[QCWA] Fiction - sort of

[Daniel Metzger]

Hi!

Here is a story I wrote for our club newsletter (The Hertzian Herald, 
Monroe MI) a few years ago.  It was reprinted in the now-defunct 73 
magazine a few years later, but they don't own the copyrignt - I do.

I'd be pleased to have it reprinted or posted by anyone who cares to, 
provided they credit K8JWR as the author.  I think it speaks to the 
condition of the Hobby today, if you think about it.

Dan Metzger, K8JWR



  The Old Man        (For July, 2001)

    The guy they called The Old Man?  Sure, I knew him. Well, it wasn’t 
actually me - it was my buddy, Al.  I think his family knew him from 
way back.  However it was, three or four times during our sophomore and 
junior years of high school Al called me to say that he had been 
invited to The Old Man’s shack because he “wanted to talk” - and would 
I like to come along.

    The Old Man’s shack was a two-car garage, partitioned into operating 
room, workshop, and storage area in about the proportions of 
1-to-2-to-3.  His rig consisted of three six-foot relay racks full of 
what appeared to be home-brew exciters, amplifiers, modulators, and 
power supplies.  The rig was dark and silent, and he never turned it on 
while we were there. In fact, I never heard him on the air, and later, 
when I got home and looked up his call in the Call Book, it wasn’t 
there.

    His receiver, a Collins 75A-2, was always on, with cw signals 
mumbling softly in the background.  Once, while The Old Man was 
rummaging in a junk box, I reached for the tuning knob to get the feel 
of this paragon of receivers, and he put me in my place with a curt, 
“Please don’t monkey with the receiver.”

    Well, The Old Man had said he wanted to talk, and talk he did - for 
nearly two hours.  He regaled us with stories of how the Radio 
Inspector had threatened to confiscate his spark transmitter one Friday 
back in ‘24 because he was interfering with Great Lakes shipping 
traffic, and by the next Monday he had his first vacuum tube rig on the 
air.  He told of being an engineer at a local radio station in the ‘30s 
and climbing a 200-foot tower in the wintery darkness to make an 
antenna repair in time for Amos and Andy.  We heard how he was in the 
South Pacific during World War II, training island natives who didn’t 
know a word of English to copy code by rote memory: dot-dash, write an 
A; dash-dot-dot-dot, write B; and so on.  His eyes sparkled as the 
names of hams and radio men he had known rolled off his tongue by the 
dozen, and he seemed to expect that we should know these people as well 
as we knew our classmates in school.

    Finally, he wound down and said, “Well, this is boring to you.  Now, 
how would you boys like some radio parts, on the square?”

    Al managed to say, “Sure!” but I could only hope that The Old Man 
read the wide grin that broke out on my face as a “Yes!”  That first 
visit he gave me a power supply for my VFO.  (I had just gotten my 
general.)  It used a type 80 rectifier, so it must have been from the 
early ‘30s or late ‘20s.  I had ridden my bike over, and it was a real 
struggle to keep that bulky thing under my left arm while managing the 
bike with my right.

    By the second visit Al was driving, and we made sure the trunk was 
cleared out before we came.  Good thing, too, because that time he gave 
me an old Hallicrafters AM transmitter; it must have been three feet 
wide and weighed over a hundred pounds.  On other visits we came away 
with antenna tuners, microphones, transmitting tubes, and 500-watt 
power transformers.

    He mentioned that the transformer secondary was 900 volts rms, and 
when I asked him what “rms” meant, The Old Man practically exploded: 
“How can you do anything in radio if you don’t know what rms means?”  
So he sat me right down and explained it to me, and even though I was 
still a little shaky on the details I told him that I understood it 
perfectly, Yes Sir!

    Well, that’s about all.  We were supposed to see The Old Man again 
one Saturday in late May, but Al got a call on Friday that they’d taken 
him to the hospital, and a few days later we heard that he’d died.  
What with school and me starting my first job about then, I never did 
find out what happened to his garage full of stuff and that untouchable 
75A-2.

   Say, look - I’ve got to be getting home.  The kid across the street 
is into computers, and I told him that if he’d come over after supper 
I’d give him my old PC, and a modem and some other junk.  It’s funny - 
that kid comes over and gets me talking, and he don’t leave for maybe 
two, three hours.  I was telling him about my first computer, an Apple 
II - and I don’t think he’d ever heard the name of Steve Wozniak 
before.  And he didn’t know what TTL levels were!  Now, how’s he going 
to do anything in computers if he doesn’t know what TTL levels are?

73 de K8JWR       dmetzger at monroe.lib.mi.us