[GreenKeys] Police teletype

[Jim Haynes]

On Wed, 18 Dec 2019, Jim Cooper wrote:

> On 18 Dec 2019 at 21:22, Ralph Irish wrote:
>
>> Did you ever see one of those Model
>> 28 "DELTA" sets which were designed
>> for Delta Airlines' Reservation
>> System?
>

I have one of them.  And I've told the story of the Delta system several
times on this list, so won't repeat it unless someone asks for it.

> So when I was being interviewed, he asked me
> if I had any experience with Model 28 equipment...
> my honest response was "I built an ASR from parts!"
> LOL
>
That's impressive.  When I had the summer jobs with Teletype in 1958 and
1959 I stayed in a YMCA in Chicago.  (This is probably all in my "chads"
memoir, so apologies for being repetitious.)  I took advantage of the
proximity to visit Ray Morrison W9GRW in Skokie.  Ray worked for Illinois
Bell in a non-Teletype capacity, and had a side business where he built
Teletype machines from scrap he acquired somehow.  Several hams got Model
28 machines through Ray.  Well on one of these visits he started filling
a big box with parts of Model 15 and gave them to me (and gave me a ride
back to the Y in his car, since it would have been hard to handle all
that on the El train).  There was a ham club at the Y with a work room,
so I spent my nights the rest of the summer taking it all apart and 
cleaning and reassembling, and had it working by the time I went home
at the end of the summer.

Ray's garage and basement were the stuff of legend.  He had a Collins
KW-1 transmitter in the basement. and tons and tons of Teletype and 
telephone stuff.  I don't know that he ever got on the air except for
the RTTY contests.  He was a reserve officer in the Navy and went to
California every year for duty.  There he always visited Merrill Swan
W6AEE, the original publisher of RTTY magazine.