[Hallicrafters] Hallicrafter user, Thor Heyerdahl obit

[William L Howard]

I seem to remember an ad that Hallicrafters had saying the S 38 was the
main radio on the Kon Tiki expedition.

Thor Heyerdahl died at 87 from cancer, while vacationing in Italy. He
was living in the Canary Islands.Very well known for his balsa raft
voyage on the "Kon Tiki" and the immensely successful book which he
wrote about the voyage, Heyerdahl was already a veteran of South Pacific
scientific field trips when WWII broke out.
He spent the war in the free Norwegian forces, primarily as a
paratrooper.After the war he tried to interest scientists in his theory
that the islands of the South Pacific could have been originally
populated by seafarers from South America, travelling east. He got
little support ,and decided to demonstrate that it could be done.  His
book describes the difficulties of getting logs from giant balsa trees,
to make the Kon Tiki raft. He set out with five companions of various
nations in 1946 and sailed to an island near Tahiti in 101 days. His
book was translated into 65 languages and made him a sensation. A
documentary film was made of the trip, and won an Oscar.
His theories received little acceptance among other scientists, and have
been rebutted, based on language differences among the ethnic groups
which were the subject of study.  He also sailed a reed boat "Ra II"
with a crew from Morocco to Barbados, advancing a theory of migration by
Egyptians to the western hemisphere, studied the giant statues on Easter
Island, and was involved in other ethnographic efforts.