 35 WPM in Russian. On graduation first in his 
class, he was offered either Adak Island Alaska or Germany. Cash didn't know 
anyting about Adak except that it was 100s of miles from nowhere, but he had 
heard that Germany was a good place, so he went there.

Asked if he ever intercepted anything interesting he had two stories.

Sitting there with headset and typewriter, one day he was copying the TASS 
news service bulletins to the outlying SSRs, when he copied the first TASS 
bulletin on the death of Stalin. This went right up the chain to Washington 
of course, as the first news they heard of it. Another time, he was tuning 
around when he picked up an in-flight position report from a Russian bomber 
flying from Moscow to Smolensk. It was a real weak signal at 45 WPM, almost 
lost in the QRM and QRN, but he copied the code and ran it over to the 
crypto shop. The departure time and ETA were way too short for that route 
(either 1/3 the usual time or 1/3 off the usual time, I forget). From this, 
Intel determined that the Russians had got their jet powered bomber flying 
at last. This news flashed to WDC, and Cash got an Air Force Commendation 
Medal for that intercept.

After a few years, he made rank and became chief of the station. Meanwhile, 
in his off time, he finally had enough money to buy himself a git-tar, which 
he instantly learned to play. The Air Force offered him good assignments and 
bennies to re-up, but he always just wanted to sing on the radio, The rest
is History.

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