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Harold's Old Time Radio
The Jean Shepherd Show 63-01-24 (x) 097 Getting Ham License
00:33:37
The Jean Shepherd Show 63-01-24 (x) 097 Getting Ham License
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- [00:00]
Advertiser
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Narrator
It's all right. It's going to be zero tonight, huh? Gonna be zero tonight, huh? Well, that means it's going to be a rough night for the brass monkeys again. Now it's a funny thing about cold weather and the. I might as well warn you before we go, before we go any further tonight. Tonight's program is about the unattainable, the secret mystery, the awful thing that lies just beyond that great black curtain out there. And it has to do with cold weather. So don't turn away. Stick your head out the window for just a moment. Really, Really. I mean really feel it. Look, look out there in the dark. Well, now there's something very exciting about very, very cold weather. And I come from a section of the country where cold weather is far more common in the wintertime than the other kind. As a matter of fact, I hear tonight that in Chicago it's around 18 or 20 below, something like that. And in the last couple of days it hasn't been any warmer in Chicago than 13 below. Well, let me tell you something about cold weather. And this is not program that is nostalgic about cold weather at all. Not at all. I don't know if get excited there. I can remember one night as a kid lying on a daybed looking out of the window. We had kind of a front bedroom, you see, and you could look out into the dark. And about a block away across over a deserted prairie, there was a road. And along this road stretched a streetcar tracks. Now above this streetcar tracks of course, was the streetcar wires. Now for those of you who don't know what a streetcar is because obviously we don't have streetcars in New York. They still have them in Philadelphia, you know. Oh yes, a streetcar is a streetcar. It's like. I'll tell you, kid, it's like. It's like a one car subway that's above ground, if you can imagine such a thing, kid. And it rides along right in the middle of the street and it has a big, a big antenna sticking out of the top of it. And on the top of that antenna is a little round wheel. And that round wheel runs along a wire. Now that's where it gets its juice. Well, I can remember lying on the daybed at about oh, 9, 10 o'clock in the evening, it was dark. The temperature was hovering between 25 and 30 below zero, which is considerably colder than what we've got here right now tonight. Well, every half hour or so a streetcar would go past. And this was why I was watching, because of the tremendous cold. The wires had contracted so much that the streetcars were having trouble. And also because of other things that are involved in copper wire. When it gets very cold, you see things happen. The resistance changes and a lot of other things happen to it. Are you aware of that? And so the old streetcars would go along and as they would go along, there would be a thin coating of. Well, it's a kind of frost that forms in the air when very, very cold weather hits. This frost would form on the wire and these wheels would move along in the dark and there'd be great sheets of white flame. The streetcar would go past and I would wait, you see, and you just see, it was just like. I'll tell you what it looked like. It looked like an enormous blue white skyrocket going from left to right directly across a totally black landscape. A streetcar would leave that trail and then for a few seconds after the streetcar would go past, you would see, because of the heat generated because of that, you'd see little spots along the way. And then it'll be quiet again. And then a couple of minutes later, the streetcar would go the opposite direction. Well, then the very thing that we would be waiting for would happen. If we were lucky, while it, while it was being watched, one of the wires would contract so much that the wire would come down. A great explosion. The wire would land on that street which was covered with ice and a great big blue flames for about five minutes. And then the trucks would come. Well, now, the reason that we're, we're telling this, this story tonight, and I'm, I'm. I'm going to have to warn you. Tonight's story is about amateur radio because very cold weather like this always reminds me. It, it, it causes my, my keying finger to itch, which is on my right hand. I could just feel it. It, it begins to itch. I can feel a little. It's like. It must be like an old golfer who sees just the slightest edge of sun peering down and maybe one or two blades of grass. His putting hand begins to, you know, he feels it down in the, down in the knees and he wants to get out there and start flubbing around again. Well, I feel the itch in the, in the old keying finger. Because it is on nights like this, at about 2 and 3 o'clock in the morning when the temperature hovers around zero, that you. It's just you never know what's going to happen. Absolutely have no idea. Because out of the blue comes the most uncanny signals. The most wild things can happen on a night like this in amateur radio. And of course, to those of you who don't know what amateur radio. Speaking of amateur radio, this is Wor Am FM, N.Y. and we have here. Let's get a couple of commercials out of the way and then we'll go on with this story because it concerns the achievement of the unattainable. Now, once in a while you achieve it, you know, and it's very scary and you'll never forget it. In man's desperate race into space, will mankind be left behind? Will America's new space frontier create a new culture? Or will it destroy old heritages in the name of progress?
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Advertiser
With the blue Cash Everyday card, It's easy to earn 3% cash back on groceries at U.S. supermarkets, U.S. online retail purchases and U.S. gas stations. How we grow our family's little nest egg. Learn more@american express.com Explore-BCE terms and cash back cap apply.
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Narrator
Hitting current issue of show magazine explores these and other important aspects. Important issue, yes, the future has become showbiz. Boy, that's very exciting. We also, speaking of showbiz, we have with us two. And this I'm going to go through very briefly because it's a very special kind of announcement for anybody who has an institution, for example, a school, a college. I'm an amateur radio operator and I want to tell you something about that. I just feel in the mood tonight to talk about something now if you don't want to hear about it, you know, you can scoot over and listen to Mandavani or something or that Haydn quartet or whatever jazz you're looking for. But when I was a kid, you know, it's very funny when, when something happens to you that literally changes the whole course of your life, you hardly ever know that it has happened. Well, I recall an incident that really did do that to me. I was fooling around. There were two or three kids in the neighborhood who built radios. And they were older kids and of course they were official kids. And I was always trying to be like the bigger kids. You know, this is just the way kids are. And I was building little radios and fooling around. And one day a kid in school with me, his name was Ray Galambus. I'LL never forget him. Ray Galambus, whom I've never mentioned on this show previously, but Ray. Yeah, Ray Galambus. Ray Galabus, one day discovered I built radios. And he says, my old man builds radios. And I said, yeah. He said, yeah. And with that, he took me home to see his old man. Well, let me tell you what I was confronted with. I had never seen this before. I had heard only vague rumors of it because I was reading the shortwave magazines. There was a magazine called Short Wavecraft, which I read. In this man's room was a set of enormous rack and panels. I'll tell you what it looked like. It looked like the mad scientist scene from the terrible movies. You see, tremendous, fantastic thing with meters all over it. And this guy is sitting down at his desk and he has a microphone and he's talking to people. Talking to people. Well, I took one, one, one look at this and I was out of my skull. It must be what happens when some kid suddenly discovered the theater or something. You always hear about the guy, you know, being taken to the theater and all of a sudden, this is it. This is it. He discovers his world. Well, I discovered that world that day and I. I went out of the house in a daze. I fell down the stairs and I got up and I staggered home. And I sat there in, In a delirium for about three days and finally went back to this guy and said, how do you get to be one? And he said, well, it is very hard, kid. Well, he was understating the case. So within about three days, I had gotten all the textbooks on it and I began to study. Now, remember, I'm a kid in school. I'm only about, oh, 13 or 14 at the time. And I had just begun high school and I was having a tough time getting acclimated to high school. And suddenly I got hooked on this thing. Well, there was nobody around that I could talk to. Now, that's very important. Only this man. And this man lived on the other side of town. And I hardly ever saw him. He was very unattainable. He was a big man in the steel mill. And so I began to work in private on this insane thing. I began to read all these books about this very mystical science. Well, of course, what it was was literally electronic theory of transmission. It was, it was, it was transmitter radio theory. I could go on, tell you what textbooks they were. But nevertheless, I began to study this incomprehensible thing. Remember, I was right now having trouble with the parts of speech that was all really. And. And I was having trouble already with just algebra, with one unknown, you know, and. And just. Just flubbing. And I suddenly got involved in this highly technical, completely, completely removed study. And it got ahold of me. It got ahold of me so much that I couldn't. I couldn't stop. All day long I am reading this stuff. I'm in school, I'm in geography class. And hidden in my geography book is a Q and A which to the uninitiative and uninitiated is the question and answer manual. I would have the amateur radio handbook. And I'm studying and studying, and it's beginning to get me. It's beginning to. It's beginning to develop a terrible thing with me. It's like the white whale. Getting a license became to me. Well, it became almost like what today's novelist must the. The pursuit of love, you know, or the pursuit of understanding, or the pursuit of all encompassing, beautiful, forever young peace or whatever it is that. That the great novelist pursuing. I began to pursue this insane white whale. I knew that I had to learn all of this to get a license as well as learn the code. Well, I don't know whether you've ever tried to learn the amateur radio code all by yourself. Well, it's like trying to learn a language with nobody around to teach you the language, nobody to talk it to you. And those who do speak it to you speak so fast, so colloquially, so insanely, beautifully that you can't even comprehend one word. It goes. Well, I had built this radio and I began to listen to the code and I. I memorized the code from the book and I began to try to copy down words, letters, you know, and it's going insanely. And I'd write down one word. I get one word out of like a half an hour, one word, A. And then I just. I got one. Eat. Oh. Day after day after day. But the beautiful thing, then that began to happen. I cut. I. I stuck to this like I was a nut. And my mother would come in and I'd be sitting there with the cans on my head, and I've got sheets of paper and I'm writing down D F ke. And it's going through my head like. Like. Like an endless maze. I was only hearing this and I was getting none of it. It was just like. Like suddenly being dropped in the middle of Nigeria. And they're talking Yoruba hour after hour after hour. Once in a while, you get. You get one word, like. Yes, you write it down. Yes, yes, I got that one. Well, my mother kept saying, will you cut it out? You're going out of your mind. Now stop it. And I couldn't stop. I'd rush home, put the cans on. Well, of course, naturally the first thing that began to happen was that I began to have trouble in school, which meant no difference to me. I was ready to retire from school. As far as I was concerned, school could go fly a gigantic kite with a tail. So I didn't care, I really didn't. And, and I got my first report card of that semester. And of course it was, it was Disastrousville. I, I got a D in, in algebra. Oh boy, it was fantastic. I got, I got something like a C minus in English and my mother was out of her skull. It's the first time this had ever happened. You're going to cut this out unless this is ridiculous. I'm going to throw all that radio junk out. Well, you know, you don't do this. And I'm fighting, fighting, trying to do everything at once. And I'm staying up every night till about 3 o'clock in the morning trying to do the algebra, learn the code, trying to learn theory, trying to learn the whole bit. Well, in those days getting an amateur license was very, very tough. Not like today. They've, they've made it much easier today. But in those days there was no such thing as a novice class. There was no such thing as a question. They didn't even have multiple choice questions like they have now on the exam. This exam is given by the government to begin with and it is designed specifically to separate the men from the boys. Well, guess what? I was. Yep. All right. So I had, I had a fantastic job and I couldn't even understand half of the big words that I was studying. Well, I began, it began to slowly seep into me and I began to have knowledge of this crazy thing, electronics. And nobody else around me knew anything about it. I began to have a sense of being a secret, something as though I knew something very secret. And I began to feel more and more separated from my fellows. And I became closer and closer and closer and closer and closer and closer to my goal of getting this license. I never really thought I would ever get it though. Was like I'm sure Ahab never thought he would ever land on the back of that white whale. I never thought that I would get it. Well, finally, one day after one solid year of literally, literally consecrating my, literally devoting myself without any outside interest at all to this nutty thing I finally, I'm going to go up. Well, here's the way it works. You go up the way. The way it was in the Midwest, at least in that area. You went into Chicago, right in the main part of Chicago, the old post office building, which is roughly the same as going to the Empire State Building here or some great big official building here in New York. It's like going down to the city hall. It covers a whole block. And I'm this little kid, I'm 14 now, you know, and I get out of this, out of the streetcar and here I'm standing in front of this building with thing stretches for a block. And you were supposed to be there at 8 o'clock in the morning. The FCC had its offices there. At this one particular day they gave the exam once every two weeks. 8:00 in the morning at the FCC offices, the old post office building. And you had to be there at that time or else. Well, now here's. It works this way. If you flunk it, you can't take the exam again for another three months. Well, I mean that's the. You know, it's. I'm frightened. There it is, the first time I'd ever even seen this building. So I go up and I ask the guy at the information there and it's 8:00, you know, it's hardly anybody in there yet but a few people. And I say, where's the FCC place? And he says, well, that's up on the, up on the thing up there, up on the second floor. Take the stairway there. He looked at me, you know, the kid, he says, you sure that's what you wanted, messenger? I says, yes, I want to go up there. So I go up and there's about, oh, there must have been about 75 men, big grown up men all standing around there waiting for the door to open. And I fall into that crowd and they're all talking, they're talking, you know, gee, oh boy, they're all nervous. You can just see the guys are sweating.
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And.
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Narrator
And I got to talking to a man, a grown up man, he must have been about 40 years old. And I said, you know, I'm up here to take. He's the first time kid. And I says, yeah, first time time. He had failed it eight times. Eight times. I'm telling you how hard it was. They had actually in those days they had something like a 25 to 28% completion percentage. In other words, out of the. Only about 25 out of 100 guys would get the License at that time. It's so rough. So I'm standing there. Boy, I'm nervous, you know, all this time and. And. And I'm waiting. I'm waiting. And they open the door, and the man is standing in there. He's the fcc, the ri. The radio inspector. He says, all right, ma'am, file in now. And when you come in, I want your names. I want all of you to sign your names on this piece of paper. And then I'll pass out the application blanks. And then after the application blanks are in, we'll take the code test. Well, I sat down there, of course, I'm a kid, you know, I'm used to taking tests. Well, you know. So they gave us the application blank. And I'm writing down, you know, my age of 14 years old, and I'm writing all that stuff. You know, all these guys, about 75 guys taking this thing. And they're all very. This is the government, you know. It's not like school. There's a guy standing with a uniform with a thing in his hat. And he walks up and down and he keeps saying, let's. Let's see this. And then check. Check this thing. So back and forth we go. And they notarize that. They have a notary out there. So they're notarizing these little things. You give them a quarter. You know, the stamp. It's all notarized. And finally the man says, all right, now let's go into the next room. All of you men. We're all ready now. Let's go into the next room. We'll begin to. This is where they really separate them. Boy. Right away, the code test. And so we go into the next room and we all put earphones on, and I'm shaking. You have to get 65 characters in a row without missing one. In other words, you have to receive 13 words a minute code for one solid minute. Or rather three solid minutes. Three solid minutes without a mistake. Numbers, coded groups, commas, punctuation and the whole jazz. Oh, yeah, they don't fool around either. So I'm sitting down there.
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Advertiser
And I'm.
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Narrator
Writing down like, man, I'm just, like, insanely. And I hear this guy next to me muttering, cursing. Come. Sweating. My nose is sweating. I'm writing down that. They give you this little stub of a yellow government pencil. And finally it goes. It starts suddenly. The man stands up, says, okay, all right, all off. Now. Take your phones off. Take your phones off and pass in your papers over to the right. Let's go now. Pass the papers over the rhino. The die is cast. And there were two men sitting up in the front and they start going over this thing. We're just sitting there. And then he would call out each man as he calls out the name, he would call out the name of the guy who has passed and then give him his sealed government examination that came from Washington, which consisted of 10 blockbuster questions, period. All essay questions. Ed. Oh boy, were they killers in those days. Such little questions as give a complete schematic diagram of a heising system of modulation including all. All circuit values and including waveforms to be found at various circuit points. And also suggested grid drive voltages. Oh boy, I mean that kind of stuff. And then tell why, you know, at the bottom say give theory. Well, I'm sitting there and the he. Smathers. Jam Smathers. And Smathers would go up and get his thing and then one after the other he would say to guys, he'd say, Strickland, Strickland, Mr. Strickland, I'm sorry. Then you'd see him looking at the paper and Strickland would start drooping and out he'd go, dead. D, E D dead. One after the other. They're sending these guys back down into the street one after the other. You could hear them crying going down the elevator. Come. This is a real pain, I'm telling you, working on this thing. Insane. And they are absolutely ruthless, cold, ruthless, rough guys they didn't fool. One after the other. And finally he says, Shepherd, JP this 14 year old squirt gets up. I'm shaking. I don't know whether I've got, you know what, whether I'm going to pass or not. And he says, are you Shepherd? He looked at me, he said, a little 14 year old kid, he says, are you Shepherd? I say, yes, yes, shepherd jp he checks my application. Oh, he said, here, hands me the envelope. I'm going to take the thing. The blockbuster. Oh, I passed the code test. The code test. I made it. And I go tearing into the next room and there are about seven guys, proctors watching, you see. So no, no fooling around in here. And they have desks all separated one from the other and you open up the out and the first question says, give circuit diagram of complete rectification circuit, high voltage type using two half wave rectifiers of the 866A type give definite. Give all circuit values. Give voltages to be found. Suggested that each point including plates give. Well, I know this one. So I down up and down I go. You know, it says it must give complete filtering circuit. Must also include a discussion of characteristics regarding regulation. Voltage regulation. Well, all right. I'm waiting through this thing. Hour after they give you three hours to do it. By the way, boy, I'm covering the paper with all this stuff. I'm pouring it out. Everything I ever knew about. About choke modulation. The whole business is coming. And finally, I have finished all these pages, every last one of them, and there's no more to be done. I go back over my circuit diagrams, and then I fold it back up, I stick it in the envelope, and I go up and give it to the man. He says, Shepard, J.P. i says, yes. And I began to wait. Then is when the real hell starts. Because you wait about six weeks and you get no idea, no idea whether you pass this thing or not. Nobody tells you. And every day I'm coming home, you know, it's like. It's like Ahab has baited the hook and he's waiting every day. He waits for the bite, you know. Every day I come home, hey, Ma, is a mail here? And she'd say, no, there's only a spring and summer catalog from Montgomery Ward. Oh, oh. Then on Saturday, I'd wait for the mailman myself. I'd sit on the porch and he'd come out and give us the light bill, you know, something like that. Day after day after day after day. Until finally I got that little envelope. I had made it. You knew it, you see. You get that little glass envelope. Licensee, it says on the front. A little tiny envelope with a glass thing. I made it. And I could hardly wait, you see, because you don't even know what your call letters are. And by the way, your call letters forever and ever. Then your name, literally your name. Well, I rip open the envelope and there it is. I am officially W9. Quebec, Washington, Norway. I cannot describe to you what it felt. It was like the culmination of an insane, ridiculous, nutty, weird. Well, completely surrealistic year. Nobody in my family knew anything about it. They couldn't even conceive of the. Of the significance of what I had done, you see, because they are. They had nutty thingies in the front. And there with the beeps there. Nutty thing with all those little squiggly lines he draws, you know, it's another thing. Well, I knew what I had done, you know. I knew what I had done, and I knew it. Well, nobody else knew it. And you know, it's terrible to have. To have done Something gigantic. And none of the kids, you know, nobody else, you know, even appreciates it. You know, it's like writing a fantastic novel and nobody reads in your neighborhood and in fact nobody reads anywhere. But you've written this giant novel and it's great and I just don't know what to say. So I've got this thing. Well, that night, let me tell you what happened. This is where the cold weather comes in. It was a bitter cold night that I received my license. In fact, I'll tell you what it was. It was February 6th. Even though the date it's in, it's, it's burned in silver in my brain. February 6th. Now I had been building my equipment preparatory to this fantastic moment. This is like a bride's hope chest. You know, I would buy these things, I would work on my paper. Rotten. I'll never forget the great moment when I went into Allied Allied Radio in Chicago and I walked right up to the guy in the amateur radio department and I said I would like a Bliley BC3 crystal. I want an X cut crystal in a D3 holder and I want it for 7182 kilocycles. 7182 in the middle of the 40 meter band. 7182. And he gave me this thing. Yeah, I mean it's just, you know, it's like buying your first jet plane. Well, I had, I had built my equipment up over the year and my equipment consisted of a 2A5 oscillator period tri tech with my Bliley BC3 crystal. I had a majestic 130 volt B eliminator for the power supply. This is for those of you who are interested, the ham types out there. And I was going on 40 meter CW. I was running a cool 1.7 watts input. My output, that is not counting the standing waves that I must have had on my twisted pair lead in to my RCA doublet receiving antenna. My output must have been roughly in the vicinity of, oh, I'd say 0.8 watts. Roughly. I could barely light a 2 watt neon bulb. Barely. Just a little flicker on the edge, you know, flicker. So there I am, you know, and I had my receiver. And at about 5 o'clock in the afternoon I came down on the 40 meter band and it was a bitter cold day. I got home from school, I fired up the rig and I was official and I, and I, and I threw out my first cq. I, I, I can't, I can only tell you about three Parallels to this incident and none of them are really should be told on the air. So I won't tell them to you. You can, you can, you can, you can guess what this, what the parallel to this would be. This is absolutely. I'm on the air now for the first time, I'm real. And, and up to this point, you see, I've been hearing these people all the time on my earphones and they had gotten a kind of mystical quality. You see, they were only these very. How shall I put it? ABSTRACT BEEPS that's the beautiful thing about code. You see, if you hear people's voices, they're truly human. But you just hear there's some God that you hear this cold coming in, coming in. And it has a quality of great mystery to it. So now I'm on them. I had a big chirp, by the way. I am calling CQ until I am blue in the skull. My eyeballs are popping up, my ears are sweating, I don't eat. I call CQ. I call every guy on the band for about 24 consecutive hours, Ed. And I don't even raise a peak. Nothing. Well, let me describe what happened on. It was about 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. I had been calling and calling and calling and calling and calling CQ, calling every guy here. And about 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning I call a guy. And by this time I haven't slept, I really haven't slept for two days. I'm just calling automatically and I'm calling a W2 and I sign and then I hear this guy, he's calling me. Oh my God, W2KMX is calling me. And I am so fantastically nervous. I get on the key, if you can stutter in code. I stuttered. I came back to this guy. He was in Brooklyn. The first guy I ever talked to was in Brooklyn, which is pretty good, you know, considering. And I'm talking to this guy, of course, immediately he lost me in the. In the qr him in the noise, completely lost me. But I had talked to a guy at 2:30 in the morning in a fantastically cold February night. I had talked to a guy, me, a 14 year old kid, you know that I never heard from that guy again. I sent him, I sent him QSL cards. Ed. For a hundred years I never heard it from this guy again. But I've never, never turned back. It changed me forever and ever. And I know that white whales are attainable by God, they are attainable by George.