[QCWA] Fiction - sort of

[William M. Pasternak]

Wow -- a truly great story.  Might I suggest that you submit it to 
Worldradio for reprint.  Send it to Editor Nancy Kott, WZ8C at 
nancy at tir.com.  It needs to be shared.

de
Bill P. / WA6ITF


At 05:15 AM 1/2/05, you wrote:
>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
>
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