I started out in electronics by trashing old radios to get the big paper capacitors and carbon resistors. I'd break off one lead and play like they were firecrackers. Daddy showed me how to bend one lead flat so they could be used again and they still looked like firecrackers. I hung out with Jack and Clyde Coffee (big high school kids) to watch them experiment with radio stuff. I also visited Gene Courtney, an older guy, who had lots of working radio gear. Gene later established a radio station between Winfield and Ark City.
When I was 13 in Arkansas, I studied Dad's First World War, Navy electrician's manual. This book was published in 1916 and covered principals of electricity through motors and CW (continuous wave) radio transmission. Dad was one of a small handful of sailors working with AM (amplitude modulation) voice communication. That was new and so top-secret there was no associated manual — taught verbally and memorized and was restricted to the President's yacht, USS Mayflower. Anyhoo, I built an electric motor for a science project, using a fish cork armature stuffed with lengths of bailing wire, sewing supplies, glue, and wire stripped from an old radio transformer. It was a commutator-type (straight pins sticking out one end) and required DC voltage to run. Dad bought for me two D cells with a caution, "Ration 'em. Ain't going to be no more." (Batteries are expensive.) The thing worked. I stood by to run it when someone wanted a demonstration at school.
Annie and I got the idea of a tin-can walkie-talkie from a bubble gum wrapper. We spliced together all the string we could find. Standing about 20 foot apart, one would scream into his tin can, "Can you hear me?" The other would yell, "I hear you very well." We learned Morse code and had fun sending semaphores the length of our front meadow (200 or 300 yards).
I had a complete set of lesson books that Jack had used at Midland Radio School in Kansas City. He had started at that trade school out of high school. The war came along as he was graduating Midland's course. The government took over the school to teach service men, and froze Jack there as an instructor. The covered material of these lessons was state of the art in 1941 with one exception — radar wasn't mentioned but it was still being developed.
[Bill, the following paragraph sort of ties in with what we've been talking about, but isn't part of my personal story (unless you are a psychologist figuring out what makes Billy kill). You should know these things, however, and be prepared to transmit by oral tradition to your kids, sisters, whoever.]
This set of books, booklets really, color coded according to subject, disappeared during one of Mother's house cleaning purges. At about the same time, Dad's Navy electrician's manual disappeared. At about the same time, Grandma Cassie's Franklin/Nimrod family Bible disappeared. At about the same time, a set of Merrill's Readers disappeared, which Jack had used as school texts 1929-32. At about the same time, Mom threw away a blood-smeared pre-flight check list from a BT-13 in which one of Dad's buddies had died. Annie saw Dad's World War I Navy uniforms, with insignia, both white and blue, in the trash and salvaged the blues. When asked, Mother reported that she'd placed Dad's Masonic sheepskin in his coffin, according to custom. All these occurred after Daddy died, at the house Bill Wheat occupied in Burden. To bad, because particularly the Navy manual was of great historical value. Hell, all these things were collectible and the Bible was of genealogical interest.
[end of the non-biographical info]
Back in Kansas, I had good success with "cat-whisker" detector radio. Brother Jack supplied earphones and a germanium diode for this. Graduated to a vacuum-tube RF amplifier with positive feedback. That's the kind that hisses and squeals as you tune through side bands and breaks into a squeal if you tweak the feedback too high. I needed a two-gang capacitor for a super-heterodyne receiver (mix with intermediate frequency) but radios that used this technology were not yet eligible for salvage and the cost of such a part was out of reach . To this time, not a cent (except the D batteries in Arkansas) had been spent on any project.
I always liked math and science. Because Burden was the worst high school on earth, I spent the first year at Saint John's Junior College, catching up on math to Freshman college level and all else they could offer me. I enjoyed Literature and German Language. The second year, I transferred to Emporia State Teacher's College in Emporia, Kansas. That school required that I declare a "school" and a major and minor courses of study. I chose to major in science and minor in math in the School of Education. I had no intention of becoming a teacher, but that's all I could think of. I participated in Freshman orientation and parties mostly to hang out around girls. Discovering the social benefits of sororities and fraternities for the first time, I rejected both as being silly and expensive and became, forever after, an "independent". I returned home on weekends to eat and do my laundry.
Jack donated a '37 Plymouth sedan to me, which I used to commute to both St. John's and Emporia. What you would call basic transportation. John Ryan had a '37 Chevy and we alternated commuting between Burden and St. Johns. The greatest thing, we were the only two cars allowed on campus at St. Johns because we were the only commuters. Coeds recruited us, when we were free of classes, to take them swimming in nearby cricks. I lost a pair of glasses, neglecting to take them off before diving after a half-naked female. I showed up late to Professor Lankeneau's English Lit. class, soaked to the skin after I'd fallen in the crick. Good times, man! Home for the weekend from Emporia, Patty Ruggles and I drove over to Grenola. On the way home, we were into heavy petting and I drove into a cement culvert, messing up the steering alignment.
And finally back to the subject of my electronics career. I received my draft notice before the spring semester was over. Lyle Barker and I, whose ages deviated by five days, took a fifth of Old Granddad to Grouse Creek and talked about being drafted into the Army. We decided to beat the draft by enlisting in the Marines. Now that's really smart, enlisting for four years instead of being drafted for two. Anyway, the Marines put us in their reserves until the school semester finished. The Marines were being shot up pretty badly in Korea at this time (this was 1953). They were an all-volunteer outfit and, as an incentive to maintain that, offered us a three-year enlistment. Bark went in a month before I did (his birthday was in June).
Where was I? I was going to tell you about the whisky bottle. I was home on leave and decided to try and find the bottle for a keepsake. It was gone. Out of the Marines in 1956, I was best man at Bark's wedding and gave up all the money I had to grubstake his trip to San Jose, California, where he wanted to settle. I took his double-barrel 12 gauge shotgun in return. He had a fine Smith & Wesson .357 magnum revolver he wanted to give me, but I turned it down because it was his most prized possession. We lost track until he contacted me about 1990 after I'd come down from the mountain to live in Alamogordo. He had the Old Granddad bottle — he had retrieved it before I went looking. He said the label and cap was gone, but the bottle has "Old Granddad 1952" molded into the glass.
Over the years, I'd done some work on Lyle's double-12. We gave it a blue job in a chicken-watering trough in 1949 and did a nice job, except for the brazed brass seam holding the barrels together. I whittled a new stock and forearm from a big chunk of walnut (the original was hollow plastic). The pot-metal trigger guard was replaced by a brass one, also filed by hand from a solid block. The box-lock action was tight. I mailed this shotgun to Lyle, when he retired to Phoenix, Arizona, in two mailing tubes. I declared the parts to be photographic equipment because of our nonsensical mailing restrictions. The piece is now in his daughter's hands in Wyoming (I think). Lyle is dead now, having waddled off to the great hunting ground in the sky.
Back to electronics. Lyle and I must have been similar as toddlers. Tom Barker ("Turn over, Lizzie. It's me, Tom!") had brought Lyle downtown. Albert Franklin tried to call Lyle in from the street, "Come back inside, Billy!" The kid ran. Albert chased him down and started dragging him home. Tom said he thought it was his kid. They stood there for a time discussing whose kid it was.
And that's how I became an electronic technician.