[Hammarlund] craig roberts

[Mike Taylor]

Craig, I enjoyed your story. Thanks for sharing with us. I got interested in
radio because of my grandfather, whose first transmitter was a "spark" type.
In the fall of 1926, he built the studio in a living room in a house in
Peoria Heights, Illinois, and also the transmitter and antenna for radio
station WMBD in Peoria, Illinois. He even built the michrophones from
scratch.  The station went on the air on Valentines Day, 1927. He was 18
years old at the time. He retired from WMBD in 1975, and is now a silent
key. At that time he was WB9SAP.  (He had a beautiful walnut base brass key
and could bang out 40 wpm). When I was a kid in the '60s, he used to take me
out to the transmitter site which by that time included WMBD channel 31 and
WMBD-FM. He used to let me pull the switch on the console which fired up the
two million watt channel 31 transmitter at sign-on. That was always a thrill
for me. WMBD is still alive and well. 73's, Mike