[Hammarlund] Mars Hill Photo Collection

Tue Jul 24 12:54:09 EDT 2007

Interesting comments.

I had a Phasemaster II. It was a transition piece between the CE 10B and 
20A's I had and the 100V I really lusted after. The receivers then were 
HQ-129X, Drake 2B and 75A4. I still have the A4, the rest are history altho 
I have picked up a 129X recently.

When I worked at National Radio 1963-69 all the assemblers in the ham and 
military divisions were women and all unionized under the IBEW. All 100% 
white in liberal Massachusetts.

In 2001-2004 I worked in R&D developing microwave IC's for Alpha Industries 
also in MA. All the lab assemblers as well as 90% of the fab testers were 
women, mostly Hispanic and Asian. No union.
A big difference was the number of blacks as engineers, some working on 
PhD's.

Now retired Ive returned to boatanchors. Still looking for a Johnson Viking 
l which I used with the 129X and predated my entry to SSB. I'll even 
consider a Viking II.

Carl
KM1H

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jon Teske" <jdteske at comcast.net>
To: "Robert Nickels" <W9RAN at oneradio.net>; <hammarlund at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 12:09 PM
Subject: Re: [Hammarlund] Mars Hill Photo Collection

>I briefly (two weeks) worked at an assembly plant for electronics in
> 1960...the outfit in Manitowoc, Wisconsin which made the Lakeshore
> Phasemaster II SSB transmitter, a pioneering piece of ham SSB
> equipment. By the time I worked there it was out of production. This
> was to be a summer job while I was in college. I then left there when
> another factory in my town offered me double the money to work at
> their place. A Lakeshore Electronics, I did some final equipment
> testing. After their sideline of ham radio died out...their two
> engineers went to Gonset...they built timing devices and small
> subassemblies for other electronics firms. The factory I went to was a
> hydraulics fittings manufacturer (think power steering hose
> assemblies...they made millions of these.)  The Lakeshore plant
> assembly lines looked just like the Hammarlund photos but on a smaller
> scale. Like Hammarlund, women only did assembly.
>
> What is amazing about the Hammarlund photos are how they show the
> social mores of the time...and I presume the area. For one, there is
> no diversity among the employees. I do believe that the areas around
> Asheville, in the foothills, do not have sizeable minority populations.
> (Mars Hill is just North of Asheville,) Things seem to be strictly
> divided into "men's work" and "women's work." Virtually all the
> assembly is being done by women. The men are doing plating, tool and
> die work and of course management. Note that all the women are wearing
> dresses. Looking at the vehicles in the lot and the radios being
> assembled, I would guess these photos are from the early 1960's. The
> HQ-100, the first of the cast panel Hammarlunds was introduced in late
> 1956 (I had one of the first ones, ordered for Christmas 1956, but I 
> didn't
> get it until January 1957. I was 14 ) and the others introduced later.
> The transmitter shown, I believe came out when I was in college which
> would have been 1960-64. Like the factories I worked in, assembly was
> decidedly the province of women. In my job which was as a machinist
> helper (load brass stock into a turret lathe, rake out the metal chips
> from the oil bath for recycling), no man went into assembly unless he
> was disabled, no woman ever went into the real production of parts
> areas. In the front office, woman only did clerical work [Today that
> company has a woman CEO.]  Since the factory I worked in was fairly
> heavy manufacturing and was in an intrinsically dirty environment,
> most female workers did wear slacks or jeans. I guess for something
> less physically demanding, skirts and dresses were considered the norm.
>
> I would suspect that in North Carolina in the 60's, the idea of a
> union was virtually unthinkable. The Wisconsin factory I worked in was
> also not union...somewhat unusual in our town which was otherwise
> heavily unionized (shipbuilding, aluminum foundries etc.)  Management
> was always warning the women that if the plant went union, and there
> were union organizing drives each summer I worked there, all the women
> would have to be fired. This was of course ludicrous, the women were
> far more productive in assembly than any guy would ever be. Whenever
> there was to be a union vote, the company would hire a lot of women
> and tell them that if the place became a union shop they too would be
> out of a job.  Forty-seven years later, the place is still non-union,
> although I hear when I visit my hometown now, the pitch is that all
> the jobs would be shipped to Mexico. A fairly real threat as the
> second largest industry in this town (aluminum pots and pans) did in
> fact close and go to Mexico. I, as a summer-only employee, was
> ineligible to vote in the union elections. I did manage to work both
> sides though. A manager once saw me writing on a management handout
> on the election, and was about to fire me on the spot. Since I was an
> English major, I pointed out to him that he had sloppy grammar, poor
> spelling, split infinitives, ended sentences with prepositions and had
> very faulty logic in the arguments and I was correcting these
> mistakes. He then hired me on an hourly basis, apart from my regular
> job, to take their drafts on the subject home and rewrite them in
> proper English. He paid me more for this than for my real job. Little
> did he know that I was also doing exactly the same thing, for pay,
> from the three unions trying to organize the place. Actually, since my
> father was a union steward at a shipbuilding yard in town, my
> sympathies were with the union side, but management didn't know that.
> I made enough money in the summers doing these jobs that I totally
> paid my own way through the University of Wisconsin. I was working
> covertly for both sides. This was sort of ironic as my post college
> career was as a civilian Intelligence Officer (sometimes covert)
> although I didn't know what my career would be it at the time. I was
> actually training to be an English and French teacher which I never
> did. Working at these places was a real incentive to finish college
> and get out of town. Only 15% of my fellow high school graduates even
> entered college, much less finished it.
>
> These photos are  gems. Now I must get this old HQ-145 I have working.
>
> Jon Teske, W3JT (ex-K9CAH, W3DRV, KG4TJ)
> Olney, MD
>
>
>
> At 10:16 PM 7/23/2007, you wrote:
>>Quite to my surprise I found an excellent collection of original 
>>Hammarlund photos on the web tonight.  There are a total of 53 high 
>>resolution black and white scans available for viewing at:
>>
>>http://tinyurl.com/2gnamh
>>
>>(delete any asterisks that something seems to put in these links!)
>>
>>The source is the University of North Carolina- Asheville, and in addition 
>>to rare plant and assembly line photos, there are commercial photos of 
>>various ham and CB radios.   Note there are three pages and various viewer 
>>options.
>>
>>Like the commercial says:  "Priceless!"
>>
>>73 Bob W9RAN
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