[GreenKeys] Rtty Journal personalities

[jhhaynes at earthlink.net]

I have a favorite old story along those lines.  Maybe ten years ago,
when I was still living in California, I felt the need for a nostalgia
fix and pulled down a volume of RTTY from about 1960.  I was reading
an article about a T.U. design by Herbert Hoover, Jr., W6ZH and some
discussion he had with Merrill Swan, W6AEE.  After reading for a while
I got motivated to turn on the radio and see what might be on.

It was a night of propagation to die for - several stations on 80
meters were absolutely solid copy.  After copying for a while I learned
they were all in the Los Angeles area and were running about seven
watts.  So I broke in to tell them what swell signals they had up
in the Santa Cruz area, over 300 miles away.  We talked for a while
and then one of them said, "Let's stand by for Pete."  Well "Pete"
turned out to be Herbert Hoover III, current holder of W6ZH.
So I got to tell him that I had just been reading his late father's
article in RTTY, and how that had motivated me to turn on the radio
to see who was on.

Merrill W6AEE the original publisher of RTTY was one of the nicest people
I have ever known.  I first got in touch with him about 1954, when I was
a kid who had just learned there was such a thing as amateur RTTY.
We exchanged a lot of letters, and then I got to meet him in 1960 when
I was in the Air Force at Edwards AFB, which was about a two-hour drive
from his home in Arcadia.  So while I was at Edwards I spent many
afternoons in Merrill's ham shack, talking about RTTY and related stuff.

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jhhaynes at earthlink dot net