A RAINY SATURDAY, HALF A LIFETIME AGO
BY DAVE HERLINGER
I just came back from the garage, rummaging around in file drawers full of old tubes, wires, transformers, and buried deep inside, I found something I hadn’t seen since retiring from teaching high school physics 6 years ago. A bunch of rusty nails, a couple of pieces of scrap iron, and a roll of enameled magnet wire were the raw materials used to make this device 36 years ago. It happened on a rainy Saturday in Spring Branch, inside a cluttered, disorganized (to the unfamiliar eye) workshop attached to a cozy home. I was half of my present 72 years of age and I was in the company of a man who, along with his wife Bettie, would become lifelong friends to me, my wife and daughters.
The workshop belonged to Jack James. Some of you long time members may remember him from the early days of the club. Jack recently passed away shortly after his family and friends celebrated his 97th birthday, far from his native Texas. A sudden increase in blood pressure sent him to a V.A. hospital when he developed a fever, and after a short time in a hospice facility, Jack, the former K5JWH and HVRA member, became a “Silent Key”.
Jack was one of the first of many interesting folks I met 40 years ago after attending my first HVRA meeting in a museum basement. The club was only two years old. I had grown up fascinated by my grandparents’ 1940 Sears Silvertone Console. By the time I started hooking up a wire antenna to listen to Hams and overseas broadcasts, the old clunky beast had been stuffed away in Grandma’s basement, and when I came back to visit some years later, Grandpa had given the Silvertone away. My first HVRA meeting came about because I had bought an AK 40 from an antique shop in Ohio. I needed advice, and someone at City Electronics told me about a club of vintage radio collectors.
At one of those meetings, Jack James had brought a one hundred-pound (fact!) radio to the auction. The “skyscraper” was a 1931 Westinghouse Columnaire, a true Art Deco piece that was in excellent condition and was working. It didn’t bring the minimum bid he had listed, and when I saw Jack struggle to lug this beast back to his truck, I gave him a hand. Before we hoisted it into his truck, I decided to make him an offer. He accepted, and it went into my ’76 Dodge instead. Until Hurricane Harvey, this beautiful set graced my living room. I was able to save every other console and all other sets by putting them on other furniture or hauling them out to the garage as the unending rains began. Unfortunately, I could not get this heavy piece up onto a table or blocks before the waters began coming in. Just a couple of months ago, I took it out to the garage and began to figure out a way to replace the bottom eight inches or so of veneer. That’s when I stuck it on a bathroom scale and measured it at 102 pounds!
After my purchase of the Westinghouse, Jack invited me to come visit his shop. Jack used to restore furniture and wooden radio cabinets. He had hundreds of stains, solvents, pigment sticks, test equipment, rolls of wire, and boxes of everything electrical. Space was tight, but not being a neat freak myself, I wasn’t bothered. Jack knew where everything was, and that was all that mattered. It didn’t take long for it to become somewhat a common thing for me to spend a Saturday morning in Jack’s shop. Jack was the editor of the Grid Leak back then, but he cleverly talked me into taking it over, a position which I held for 4 years, pecking away at the Grid Leak on an IBM Selectric typewriter, and enlisting my wife and kids to label and fold all those newsletters before toting them to the post office.
One day, Jack found a pair of 2000 ohm phones that appeared to have lost their magnetism. I suggested that we make a powerful electromagnet and try to re-magnetize the phones. An hour later, after many wraps of wire around nails we had heated and annealed to make them soft (and less likely to remain permanently magnetized), we had a powerful electromagnet. It drew 10 amps from my 12-volt truck battery, and got warm quickly! What’s more, I could barely pull it off the steel fender of the Dodge! It was a fun day, and each year in the electricity unit of my physics classes, kids were amazed at the strength of that electromagnet, and how it could suck the scanning lines of the classroom CRT color television set into a black hole! I got in hot water at after doing that demonstration in another school at a teacher workshop. Apparently the TV’s automatic degaussing circuit wasn’t strong enough to remove some residual chassis magnetism and the set’s colors were never the same!
After Jack and Bettie sold their Spring Branch home, they moved to Hillsboro, Texas not long after their 50-year anniversary. It was near where Jack had grown up. After Bettie passed away a few years later, Jack was living alone in that small town. His daughter Teresa built him a small one-room home in her back yard near Los Angeles and moved Jack into his own tiny house. The V.A. paid for a powered lift as he started having trouble climbing to what he called his “aerie” perched on the hill.
We kept in touch via phone, and 10 years ago my wife and I rode our motorcycle out to visit Jack. His daughter Teresa took us out to visit Vasquez Rocks, a well-known movie location. For any Trekkies out there, it was where Captain Kirk fought the Gorn! Jack was still walking pretty well then, and we came upon a B-grade Sci-Fi movie being filmed with a green screen with costumes, and it was the highlight of the day!
Just before he passed away, I found out that Jack had been taught to fly a crop duster before WWII, and when war broke out, that skill was enough to help the Army, after initial training in Louisiana, send him to a B-24 Liberator pilot training and maintenance facility in Liberal, Kansas. He spent the war years upgrading these aircraft, changing engines and other critical equipment, and informing new pilots of mechanical changes to help them successfully fly those iconic heavy bombers.
Pulling that electromagnet out of the drawer took me back to those fun days in Jack’s shop long ago. Times when Jack helped me restore my Radiola III box, sitting around in his kitchen with our wives sipping on lemonade, listening to Jack playing a guitar and watching him building an Appalachian dulcimer: those literally were the good old days.
Jack you were a good friend. I am glad you had a long life. I won’t forget you. Somewhere around 36 light-years away, a CW tone is still racing through the universe at the speed of light: K5JWH calling CQ, CQ, CQ. K5JWH calling CQ.