John Ellsworth Interview 3-19-2016

VCRM: I’m interested in hearing about your background, how you began collecting old radios and how that lead to the radio museum.

JE: I was a public school teacher and I was teaching technology education, and saw myself as a wood shop teacher and a drafting teacher. And a couple years into working at Southington High School they asked me to teach electronics which I knew nothing about. So I started learning very, very quickly and kind of got into electronics and enjoyed it. So as time went on and I developed a little bit of knowledge I used to go out tag sailing and flea marketing all the time and I saw a little old vacuum tube radio sitting at a flea market one day and picked it up for five bucks thinking I would take it home and fix it with my new-found knowledge. And I did and got it working and that was my first mistake! Next thing I knew, I had about two hundred radios floating around the house and I was an avid collector, picking up everything I could find that was old electronics. People would come over to the house and enjoy hearing the stories behind these pieces that I had around the house, and so we went public with it a couple of times. We’d put displays out at libraries and public display areas like that and people loved it…

VRCM: You said ‘we’?

JE: My wife and I at the time. And so we said well, let’s try a museum. I have no idea where that idea came from, but it came from somewhere. And that’s when we rented a little 500 square foot of space at the bottom end of Arch Street, at the corner of Wallace Street in New Britain, and opened up the museum, and that’s where this all started. And it went from there.

VRCM: So you’ve been in business for 25 years.

JE: Yes. We’re starting our 26th! We just celebrated our 25th anniversary last September; September of 2015.

VRCM: And it’s all been with volunteers.

JE: Totally a volunteer organization. Totally a labor of love. What happened, as time went on the museum collected two things: it collected a lot of stuff and it collected a lot of people. And the people are what make it go. And so we have all 100% volunteers. It’s gone through six different transitions in terms of physical location. We kept on getting kicked around as tenants and eventually got ourselves to the point where we actually own the building. But we’re still all volunteer – the complete staff. No Federal funding; none of that kind of stuff.

VRCM: Great! Anything else you care to add?

JE: It’s been a fantastic experience. It’s been a phenomenal trip. (Laughs) For everybody involved I think and we have a lot of fun doing it. It’s been very enjoyable.

End

Bob Allison Interview – 3-13-2016

VRCM: Tell me a little about your background

BA: Well, I grew up in Glastonbury, Connecticut. I’ve always been a big fan of radio ever since I was sick with the chicken pox at age five I discovered AM radio and listening to WHYN up in Springfield. It came in real good on this little transistor radio that I had and I was hooked and soon I was listening to WDRC and all the top hits. My brother and sister were older so they had an influence on my musical tastes which were advanced for my age. So yes, I really liked listening to the Beetle’s latest hits in the mid-sixties and I sort of evolved with the music… with my musical taste.

I always had an affinity for radio and you can imagine the joy I had one Christmas when I was maybe about 12 years old that I got my first pair of two-way radio CB walkie talkies. Now, to me, two way radio was very, very exciting and my friend Peter Knight – who is also a volunteer at this museum – I’d give him one of my walkie talkies and I would take the other and we’d see how far we could talk to each another with the ultimate goal of spanning an entire mile. Mind you, these were rated for one-quarter mile and well, we soon discovered that we could modify the antennas on the walkie talkies and make them talk farther by attaching wire! And soon we were able to communicate from one house to the other. And Peter was using his dad’s barbeque grill – the grill of the cooking surface – hanging on the side of his house as the antenna. And it worked! That was the best antenna he had that worked very nicely until Peter’s dad had to do some outside grilling and said “What the ---“(laughs) and saw the grill on the side of the house.

None the less, I ended up getting better walkie talkies and eventually a CB radio in 1973; it was just before CB had the big boom. So I was into CB radio for a bit and that taught me how to communicate and I talked to a wide variety of people. But then that wasn’t quite enough, so my mom suggested, “Bobby, why don’t you try Amateur Radio?” So I did just that. In the fall of 1973 I enrolled in a class in Glastonbury and in the spring of 1974 I got my two-year novice license. So my novice career was great. I had to not speak but only do Morse code, which I didn’t have any problem with – I loved Morse Code – and soon I was communicating with people all over the place: around the country and eventually around the world. So that was a great joy for me.

Amateur radio kept my interest all the way through adult hood. But amateur radio led to a career in electronics and engineering; that’s what I pursued after high school and the University of Hartford. So I was a graduate of Ward Technical College and the last year I was going to college I worked full time at Channel 30, the NBC affiliate in West Hartford and that started my career as a broadcast engineer. I stuck with television for 28 years.

But I missed my wife tremendously because I always worked second shift for the most part and she always worked first shift. I was growing older and was approaching age fifty and said to myself I don’t want to go through life missing my wife because we were ships passing in the night. I would go home and see her on Saturday morning and we’d have fun together on the weekend but Sunday night I’d have to say, “Bye Kathy. See you next Saturday… I hope.” I wasn’t going to grow older like this. Life’s too short; love is strong. I started volunteering at the American Radio Relay League in 2006. That’s two years before I ended up leaving television. I ended up as a volunteer tour guide. It was a brand new program at the ARRL in 2006… in July. The intent was to have lunch with my wife twice a week. I could at least see Kathy at least twice a week as a tour guide. So I did that. But during that year and a half that I was a tour guide, I got to really appreciate the ARRL: what it does for its members and how it preserves amateur radio. I was very impressed with the people that worked in the building. So when a job in the laboratory opened up I said, “I could do that!” So I started at the ARRL as the test engineer for QST Product Review. I still test for QSL Product Review but now I’m also the Assistant Lab Manager, so I have a lot of responsibilities there, but I love my career and it all started with radio.

VRCM: How did you get involved with the radio museum?

BA: Well, interesting, when Channel 30 retired all of their film equipment in the early 1990s, I ended up with one of their 16mm broadcast film projectors. It’s not meant for projecting far away across to a screen, it was made for broadcasting into a television camera. And I had preserved all the films at Channel 30 and transferred them over to videotape and I used to operate these 16mm projectors on the air when I was much younger at Channel 30. So they’re scrapping all the projectors; ending up in the dumpster. And what I did was save one of them; had it at my folks barn in Glastonbury for quite a while, but then they got tired of looking at it so they said, “Bobby, you’ve got to get rid of that thing.” So someone at work had heard of the Vintage Radio and Communications Museum. I think at that time it was located in East Hartford. I think it was in the I-Hop building. So I ended up donating the projector and I remember Gene Gregory was one of the crew that came by to pick up the projector because he was always cutting up and making a lot of funny jokes. I remember Gene. They took the projector away and they preserved it. And today I was actually running it before this interview. So then I learned about that museum. They said come on down – take a look. And me: I’ve always loved things old. I love history. I love old technology. I have a large collection of radios and phonographs. I said, “Gosh I’ve got to see that place”.

So I went down there the next weekend, met John Ellsworth and I really, really liked the place. The only problem was, since I was second shift, I wasn’t a good candidate myself to actually volunteer as a tour guide, especially the first thing on a Saturday morning (laughs). So flash forward to 2008. Now I’m at the ARRL. I’m happily at first shift and now I can volunteer once again. What to do? What to do with my volunteer time? Hmmm…. May be I’ll drive trolleys at Warehouse Point. I love trolleys and I really wanted to volunteer. But Charles Griffen volunteered here at the museum and said, “Bob, we really, really could use someone like you at that museum.” And Charles twisted my arm something awful… I could feel joints buckling and cracking. I said “uncle”. And so I came up here during a swap meet John Ellsworth once again showed me around, but this time the museum was located in Windsor, Connecticut on Pierson Lane. I was quite impressed and the guys there were really terrific, so soon afterwards I started as a tour guide here at the museum. I love having the ability to share my information and knowledge that I have of all things historical; all things communications with the general public that comes here. It’s a great pleasure to have that opportunity to share my knowledge and of course I learn lots of stuff from people who come here and they tell me a thing or two. So when I leave every day I learn something new and that makes life exciting.

End

John Bayusik Interview – 3-13-2016

VRCM: Briefly tell me about your background, what you did for a living and how you got involved with the radio museum.

JB: Well I started getting interested in radio when I was a kid because my grandparents lived with us and they had this huge Zenith console with the “green eye” and it was fascinating that you could listen to all these places all over the world. And radio was always kind of… I had other interests but radio was always in the background.

For a living, I had been working in chemistry for the last 44 years as a lab technician but electronics came in handy from time to time to get the equipment running again.

VRCM: When did you join the radio museum?

JB: I became aware of the museum probably around 1993 or 4. John Ellsworth called the local radio stations and mentioned that the museum was closing because of the weather. And I heard that and thought, “what radio museum?” And it took me quite a while to figure out where it was because at that point they didn’t even have a phone. So I finally tracked down the museum and the rest, as they say, is history.

I think the first volunteer job I had with the museum actually was helping them move out of Arch Street and moving everything into John Ellsworth’s barn. And I’ve been volunteering ever since.

VRCM: So you’ve been on a number of moves.

JB: Oh yea, every one! (Laughs)

VRCM: How many have there been?

JB: Well, let’s see. There’s Arch St. to John’s barn, and then John’s barn to the Comstock Building in East Hartford and from there to the I-Hop building, from the I-Hop building to the hardware store building, from there over to Mechanic St. in Windsor and from Mechanic St. to here.

VRCM: You mentioned you were a lab technician in chemistry. Did you get involved with the Eppley collection when it came over here?

JB: I helped move it, but besides that, I didn’t.

VRCM: I see that you started a program to get rid of some of the old consoles.

JB: Consoles are kind of an acquired taste; they take up so much room, and most collectors, they like having one or two consoles. But to have a lot of them, you have to have a lot of room. So a lot of the ones we have are probably only good for parts so I would like to try and move them along as parts sets and as we move things out we can sell off some of the duplicates or ones we feel we don’t really need. Our primary driver on that is that we need the space.

VRCM: Have you had much success with the program?

JB: Some. We’ve had a couple of calls and guys have come in and seen the items on the website. Also people at swap meets will make mention that these are available and we’ve sold a few that way.

VRCM: Obviously you get something out of being a volunteer at the museum. How would you express what pleasure you get?

JB: When I give the tours… in a sense its teaching. People are unaware of a lot of the history. And just working with people toward a common goal to keep the museum running.

End

Mark Heiss Interview: 5-21-2016

VRCM: Mark, tell me a little about your background, what you did for a living, how you got interested in collecting and how you got involved with the museum.

MH: I was born at Grace New Haven Hospital when my parents lived in Seymour. I later lived in Milford and then Woodbury, where I attended Nonnewaug High School. For college, I went to the University of Hartford in West Hartford. Eventually I settled in Prospect.

VRCM: When you went to the University, what was your major?

MH: Electrical Engineering, I have a B.S.E.E. My first job was for Dataproducts New England (DNE) in Wallingford. They made data communications test equipment. I was a hardware designer and did microprocessor design. This was at a time when computer boards were designed from discrete components: microprocessor, memory, address decoding and peripherals, mostly TTL logic.

While at DNE, I went to The Hartford Graduate Center, now called Rensselaer-Hartford, where I got my Master’s Degree in Computer Science.

After DNE, I went to General DataComm (GDC) in Middlebury where I designed network-managed modems. These were modems used in “networked” applications like ATM machines, before there was the Internet. This led me into network management software development, because these distributed modems needed to be monitored from a centralized location.

After GDC, I worked at ADC in Meriden to manage network management software for their video-over-fiber multiplexers for the cable television industry.

After ADC, I worked for TranSwitch in Shelton. They made integrated circuits used for high speed data communications.

After the telecom crash of the early 2000s, I changed careers and moved to Pitney Bowes as a Business Analyst. I was involved in deployment of software that monitors mail insertion (envelope stuffing) machines at large mailing houses. Now I’m a Project Manager, in their Service Lifecycle Management team.

As for hobbies, when I was in high school I was cleaning my grandmother’s barn and uncovered an Edison Home Phonograph; a cylinder phonograph that was my great grandfather’s. I brought it home, fixed it up and caught the collector bug. I think I liked cylinder records because it seemed nobody else had ever heard of them, something about that really appealed to me at the time.

VRCM: Do you have your own little collection at home?

MH: I have a handful of phonographs and quite a few cylinder records. But I never really collected radios, strange considering my involvement with the radio museum, though I do like that kind of thing.

I’ve been aware of the Radio Museum for quite some time. I had a newspaper clipping from the museum when it was in New Britain and intended on visiting, but never made it. For all these years I had that clipping on my bulletin board and then one day I wondered, does that place still exist? I looked it up and found it in Windsor. So my wife and I came up and once I started walking around…

VRCM: you were hooked!

MH: Yeah. And I saw the phonographs. The museum didn’t have a cylinder phonograph on display, which bothered me. I felt this museum has to have a cylinder phonograph. There was a Home Phonograph in the back, missing half the parts. I took it home to see what I could do. I called all my friends who donated the missing parts and pieced it together and that’s the cylinder phonograph we have on display right now. I’ve gone through the museum’s display phonographs and fixed each one. They’re all working now.

I really like talking about old technology, especially the phonographs. Being a docent here gives me that chance.

One more thing, I’m a big fan of jukeboxes. I currently have three – that’s probably the most I’ve had at one time. I’ve also done some repairs on the museum’s jukeboxes.

VRCM: Are parts easily obtainable?

MH: Not too bad. One of my jukeboxes took years to fix because it had a crack in the glass dome. It was a low production jukebox, so people with this model jukebox with good glass tend not to part them out.

One last thing I’ll add… Being in close proximity to the ham club, everybody kept asking me about getting my ham license. So three years ago I read the ARRL Tech, General and Extra handbooks and got my ham license: KB1ZEE.

Being here at the museum I’ve made a lot of new friends that all share a common love for old technology.

End

Interview with Robert “Hi Hi Bob” Pienkowski, March, 2016:

VRCM: Tell me a little about your background and how you got interested in the Vintage Radio and Communications Museum.

BP:  I am a radiological tech -- x-ray technician -- and I have had an interest in stereo equipment since the early 1970's. It was in 1999 when I met my friend Mike Urban, who has his own repair / restoration business that I began to restore and repair the stuff myself. I am 85% self taught, with help from Mike and various other people over the years.  Now I buy, sell, and restore all kinds of equipment and have a nice collection of vintage vacuum tube pieces which I enjoy, along with early solid-state, turntables, CD players, speakers; you name it.

Also In 1999 I had heard of the Radio Museum – it was in E. Hartford then -- and decided to join.  At first I was working on old radios for practice, such as Zenith tube Transoceanics. I loved the people and all the resources at the Museum, as I moved on to bigger and better projects with vintage hi-fi equipment.

VRCM: I’ve heard people refer to you as “Hi Fi Bob.” How did you get that nickname?

BP:  Well, I needed an e-mail name, and Dan Crowley of the Radio Museum started calling me that years ago, so it just stuck. Because of my interest in vintage hi-fi, in buying, collecting, restoring, repairing, and selling, I suppose the name just fits.

VRCM: Any other comments you care to make?

BP: I love my time at the VRCM, and its sister museum, the Vintage Hi-Fi in W. Hartford. Mike and I created the HI-Fi Museum to educate the visiting public on vintage early hi-fi, and music, and to make available some fine pieces of software (LP's) and hardware so they can enjoy their LP's, CD's, and tapes once again.

It is a never ending field of design and development out there with more and more analogue (LP's and Turntables) coming out every year, plus rising LP production and sales for everyone to enjoy. For anyone with a 'thing' for any of the various aspects of either museum, be it battery sets of the teens and 20's, telephone equipment, television, telegraph, hi-fi gear, you name it... the museums are an invaluable resource.

End

Gene Gregory Interview – February 11, 2016

VRCM: I’m interested in a brief overview of your background, how you got interested in telephones and how you got involved with the radio museum.

GG: How I came about to become a… Well, my introduction was kind of by accident. Years ago I stopped at the triple AAA diner in East Hartford. And I was pulling in to find a place to park and in the window of the building next door was the back side of a Stroger telephone switch. Well, I knew what that was! So I went in for my cup of coffee and toast and I come back out and wandered over into the building and got greeting by John Ellsworth [museum director]… “Good morning! How are you?” And Paul was there too, remember Paul? [Paul Weigold] And he got to show me the museum and asked, “Do you want to become a member?” And I said Gee Whiz, why not? That’s how it all started.

VRCM: Had you worked in the telephone industry?

GG: No. It was always a hobby of mine. My father was a mason contractor – always been in the building trades. When I was a little guy growing up, I would find a discarded old radio or telephone, take the thing apart and put it back together trying to figure out what made it work – and things like that (laughs). It was a sideline, kept me out of trouble (laughs). I had a couple of benches set up down in the basement. Mother would say, “What the heck are you doing? You take up more room than I do laying out the lawn chairs!” (Laughs) But I’d take things apart, save all the parts, put them all back together with nothing left over. But sometime I’d scratch my head and say why doesn’t this thing work?! And my father would yell, “Why do you think they tossed it out? It didn’t work and you’re trying to fix it!” (Laughs)

VRCM: The building next to the AAA diner; that was the IHOP building, right?

GG: Yes, they shared the same parking lot

VRCM: What year was that?

GG: If I knew the car or truck I was driving, I’d know the approximate year. But I don’t remember what I was driving then…

VRCM: mid 1990s I’d guess

GG: Probably. I wasn’t involved in the move from the IHOP to the hardware store – I missed that. That would have been interesting; the stories I heard!

VRCM: Did you grow up in Connecticut?

GG: Agawam, Massachusetts. When I got out of the army, I worked on the Mass turnpike for a couple of years; maybe three years. And I stayed with that company and they were out of Southington Connecticut and I did my stint in heavy construction. Then I got a real job (laughs) – a steady job as an inspector; a job site inspector, called “clerk of the works”, for an architect. He kept me busy for 20 years; always had a job waiting for me.

VRCM: Residential?

GG: No. He did churches, he did school buildings… small industrial buildings, renovations, things like that... conversions: I know we did an A & P in Palmer, Massachusetts; made a library out of it. It was very interesting work because every job is different and the crew is always different. Some contractors are out and out crooks and other contractors are beautiful, wonderful people. I never worked for the contractor; I worked for the architect, because my architect said, “My name’s on the drawing. I want my guy on the job, not some political appointee.” It’s a very competitive business. If a job comes up in a town… say the building committee is interviewing architects for a new school building. So he has to go through that process. If he’s selected, okay, fine, that’s great. Meanwhile you have to draw up a set of plans, go back and forth with the building committee and the school committee…”This room’s too big, that room’s too small, and so on”… By the time you get plans and drawings finalized and town or city gets grant money from the state or other funding, you know…. But I was fortunate in that when my architect employer put a project out to bid and got a general contractor with the lowest bid. When that job started, I was finishing up another job. So I didn’t see all of his jobs, I didn’t work on all of his jobs, just some of them. But he kept me busy for around 20 years; never had to look for work.

VRCM: How many museum moves were you involved with?

GG: How many moves? Actual? Physical?

VRCM: Different locations.

GG: I wasn’t involved with the move from the IHOP to the hardware store in East Hartford; I missed that for some reason. But I did help move from the hardware store to 33 Mechanic Street in Windsor and from 33 Mechanic Street to 115 Pierson Lane, where we are now.

VRCM: So the telephone interest was strictly a hobby.

GG: Telephones always fascinated me. When I got out of the army, of course I had to go to work; you know… bills and that. When we lived in Agawam, we lived on a small farm and if I remember right we had a magneto phone in the kitchen; one in the garage; and one way out in a chicken coop out in the field. And it spanned a brook we had – in Agawam we had a little brook going through our property to another building on the other side of the brook (laughs) and that had a magneto phone. I ran all the lines and poles… a regular magneto phone system! My mother didn’t have to yell, “Hey, it’s time to eat!” She could get on the phone: “Dinner’s ready.” Of course, the real reason I did that was so she didn’t have to holler and not because I was interested in telephones (laughs). At the time it was a great necessity. And the funny thing about it, our next-door neighbor was a… a fellow who worked in the paper mill but his son, when he got out of the navy or the army, he went to work for the telephone company. He commented that I must be smart to be installing telephones (laughs). His son worked as a lineman, not installing. But I installed, [worked as] lineman and everything (hearty laugh). I figured it all out.

VRCM: Anything else?

GG: I currently belong to two telephone collector’s clubs: ATCA: Antique Telephone Collectors of America, and the other TCI: Telephone Collectors International. They’re people all around the world – a bunch of nuts, just like I am.

VRCM: Write articles, swap information…

GG: Well, we have meets similar to the radio meets. It wasn’t until very recently that I suddenly realized and it dawned on me that other people have the same affliction I have (laughs) we like to collect telephones. As I sometimes say, I can’t walk by a telephone and (begins to mentions names and models). I can tell if it’s an F3 vs. a F4 handset (laughs)

End

Interview, 10-3-2016

VRCM: Tell me a little about your background and how you became involved with the radio museum.

DM: I got involved in the radio museum through my husband, Bernie. He and I had a close friend who basically let us know one day that there was a radio museum in Connecticut which was in East Hartford at that time. And so we went out one day and found what was in an old I-Hop. There was a restaurant next to it and we decided we would go there for lunch but we wanted to go into the museum. We walked in and it was just a sea… an absolute sea of old radios and one after the other in the old I-Hop, which wasn’t that big. My husband, who is an amateur radio operator and has been interested in radio and communications for a long time… by the way, before we got married, I also had my amateur radio license. So I had some knowledge, but not a lot I’m not a radio tech person at all. But I found it fascinating and there was a gentleman there. I’d say an older gentleman but both my husband and I are older so, I’d guess I’d say someone our own age. And he and my husband started talking and I just started looking around, and I found it fascinating. At that point, I’m not sure how much my husband Bernie got involved then, but I know I enjoyed that whole adventure.

Eventually the museum moved and Bernie got more involved when it moved into Windsor Connecticut. on Mechanic street, into this huge… from the little I-Hop it moved into this huge, huge building… without much heat (laughs). It did have electricity but it was enormous. And they had taken the front of that building and took the contents of the museum and made a very nice little display area. But in the back it was just one huge room. I can remember clearly going there and visiting it when our Finnish “son”, Jarmo [an exchange student who lived with us] and his daughter, Isa, came for a visit. We took them and my husband is also a photographer and he took some pictures and we still use one of the pictures in our brochure. We took our family; our son and our daughter over to the museum. That was fun to do. Bernie got more involved and eventually I started to go to some of the [volunteer] meetings that were being held and I can remember clearly freezing to death! But I can also remember wandering through this whole sea of… in the back, and basically looking at it and thinking, “I don’t know how they’re going to heat this place?” What kind of heat did they have at that time?

VRCM: I think it was steam heat. There was an old boiler in the basement.

DM: Is that what it was? It was long past its prime! At that point I did go to a couple of the meetings and I kind of liked meeting the people there – they were very nice. And I liked meeting with John Ellsworth. They were just interesting, nice people.

Now, let me go back and say what my background is. I am a Registered Nurse and at that point it was during the time when I was not working full time any more. I had retired but went back to school and got a degree in computers and programming and so that kind of got me into the same kind of mind-set of the museum. The museum has always attracted people who like to collect. And so, again, what I remember most is collections: collections of records, collections of manuals and books – but not the kind of books I enjoy reading! What I enjoyed most was the camaraderie and the enthusiasm of all the volunteers. Just about that time, the museum moved again because the old building that they were in was going to be turned into apartments. And so they found another building over on Pierson Lane, which is the present home of the museum. And it was sort of in a mess at that point and I had other things that I wanted to do, so my involvement was through my husband. When the museum did move over to Pierson Lane, there came a point, and I don’t remember the date, but I remember coming in and basically working on the front desk. And at that point the former treasurer decided he could no longer do the treasury. So I got involved in the treasurer’s job, which was way out of where I was comfortable. But at that point, I had the knowledge of doing computerized… setting up a system, because when I was taking my courses at Springfield Technical Community College, I had to have an accounting course. Now, accounting is not my major background, but I got into the treasury and that was an interesting time. I was covering Sundays and one of the days during the week at the front desk, do the treasury, and as I did that I looked at what the former treasurer had done. He had somewhat of a software program, but I put everything into Peachtree. And he came over with shoe boxes full of receipts, including receipts for things his wife sent him to the store for, and he had a little note on that and on the other side there was some other information. And I don’t remember how much time it took, but I finally got the finances all arranged and I realized that, as a non-profit they had not declared what they needed to do, so I met with the museum’s accountant and presented him with my Peachtree and he asked about the original receipts and I told him where they were. So we got the finances settled out and as I was doing that I realized the museum was going to go broke if we didn’t do something. As our executive director keeps saying, it’s now 25 years that we’ve been in business and something always comes up. But we looked at what we needed to do and I got somewhat involved. And they had an old business plan and we got involved in looking at that business plan. At that point, the finances got squared away.

About that time I decided that, now that I’ve done that, I didn’t want to do the treasury anymore and resigned that position; finances are not my big thing. But as I was doing that I got more involved in the museum itself and found that I really enjoyed the people. It’s a museum of collectors and I think it’s just wonderful. Now, there came a point where I was taking and doing more of my own… what was interesting to me, which is nursing and nursing history. And I started my own website for nursing history. Several years ago, the museum had a very, very talented marketing person who also knew computers and was also heavily invested in the museum himself. Unfortunately there came a point where this person no longer could handle the website and he kept all of the software for the website, it was hosted by a company called GoDaddy, but they were only the host. And there was something… everything worked out; it was a lovely [worksite] website but there was a problem and his computer and he were no longer able to host the website. And the whole application software was on a computer that was no longer functioning. So that’s when I got involved because you got a very viable website that they were using because most of the financing for the museum was done through eBay sales and all of the information was on a website for all of the events and the news and there was nobody apparently who could do a website. So I was sort of anxious that the museum go on because it is a great museum and I have a husband who is so invested in it. So I volunteered to try and save the website which meant I had to save the domain name and GoDaddy was very helpful; the people there. And I just mention them because they are the host. But they said they could not get the information from that old website because the software was no longer available. So I had to basically reconstruct the old website, copying every page to my machine… and then we set up a… using their product we were able to develop a website. That was a very frustrating but fun time. It taught me a lot and so I became the webmaster and administrator. And that got me back into working into the museum.

One of my other interests was looking at… the museum goes through communication. To me they stop when computers are starting to become… and the internet is starting to become very much… our communication is moving into a wireless… everybody is using devices. Now the museum doesn’t go that far but there are some old computer and one of the things that I’m interested in is history. And since the museum tells that history… basically looking and seeing what are you doing as far as computers and that beginning history of computers? So lately I volunteered to get that set up. We have a new webmaster—I’m the administrator but we have a new webmaster—and she and I basically set up the computer display and we’d like to do some more but the museum itself is jam-packed and there’s no room to present things, so hopefully in the future there will be some room where we can enlarge the computers and talk about the beginnings of the Internet at that point because it would fit in with the basic focus of the museum which is communication. I’m still actively involved, but not as active as before.

End: 17:35 minutes

Bernie’s “interview” – February 19, 2016


VRCM: Tell me a little about your background, how you got into amateur radio and your involvement with the radio museum.

BM: Well, I guess I was born with a radio gene. I grew up in Rochester, New York. My dad had worked for the Stromberg-Carlson company before I was born. They started out making telephones but expanded to radios, and later into TV and sound equipment – hi fi amplifiers, school intercom systems and military audio stuff. He had boxes of radio parts in the basement and as a kid, I used to play with them… didn’t know what they did, but they were interesting!

When World War Two ended, I got hooked on building one-tube pocket radios. Military electronic parts were flooding the market for pennies, and I built several of these things to listen to local AM radio. The radio might fit into your pocket, but then there were the batteries, headphones, antenna, and on and on (laughs). Then one of my dad’s Popular Science magazines had an article on building a one tube receiver for 10 meters. It appealed to me and it opened a whole new world – shortwave, and in particular, ham radio… I heard guys talking to one another on the radio! Well, this really got my interest and I bought a copy of the 1948 Radio Amateur’s Handbook and began studying for my novice ham radio exam. I also built a 4-tube receiver from the handbook, and spent two years trying to get it to work. Then one day a friend of my dad’s came over and suggested I switch two connections on the oscillator coil. That did the trick – a simple mistake like that! Even had the “experts” baffled.

In 1950 I met a young lady and we began seeing each other. She got interested in ham radio too, and the next year we met at 5 in the morning and took a train from Rochester to Buffalo, where the FCC exams were held. Debbie got the call WN2LFT and I got WN2LFV. I made my first contact on the air one day after school – I was finishing up high school. I sent out a CQ in code and heard a station call me back – a VE3 in Toronto, Canada. DX on my first contact: Wow! I was so nervous I couldn’t complete the contact (laughs).

Well, I wanted to be an electronics engineer and began attending R.I.T. – Rochester Institute of Technology. It was rough because my math skills were very weak and I had very little confidence in myself at the time. I stuck it out for the full three years – they only gave an Associate’s Degree at the time – but dropped out before getting the degree. Debbie and I were married – that was 1954 – and I went into the army for two years. I didn’t do much ham radio, but after going to the signal school at Fort Monmouth, I became a guided missile electronics instructor… worked on the Nike and Corporal systems… got assigned to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama.

Our son was born in Alabama while were down there and although I wasn’t an active ham, Redstone had a MARS station – Military Amateur Radio Station. So I went over there and had them send a message to one of Debbie’s relatives. As the story goes, the ham operator relayed the message to a ham in California and he called the relative and said something like “This is MARS. I have a message for…” She hung up, thinking it was a crank call! (Laughs) I did have some interest in ham radio and would spend time at the base dump where there were tons of electronic stuff from the German missile program; you know, V-1 buzz bombs and V-2 rockets. In fact I built a heater for our son’s bedroom out of parts from a V-2 hydrogen generator!

I got out of the army in 1956 and went to work for the Glenn L. Martin Company in Baltimore – they’re Martin Marrietta these days – as an instructor and technical writer. They transferred us to Orlando, Florida. Our daughter was born down there. But after two years putting up with heat, humidity and bugs, we decided to move back to Rochester. I went to work for General Dynamics – they had bought Stromberg-Carlson – and I worked on manuals for a military single sideband radio system. When General Dynamics began scrounging for more military contracts, I didn’t care for the insecurity and moved to a small company that seemed to be growing – the Haloid Company, which later became Xerox. I spent over 15 years with Xerox, first as writer then manager and ended up producing and directing training films. Along the way I met two hams that got me back into radio: Bob Wille, K2RQU and Clyde Foley – I don’t remember his call; it was a five call as Clyde was from Texas.

I was having so much fun making movies, I left Xerox and started my own firm, first in Rochester than in Dallas, Texas. We spent seven years in Texas, Debbie as a nurse clinical specialist and college professor, me running a little film and video production company. We did work for Texas Instruments, all the major banks and corporations… My ham call was WD5JLJ down there – had a little 50 watt station and made lots of good contacts on the air.

We came back east, as they say down there, in 1984 and I set up shop as a freelance video scriptwriter and director; wrote training and informational videos and then got into doing documentaries. I even got to work with Maureen O’Hara, the movie actress on a project for the New England Air Museum.

Since I was now living in New England, I got a new ham call: KB1OO, and became fairly active on the air. One day – I think it was in 2001 – a friend called to tell me he heard an announcement on one of the radio stations that the vintage radio museum was looking for volunteers. That sounded interesting; Debbie and I had visited the museum at one time and found it quite interesting. So I contacted John Ellsworth, the director, who invited me down. I fell in love with the place – at the time it was in an old factory building and was full of all the radios I wanted when I was younger but couldn’t afford! (Laughs). The building needed a lot of work to make it into a museum and a lot of the guys were skilled at carpentry and other building craft – I was a klutz doing that type of work and ended up helping the museum’s librarian with setting up the library. The librarian was Charles Griffen. Charles and I hit it off – we were both hams, loved classical music, and seemed to have the same outlook on many things. In time the museum moved to its present location and I saw the opportunity to educate visitors rather than just have collections of radios, telephones TV’s and other stuff. I created the time line we have in the display area and wrote most of the signs you see on the walls describing the displays. I also got elected to the board of directors as secretary. Debbie joined the board as treasurer later, when the treasurer retired. We both spent a lot of Saturdays at the museum, she covered the front desk and managed the gift shop and I gave tours and continued helping Charles with the library.

One of our ham volunteers, Gordon Horn, thought we should have a ham club and he set up a club station. I helped him get a callsign for the club station: W1VCM, which stands for Vintage Communications Museum. I wanted VRM for Vintage Radio Museum, but that was already assigned (laughs). Our club is up to 28 members now. Every June the club takes part in an event called “Field Day” where we set up temporary stations and operate off alternate power. I bring in a little low-power radio and portable antenna and set up on the lawn in front of the museum. We never rack up high points but we give the museum a presence on the air. Besides, it’s a lot of fun! Oh yea, I recently got my old original call back: W2LVF; have it on my car license plate too, as a matter of fact!

VRCM: So you’re still involved with the museum.

BM: Yes, I’m secretary of the ham club, but I’ve scaled back my participation in the museum itself, partly due to my age. I only come in on Thursdays to give tours and spend time chatting with the guys, especially Charles; he and I have developed a close friendship. The other guys at the museum are all top notch too! I suspect a lot of us would be lost without the camaraderie and challenges the museum offers. Debbie is currently the museum’s webmaster and I get involved every now and then answering technical questions she might have and offering my advice on this and that… I think I would spend more time here, but I get frustrated because I see the potential for education here, but the overall attitude is geared more towards collections, and I suspect in time they’ll blot out the timeline we worked so hard to create. I hope I’m wrong.

End

Interview with Ed Sax, September 24, 2015 talking about his background & work experience:

VRCM: Ed, I’m going to ask you to “bare your soul” and just give me a quick biographical sketch of you, your profession, some of the things you’re proud of in your accomplishments…

ES: Well, tell you what. I’ll go back to college in which I majored in sociology under Talcott Parsons. And then on graduation went over to Europe to work with a group called the Winant Volunteers. That involved doing social work in London. After that I bicycled around Europe.

VRCM: What year was this?

ES: This was 1950. One of our volunteers was Ann Rockefeller and several years later she invited all of us to their residence in on top of a hill in Tarrytown, overlooking the Tappan Zee Bridge. And that was great fun. By that time I had acquired a Lincoln Continental convertible, so I was properly equipped and so… (laughs) Sometimes I look back and wonder if that would have been a good opportunity to go from where I was working – the unlikely Sikorsky Aircraft – to possibly doing something in New York. But I enjoyed my work Sikorsky Aircraft.

VRCM: You were working at Sikorsky?

ES: Yes. After I got back from my European tip I thought helicopters would be interesting: they are the only form of transport that don’t need prior preparation of terrain or shore line. And I came down here to Kaman Corporation first of all. And I didn’t have an engineering degree; I had a sociology degree. So they didn’t figure I would do very much for them. I went down to Sikorsky, and they asked, “you know how to take pictures?” I think they saw in my resume that I had started a photography club and I said yes, I certainly do know how to take pictures. So they put me in the metallurgical laboratory and its photographic facilities. And I did a lot of things there, including being turned down by Sikorsky for a proposal that made a process too efficient and would have displaced a group doing the job a little differently by hand. It would put some of his people out of work and he didn’t want to see that happen. He was a very kind hearted person, as well as being an aeronautical genius, I think.

And then I decided to leave Bridgeport, and do a little graduate work at MIT. In the process, I met the MIT reference librarian, Margaret Little, on exchange scholarship from England who later became my wife. MIT at the time was building the first transistor-based computer and also working on the first numerical controls in their servo lab facility. Later on I would become very active in the Numerical Control Society, and head its Connecticut chapter. In 1980 it was absorbed into the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. By then numerical control had become a standard procedure and stepping motors were being made by Superior Electric in Bristol, Connecticut. But it was interesting while it lasted to see how all of that worked out. And among other things it brought me down here to Connecticut. I had been working in numerical controls, particularly a relatively low cost one made by Superior. I did many installations of it on Bridgeport milling machines and became very proficient.

Then I was wooed by another company which had a new numerical control product. It was another MIT company and unfortunately its chief engineer died in an automobile accident: he was stretching himself too thin, I’m afraid, running between New England and Ohio. So at any rate, I left that company and came down here to West Hartford Connecticut and Superior Electric. There my work was quite interesting because it involved numerical controls making the components for numerical controls; mainly the printed circuit boards. This involved several systems: one for wiring the back plane between the boards that connected one board to the next, and another for doing the artwork on the printed circuit board; a third one for drilling the board which had been etched with that artwork – drilling holes for the placement of components. And all of that was very interesting. The company sent me on a tour through their European branches and I enjoyed that very much. But unfortunately Bert Nelson, founder and president of the company got to retirement age, and because my product wasn’t terribly profitable, his successor retired my product line and I left the company to work with Dynage, a little company up here in Bloomfield. The company was right on Blue Hills Avenue, opposite Kaman. And it had a nice group of people. We made small printed circuit boards that acted like logic cards. They were very high reliability types, immune to electrical noise and designed for power plant application.

After a few years a device called a programmable logic control came on the market and we hired an engineer to make that and for some reason or another things started falling apart. I left the company but was retained as their New England representative and went all over the place, including the Twin Towers where the Engineering Department of American Electric Power Company was located. So I had an interesting time. And I expanded my manufacturer’s representative role to a number of other companies as well.

I was doing pretty well when one summer I started working on my house. Our garage extended out beyond the main part of the house, so that its roof became a deck. And the deck around the pillars for the railing was starting to rot away. I relocated new pillars that mounted beyond the deck edges and in the course of doing that, grabbing something I thought was tightly fastened and wasn’t, I fell and landed on my head, resulting in a bi-lateral hematoma that literally slowed me down and I had to be operated on.

After working for a while after that, I retired and was thinking what to do next when the Royal Typewriter Company burned down. I saw the smoke rising from that fire. Two wings were left standing and I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a museum of communications technology involving typewriters and all kinds of other stuff, much of which was done here in Hartford. So I wrote a letter to the Hartford Courant, which they published, suggesting such a museum, only Stop and Shop beat me to it – they bought that property and tore down those two remaining wings for their single-story store and more level parking.

Defeated in that area, I heard about a radio museum starting up in East Hartford. So I went over there and talked with John Ellsworth, the director. Very much impressed with what he was doing, I joined up and have been with the museum ever since.
- - - - - - -
Photo Captions:

Ed Sax photos: Ed Sax, retired engineer; museum volunteer

Picture of Medallion: Medallion awarded to Ed Sax for his work as head of the Connecticut chapter of the Numerical Control Society

Ann Harper (Original Interview) – April 5, 2018

VRCM: Tell me a little about yourself: your background, education, work experience, and what brought you to the museum.

AH: Okay, I’ve always lived in the Hartford area. Right now I live in Vernon. And I originally was worked in manufacturing and insurance my adult life, and toward the end of my fourth decade I wanted to back and follow what was really my calling to work in a library. I always liked books and information, but the kind of information I was handling for… was kind of narrow – just electronic information that was for purposes of that institution, So I decided to go to library school. And after about two years of being in library school I got to a stage where I wanted to focus more on the library aspect and less on the corporate world, so I took advantage of being able to retire from the corporate world early. One thing I was really fortunate with is that, I… even though I was in school a lot of hours, I did have time to do other things. And I thought, “I would like to work in a library.” But it was too soon in the process to really get a job as a paid library, and I saw on Volunteer Match that this museum was seeking a librarian. Now, my background… I was immersed in people who have engineering degrees, or engineering-type jobs. So I thought there’d be some familiarity to me, because most of the people associated with technology here are engineer type people and I’m used to working in some places like the warehouse-aspect-parts of the building here; I’m accustomed to that from my manufacturing background. So those were things I thought would help me work here so it wasn’t a totally unfamiliar ground.

One of the things that I started was on-line cataloging or inventorying of the books. And that came out of my library education but in an obscure way because they had a… what they called “flash mod cataloging data” ? What it was… it was a collection in a house or… somebody would have been a librarian at, I think – Amherst – who had passed away a long time ago, I mean thirty, forty years ago, but his house stayed in the family and they sort of locked it. And so we went in there, all of us, with lots and lots of Ipads and went through this huge book collection – dozens of us – and also other materials. So that’s how I got introduced to this open-source that we use here. So that’s one thing that came directly out of my library education. And it paid off. I was pretty excited when… “We need to keep track of this in a way that makes sense and it has to be economical.” And then like, “Oh I remember that day we went to…” (laughs).

VRCM: Have you found that your experiences here have met your expectations?

AH: It was even more than I thought it could be. I really…. When I read in the description for the Volunteer Match; I don’t remember exactly what it said, but I didn’t know I’d be able to get so immersed in different aspects of advanced librarianship. I mean the aspect of being able to see ahead strategically about how to do things instead of being just told how to do it. So it’s been… the initial things I thought would be there, but a lot more.

It’s been really interesting, all the people I’ve met who are associated with this institution. The wealth of knowledge is huge. And everyone is so interesting and everybody has such a “can do” perspective in creative problem solving. It’s really great being around people like that – it energizes you. And I’ve enjoyed what I’m doing and I’m pretty excited about the ultimate goal of when the library is all organized into the cataloged and organized fashion to make it easy for people to find things and know what’s in there. And then once all that is in place, be able to work on other aspects to make it more publicized that the library is here.

End

Bill Caterino
Bill always held a strong interest in technology and communications. As a teenager, he developed an interest in programming computers starting with the Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. He was fascinated with the ability it had to connect to remote “Bulletin Board” servers via a dial-up modem - Technology that was the precursor to today’s Internet. He enjoyed typing in programs out of magazines and eventually learned to develop his own games.
After graduating from college, he became a professional developer and network engineer. He worked for many insurance companies in the Hartford area. However, his focus shifted back to remote communications. The Internet was in its early stages at this point and Bill dove in and learned all he could. He became one of the first web developers building online content before the age of Google.
Eventually taking a job at UnitedHealth Group, Bill continued as a developer before eventually entering into management. He was an early proponent of Agile development principles and formed one of the first Scrum teams at the company. Bill recently retired from corporate life to pursue other interests.
Bill spends some of his down time experimenting with and programming microcontrollers and simple robotics. They remind him of the early joys of programming on the TI computer! He has even built his own arcade cabinet based on the Raspberry Pi microcomputer.
It was Bill’s interest in vintage computers and the history of modern communications that brought him to the museum for a tour. He fell in love with the old radio equipment and especially the computer display! He decided to donate the cherished TI computer from his childhood (which still worked great!) Soon thereafter, he became a volunteer, focused mainly on managing the computer display. He spends a great deal of time restoring and repairing the museum’s vintage computer collection.

Dick Stebbins Interview – 5-19-2016

VRCM: Dick, tell me a little about your background, the work you did, how you got into amateur radio and how got interested in the radio museum.

DS: Well, my interest in radio started with an oscillator my father had in his junk. And I figured out that I could transmit with this oscillator by putting an antenna on it.

VRCM: Was he in the radio business?

DS: No, he was an electrical engineer. His uncle was an early ham radio operator, probably in the early 20s, so he had some influence there. It sparked my interest. I couldn’t understand why the radio in the car worked, because you had no connection…. (laughs). It also amazed me, as a youngster. So all these things sparked my interest in broadcasting.

VRCM: At the time you found the oscillator, were you a young kid?

DS: Yes, I was probably around 10 years old. And I put up a 100 foot longwire from the back yard to the front of the house. Later I got an amplifier for audio and I had a neighborhood broadcast station!

VRCM: Were the neighbors able to pick you up?

DS: Yes. Probably around a quarter mile away at most.

As far as my education, I went to trade school in Springfield for an electronics course during my high school years. Later I joined the service; the army, and requested the signal school at Ft. Monmouth. So they sent me there for a year, learning field radio repair. And from there I was sent to Germany to do field radio repair.

VRCM: What year were you at Monmouth?

DS: That would be 1957-58. So late 58 I was sent to Germany to pursue my career in field radio repair, but they didn’t need that profession over there; that MOS they called it. And since I had a background, they said “how would you like to go to guided missile school – the warhead part – because that’s electronic?” Another year of schooling, I thought it was great. Nothing wrong with that!

VRCM: Where did you go for that?

DS: In Germany; Seiglesbach, Germany, a little post in the boondocks. So that was my MOS from there on. I left Germany from late 1960 and was discharged at that point in Brooklyn. So now, I’m looking for a job and I fell right into a job at Hamilton-Standard, the electronics division. It was in Broadbrook at that point. Since I had a service background in electronics, they put me in the model shop, building models. That was a good education; I enjoyed that, building experimental circuits. The engineers would design a circuit and we would build it. I was there about six years and my uncle lived down in Deep River and he had a friend in a company called Chester Electronics. They were building electronic studio equipment for language and learning labs. They were also building TV studios for colleges, so with my background again, they put me in the… they had a gentleman that was building circuits… developing circuits, so I was his assistant, since I had a background un building models.

From there I started building a TV studio. I was the TV studio department (laughs). So I got interested in television at that time. I was there about six years. GTE Sylvania took over this electronics company and unfortunately they shut us down. So I was looking for job again and I was referred to Burns Security in South Windsor. They did security cameras mostly for big companies. One that comes to mind that was an interesting job. I got involved in installing and servicing the hydroelectric facility at Northfield Mountain. We put cameras at the river where the intake was. We put cameras up at the reservoir. We put cameras underground at the generating area.

After Burns… I wasn’t there too long; probably three years. I was out of a job in 1976 and did part time work: a clerk in a liquor store… whatever to supplement my unemployment (laughs). I saw an ad in the paper for a company called NAVCO: North American Video. They were based in Massachusetts and they were opening an office in South Windsor CT and they were looking for technicians – or field engineers. So I applied for that and with my background they said perfect. And that was the company I retired from. I worked there about 25 years; retired in 2004.

VRCM: Somewhere along the line you got interested in amateur radio?

DS: (Laughs) Yes. I was always interested in amateur radio. I was a listener. When I got out of the service I got into CB and used CB up until the time I retired. And I said now that I’ve got free time, I’m going for my license. Plus the fact they dropped the code requirement. I tried doing code and just could not get the rhythm of it. So I got my technician license in Bloomfield at one of their sessions there. That was 2005 I think. Obviously I wanted to advance to the next stage, which was General. So I studied up all the rules and theory and went to ARRL headquarters to take my examination. And while I was there I passed the General test and the examiner said why don’t you go for your Extra while you’re here? So I said sure, OK. Much to my amazement I passed the Extra the same night! That’s pretty much my amateur career.

VRCM: How did you get involved with the radio museum?

DS: I’ve been interested in the museum since they were at the hardware store in East Hartford. I went to the grand opening and it sparked my interest. And over the next several years I visited them in Windsor. Gordon and I set up this station (W1VCM). I can’t remember the year it was… maybe 2009. I’ve been here ever since.

Being interested in the television aspect of the museum, I started setting up a television studio here at one point. It was sto be “hands on” and I rigged up one of the big cameras with a small camera hidden under it (laughs). And I set up the console with the monitors in it. When I started going to Florida, Dan Thomas, who is a radio TV engineer, came up with another plan for the TV equipment, as I spend my winters in Florida and don’t get too involved. Now I spend most of my time in the ham shack, cleaning it up and… I also work with Gene Gregory, installing lights, ladder work and other maintenance.

end

Bill Storey Interview – December 27, 2019


VRCM: What we’d like to know is a little about yourself, what you did for a living, how you got involved with amateur radio and how you became a volunteer at the museum.

BS: Okay. You’ll probably have to repeat some of those questions as we go along. I graduated from Penn State “way back when” in double E: Electrical Engineering and I ended up while I was at work going to the Hartford Graduate Center and getting my Masters in Control Systems. I came to Connecticut initially, working at Hamilton-Standard, being one of the last companies that came in to interview people at Penn State (laughs), and I had not interviewed earlier in my senior year. So I worked at Hamilton Sundstrand for six and a half years or so in control systems and then went to work at West Hartford at what was formerly Colt Industries, became Colt Tech Industries, became Goodrich, became UTAS and eventually was sold off from UTAS to Triumph. Anyway, I worked primarily on helicopter control systems engine controls.

My interest in amateur radio… while I was in high school, a friend of mine’s father was in amateur radio and he said “Oh, you’re going into electronics – you should do amateur radio.” At that time I had to learn Morse code and I cannot do Morse code for anything! So anyway, eventually in about 2010 or so, another friend of mine was moving to western New York and he said we should both get ham radio licenses so we can continue to talk. So I went in to take my exam with the intent of taking the tech and general. I studied for both of those. I was about 20% through the Extra: took all three, passed all three and became an amateur radio operator… knowing absolutely nothing about it! (laughs), having only been through the ARRL training manual. So that’s how I got into amateur radio.

The first or second ham I met was Skip Colton. He said he was going over to visit a club in Windsor that was just starting up or getting together, so I joined him for a breakfast meeting at the 75 Restaurant and joined the Vintage Radio and Communications Museum Ham Club at that point in time. That’s when I started and I spent the only $20 in my wallet on joining the ham club, and Dan Crowley gave me a tour of the museum as his guest and I became a member here also. And that’s how I got involved.

When I went to school for electronics, tubes were passé and were no longer being used and they didn’t want to teach us anything about vacuum tubes, so I really don’t know a lot about vacuum tubes, but most of my career here at the museum has been sorting vacuum tubes! (laughs), so I’m trying to learn something about them.

END INTERVIEW (3:12 minutes)

Des Ould Interview – August 4, 2018


VRCM: Tell me a little about your background, your education, the jobs you’ve held, and especially how you got involved with ham radio and the radio museum.

DO: I was born in England in 1936. My memory goes back as far as ’39 when the air raid siren went off to denote the start of World War II. I was playing in my garden which was in the back of the barracks house and we were moved out of there because of the dangers of being bombed by Jerry. As it happened, two weeks later, my house was flattened and all that remained was the bath and the tap to it.

We moved about the country because of my father’s background – he was an officer in the military. He was first in the signals then in I suppose the accounting side of the army. He was shipped to Canada and was in one of those renowned bombing sites somewhere. I don’t think I can say anything about that. Anyway, we moved around the country of England and I finally ended up with my grandmother and I lived with my grandmother and grandfather and a couple of uncles in a three bedroom house with one running water tap in the kitchen and down the garden was the toilet.

VRCM: Just to clarify, your father went to Canada and you stayed in England?

DO: Yes. My mother stayed in England as well. I’m a bit hazy about that. My mother went up to Leicester and I went up to my grandmothers… where we were promptly bombed by Jerry.

VRCM: Again!?

DO: Well it was actually the end of a takeoff run for Spitfires. And they jumped this Jerry and he dropped his bombs down in my grandfather’s field, I think there were three – boom, boom, boom – and they went past us in an Anderson shelter down the garden in about I suppose about 50 yard from where the bomb landed. And then of course Jerry switched from aircraft to doodle bugs…

VRCM: Oh, the V-1 Buzz Bomb.

DO: Oh yea. We called them Doodle Bugs, because if the engine stopped and started again, you knew it was on its way down. If it carried on, it went past you. They put one balloon in our field with the hope of catching a Doodle Bug. They caught one and it spun round and round and whipped the balloon off its moorings. It split the catch and dragged it and it came down about 5 miles from me.

I went to school through all this at a kindergarten-come-junior school where I learned to write. I was old enough to take the scholarship test to enter a higher level of education and I passed it, much to my amazement. And I ended up doing six years in the grammar school. The primary aim of the school was to promote university students which I wasn’t going to make anyway. It was literature, history, geography, mathematics, and three sciences: biology, chemistry and physics. But they also threw in woodwork, metal work, so it was a bit broader when I came to doing it at the end.

My woodworking exam was a whole day. That’s a long time for a kid to do exams. We had to make something, which as happened, was a coat hanger. And we had to make the hook and cut the hook and make a square hole in the wood and file it out and put chamfers on it and what have you…

I took four of the subjects: English language, mathematics and general science, advanced general science and woodwork. The math teacher said, “I don’t know how you did it, but you passed.” (Laughs) Believe it or not, when I finished this course, I started looking for a job, obviously.

VRCM: How old were you?

DO: Sixteen. I mean “just” mind you, because I was just sixteen when I started work. I applied to two jobs. One was instrumentation and the other one was aircraft electrician. Both of them were apprentice positions. I went up to the interviews and I didn’t get one, but I got the B.O.A.C. which was the aircraft electrics. I went to the interview and I came out and told my dad, “come on let’s go. I haven’t gotten anywhere near that.” My father was called to the office and when he came down he said, ”you’ve got that job. You start the end of August.”

So I had a good summer where I went camping with the Scouts and I had a couple of friends who came and we put up a tarpaulin over a lorry – a truck – framework and slept underneath that and cooked the food that we paid for at doing paper rounds. So we did paper rounds… we did two paper rounds and we got, I think, 25 shillings a week which, in those days was good money.

Anyway, come the end of August, my father had a bad motorcycle accident – broke his leg – was off work for I think six months. So he couldn’t come with me to see me off, because I was going 200 miles away from home. I was going… if anybody knows England, I was going from London to Crewe – and we went by Stoke, which was not the way we should have gone. And we ended up going all over Stoke, and busses and goodness know what… we arrived at ten o’clock at night – at a YMCA hostel.

VRCM: where you with a group of other workers?

DO: Oh yes, there were 64 who lived in this hostel. There were 12 Pakistanis, there were ten electrical apprentices and the rest were mechanical engineers and that… to manufacture bullets, of all things. But they had a workshop that was set aside for apprentices. And we went in there and learned how to turn, mill and I suppose shaping… every type of instrument they had there that they used. And we had to make ourselves a set of metal working tools like squares, mounting gauges, various other bits and pieces. And we had to make them to professional tolerances. So often you’d hear of somebody taking five pieces of metal to make one piece (laughs).

We had to make a square hole with a Swiss file (pattern file) which was…. We got on with all those sorts of things and I finished that… two years up there, getting up to all sorts of mischief. At the end of two years I spent four weeks total at Heathrow airport as an aircraft electrician… four weeks in the first two years at Heathrow. Then we came back to Heathrow and we were going to spend the rest of the time learning the procedures associated with aircraft maintenance, in particular the Britannia – the 401. We spent a year on the Britannia and at the end of our apprenticeship we were pulled out to do our national service. I was just 21.

I had my papers still. I ended up with national certificate in electrical engineering which was three years out of the five for a degree we would get.

VRCM: With this degree, you could have gone anywhere for a job that you wanted to?

DO: I could have gone anywhere anyway. I ended up in the Royal Air force. They wouldn’t take me on Britianna’s because I was color blind – as a worker – and I learned later that I could have gotten a job as supervisor, believe it or not.

VRCM: Hmmm… Even though you were color blind?

DO: Well, I wasn’t that bad. I could read most of the colors anyway. The only difference came when you had a hot resistor and the color bands were… brown would be black and black… red would be brown. So… It was in that area, but as I said, I could always put an ohmmeter across the resistor and find out if it was good or bad or what value it was.

When I went for my test I was actually interviewed by an officer and I said well, if you can’t have me doing electrical work, I’ll go in the Army and he said, “You would? We don’t get too many people like you come through here. We got degree people out there and you’ve done better in the tests than any of them out there. Are there any more out there like you?” And I said there are ten of us around. What I forgot to tell him though there was only three that had marks in the exams comparable.

To cut a long story short, in January I went and signed on for my national service and they asked if anybody has got English in GCA and this sort of thing. Well, but they didn’t ask is if anybody got high degrees or higher qualifications that…

VRCM: And you did.

DO: I did but I stood aside and went with the thickies. And after about eight weeks, I was called down to the CO’s office, marched in and he asked, “Why didn’t you tell us you were this qualified?” And I said, “well, I didn’t want to do more than two years.” He said, “Well, we’d have sent you to officer’s training school,” I made a mistake there in my life. I should have gone for it.

Anyway, we were standing in squadrons and we were told where we were going. I was going to a wireless operator’s training down in Compton-Bassett. So I was staying in England for 22 weeks at least. Gotten that over with, they told me where I’d be stationed. And the first one was Tobruk, in North Africa. I wasn’t looking forward to that one. Then they turned around and told me you’re going to the Far East and you’re going to the Maldives. Have you seen where the Maldives are? I couldn’t see them on the map to start with.

We got flown out there – started out in a Comet. And we got over the Eiffel Tower and we turned around and came back ‘cause the fuel couldn’t go from the wingtips to the center. So they fixed the aircraft and they took us up and we ended up in Cypress in the middle of the night. We were there two hours. Nothing had been provided for us; everything was closed. So we went then onto Karachi and we couldn’t land in Karachi because they were rolling the runway because it was so hot the tarmac had buckled. So they landed us at a place called the Wapshire and we stayed there for eight hours and we went on to Karachi and finally ended up at Columbus, which back then was called Ceylon, Of course now it’s Shri Lanka. And we had a fortnight when we did nothing but enjoyed the…. yea, enjoy. We used to have to get up in the morning and turn your shoes over and shake the scorpions out. And if you wanted to go to the loo at night, you had to go outside and walk through grass and you could hear those blippin things… and they have a nasty bite stinger.

The place had four inch walls all around and to them was stuck wooden posts and on these wooden posts was perched the ceiling and roof and what came down the side of it was netting to stop the elephants from getting in – that’s what they told us.

VRCM: Is that true?

DO: I don’t know. I don’t think so. I never saw an elephant there. But as it happened, if you were going to bed of an evening and the picture house was just closing down all the married couples are coming out and there’s us, standing in our skivvies! That was quite hilarious.

We flew over to the Maldives in a Hermes. It looked like a DC-3 but it had four engines instead of two and it was an English built aircraft. It had holes where the doors would be and you could see the sea below you. And we flew in and landed on the runway and began a hilarious period in my career. We were put in our billets. It had a hole in the wall: that was the window. We had mosquito netting, sand on the floor and we did have electric light but the toilet… I can’t remember where that was – probably outside between two of these, what we’d call shacks. And beyond the corner was the generating station. And it used to rain. You couldn’t hear anything when it rained. If you happened to be in the cinema, you couldn’t hear the soundtrack. And we used to go in and watch Bridget Bardot and she used to run around in the naughty and you couldn’t hear… it was hilarious. We had to walk two miles for our breakfast; that was to go to the mess hall and back and again. And if you wanted to go down to the Napie, the Napie shop was half way down from between where we were sleeping and where we were eating.

VRCM: What is a “Napie” shop?

DO: Napie shop was… used to sell everything – kitchen sink and…

VRCM: Oh, like a general store type thing? In the U.S. Army it would be called the PX for Post Exchange.

DO: Yea… you could get cameras there – Leica, for example. The Napie café were initially built out of raffia. I suppose it was palm leaves weaved up the wall and what have you. The door was a vertical hole and that’s where we used to meet for food if you didn’t like or missed your meals. The food was pretty good—until you got to Thanksgiving and the turkey had maggots and the bread had weevils. If you wanted to go swimming you’d have to go down behind the officer’s mess and we go swimming in the sea. There were a few sharks, jelly fish. They had long tails on the jelly fish. They weren’t very large but they kept swarming. Generally speaking, the swimming was brilliant. We used to go snorkeling and go down looking for shells.

During the day we worked 24 hours. We used to service the wireless operators.

VRCM: Did you operate as a wireless operator or were you just maintenance?

DO: I was a wireless operator but I was also in charge of changing the aerials and what have you. We could do 18 words a minute when we went there, but it was tough going for me. I had to… it was very difficult for me but I ended up mastering it and could do 25 when got my next stripe.

VRCM: How long were you in the service?

DO: Two years. I ended up as the senior aircraftsman. One time I took the passenger list of an aircraft coming in and I saw somebody’s name that I recognized. It was a pilot officer who was coming in to control people putting up aerials. I couldn’t have done that job; wouldn’t have wanted it.

VRCM: So at the end of two years did you go back to England?

DO: Yea. I was back in England in September, October of the year before I left the service. I left the service in twenty past… twenty minutes in January or February 10th I think – hazy on that one.

VRCM: Of what year?

DO: Approximately… 1961. I finished my apprenticeship in 1958. I went in ’59. I did two years from 59, so it would be 61, ten days of February, ’62.

VRCM: Did you remain in electronics?

DO: I went back to aircraft electric. Well, it was the highest paid job in England in blue collar work. I went back to work with B.O.A.C. I had a good reputation at B.O.A.C. so I went back there. My wife didn’t like the shift work because it was half past six in the morning I had to be there and leaving at half past three in the afternoon. Then starting at three o’clock and finishing at eleven at night. And I wasn’t getting home ‘till close to midnight. So I went looking for another job, the idea being I didn’t leave without having a pay check coming in. It might not be a good one but was viable. I went to work with… I think it was General Electric. I learned to draw – design drafting – and I did that and they made us redundant just as I was finishing my term. But they could keep us on just modifying drawings. But they did make it possible for people who wanted staff to come in and interview us. And the Atomic Energy Authority came in and I applied to do that. I had my interview at eleven o’clock in the morning and my training draftsman said, “I don’t know what you told those men, but they thought very highly of you.” And they left me a note saying, “No matter what the post office do” Because they were going on strike, “There is something in the mail for you. Attend this place at such and such a time… and be prepared for an interview.” So I got an interview with I think four men. There was an administrative officer, there were two general engineers and a draftsman who I was going to work for. And as I came out of that I was handed a job… and they told me to report somewhere for a medical.

I served five and a half years in the drawing office-come-technician place; nuclear fusion, which included making experimental machines for fusion, doing the electrical controls and the energy for supplying huge banks of capacitors for high voltage, very short-term operation. So it would be Slap – Bang! The idea was to energize the plasma and keep it so it wouldn’t touch the coil, so it was a vacuumed glass tube and they hoped by putting ends to it, they could make it go backwards and forwards hoping that if they put a lithium blanket over it they could take energy off of it by the lithium blanket and turn it into energy for electricity… I was working on it in 1964 and it’s not here yet. During the period I was there, they got from 1 microsecond to 1 millisecond containment time. When you’ve got to look for something like a minute or so…

VRCM: So they’ve got a long way to go!

DO: Yea (laughs). I did five years. Developed… built a control for scanning the sun in a parabolic arc that a rocket would take. And we had to control this and look at the sun on the sun disc and we used to do it for sort of five milliseconds – a range of time and then move on to the next one and go around like that. And then do four different ones at a longer time. We were looking to see how hot the sun was.

VRCM: That was the purpose behind the experiment?

DO: On yea, because that gave them some indication of what heat record. And it was pretty hot. I think we worked it out that it came to around 5 million degrees C.
I had to go and put a capacitor bank on there to put another coil on to help stabilize the plasma thing that was wiggly and would often go out and catch the edge of the tube and stop, so you’re looking for pressure, heat and control. I suppose a time constraint would be the three things you were looking at and they were nowhere near that when I left. I did five and a half years in 1964 so that would be 1969.

VRCM: Where did you go then?

DO: I got involved with the Nimrod project. It was something similar to the experiment they’re doing in Geneva at the present moment. Sending and trying to control a beam round and they ended up going in opposite directions – boom. It was called Nimrod anyway, ours was, and that that stopped working and they went on to SNC or SNS, which was a different thing but more of the same.

VRCM: This was all energy resource?

DO: It was fundamental physics actually. You’re looking for particles that came off when you collided inside these things and they had sort of cameras and all sorts of detectors and they would pass this beam through liquid helium and liquid hydrogen and we’d try to catch the particles on 70mm film and we had two teams of girls who scanned these films and put roads down and we had to build a machine that would follow those roads and measure the roads and curvatures and all sorts of things and provide that information to a computer program that was on a big IBM mainframe which was in Harwell, which was a research establishment. And I built this machine for scanning the film. We built two of these devices called HPD-1 and HPD-2.

When I finished HPD-2 I’d written a computer program that could wire-wrap big boards quickly. I pinched computer time to teach myself to use the IBM, so I had to learn IBM-eze plus FORTRAN. I got a drawing program which I could take point to point information, so the circuit diagram used to be drawn on a screen and I used to pick off the points of the wires off there, because they’d be written in a certain way and I’d use that to make a paper tape and girls used to sit there and do 150 wires an hour against 30 in solder. And the accuracy was 0.001 and the solder one was not very high, about 10% somewhat; very low. So I made myself an increase in job promotion. I developed a program were you could put packages onto the board and then wire the board on the packages and you could take the package of when you got it wired and the wiring would go with it.

VRCM: So you used the board as a staging area.

DO: Yea. Unfortunately the computer wasn’t fast enough to do it. It could do it slowly but I needed to go a bit faster before I could use it. So I discarded it. Two years later they asked me if I still had the code. I said no.

I left there after 15 years. My wife divorced me. I’ve got three kids and she took the kids and… my youngest boy joined the army. My eldest boy… I don’t know what he was doing. My daughter was a secretary. In 1972 my father died. I was sleeping in the attic and all sorts of things, but I was still doing these computer programs. In the end I taught myself to program in FORTRAN, Pascal, COBOL… all sorts of languages. Whether or not I could do it today, I don’t know.

VRCM: I’m curious: what brought you to America?

DO: I married a Guernsey girl when my wife divorced me. And I had two step sons with her. I went to the island of Guernsey where I was there for 20 years. For 10-1/2 years I was happily married to this woman who then died of pancreatic cancer. And my job then was… I was growing Freesia – they’re flowers – for seven years in greenhouses, struggling to make a living. I had a partner who suddenly appeared who have a lot of money… when we lost the first set of greenhouses through a really bad storm – they collapsed and the glass went flying and what have you – He said,” Keep the boy employed and pay him” – that was his son – “And here’s some money to do that.” He gave me 10,000 pounds. And we went out and bought another greenhouse. Then the state planned to have that site as a housing site. Well, Zip! went the price of the land, so I got 250,000 pounds out of that.

Meanwhile, I was talking to this American lady on the Internet in what we called a chat room. Not as today; there’ aren’t chat rooms today, I think. So I said I’d meet her in England because she was coming over to stay with some friends. She was coming over to Mansfield and I could get up to Sheffield and stay with friends there, and my mother didn’t live very far from all of this, so I stayed a week with my mother, a week with my friend in Yorkshire, and I took my wife-to-be and her friend back to my Guernsey house, showed her the house and what have you… took her to France… the hotel we went to… we were bit heavy weighted: two persons with one suitcase couldn’t get into a lift together!

VRCM: I’ve been in some European lifts.

DO: They’re not as good as the British ones; the British ones are Otis – and where’s Otis? Just around the corner from here! So that was that. I came over here when I retired and we decided that we’d tie the knot. It took me two years and two thousand bucks to get a green card – I had to pay for a lawyer and everything else. So that’s how I came to be here. And I’ve been here fourteen, fifteen years.

VRCM: You weren’t a ham radio operator at this point were you; how did you get into ham radio?

DO: I was a radio operator for the Royal Air Force. I helped build a radio station there.

VRCM: and you also had the on-air skills…

DO: When I was in the military my profession was supposed to be “Radio Operator” at which they taught us to take Morse code at 18 words a minute. And the island was deserted, generally. It was 300 men and that was about it.

VRCM: the island you’re talking about is the Maldives, right?

DO: Yes. It was an atoll of which there several islands.

VRCM: Did England have military bases there?

DO: We were building an airfield there because Ceylon was supposed to become Shri Lanka and they gave us time to get out. We were supporting their air force at Columbo airport. It was part of the island chain for letting the big bombers to fly… carrying atomic bombs … Island hopping. It was also going to be used to transport the military personnel in…

We had nothing much to do. We played soccer, but you could only do that once a week because it was too hot. So we had nothing to do… swimming, O.K. but in the evenings it was pitch black from six o’clock to six in the morning. So… what did you do? Obviously we knew Morse Code and someone said we had an Amateur Radio station and the callsign was VS9MB. Some us said “na, we do it all day…” But I liked getting in there. I was one of the senior wireless operators anyway, so we played around with this and we built… at the time we were building a station for entertainment for the troops because we haven’t got anything. And we had a…. we got records from Singapore that came across on a weekly turnaround of a Stratocruiser… it was aircraft that they used to do low flying: they used to fly across 1500 miles of sea at 1500 feet. And they used to bring stuff: booze as well. So that’s where the basis of it was. I enjoyed doing it. We used to use voice and Morse code. We had a clunker Morse code key. It wasn’t a flip, flip, it was more or less (gestures up and down with his hand). My corporal could read Russian, so we used to chat with the Russian wireless operators and the boss said, “Be careful what you say” because at that time the cold war was in place.

VRCM: You were telling me about coming to America and since you were retired, I guess you weren’t looking for work. How did you get involved with the radio museum?

DO: Well, I saw the advert… the sign post. So I came in and joined up and… sort of enjoy coming down and meeting the men. There was nothing more for it – I come down. I enjoy coming down once a week. I wish I could do more but I can’t, so I do what I can. And that’s the way it’s gone on.

VRCM: So it’s the camaraderie?

DO: Oh yea. There are a lot of men here who have different skills and being highly trained in skills in England, I wanted someone I could talk to. Well, my wife’s got three boys; not one of them is technical, so there’s no one to talk to technically and I like hearing and being with technical people. So that’s basically the real reason I’m here.
END

Post-Interview Note:
Desmond Ould, KB1UUM, passed away in mid 2019 due to medical complications.

Larry Butler Interview January 16, -2016

VRCM: Please tell me a little about your background, how you got interested in radio and your involvement with the radio museum.

LB: Well, my life wasn’t always oriented toward radio. I was an English major at the University of Wisconsin. I was educated in the long haul meaning that I took a couple of years and then dropped out and worked a few years in roofing, and then came back to finish my English degree. It took me a while but I thought I was headed toward a writing career, but creative writing didn’t seem to be extremely marketable at the time I got my degree, and I worked a string of jobs to support my wife who was still in school.

Radio was always there. Let me back up a bit: When I was a kid, we lived in rural Iowa. I could stand at by back door and see nothing but miles and miles of corn fields! My dad was a circuit preacher with several tiny churches. Sunday afternoons he’d be invited to dinner by various members of the congregation. These were all farmers, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, and many owned big wooden console radios, with short wave bands. The grown- ups would be talking in the kitchen and I would ask if I could listen to the radio. So being a bored kid I would reach out to the world through the short wave radio. I remember the first short wave station I picked up was HCJB in Quito, Ecuador, which at the time was probably the strongest radio station in the world. At home I had only an old tube AM broadcast receiver. I lay awake late at night in the dark lit only by that radio and Iowa heat lightening. I logged quite a few stations throughout the country.

VRCM: How old were you at this time?

LB: That was 5th grade I was around 12 or 13. I also got hold of some old radios and began tearing them apart it didn't occur to me to repair anything at that time. I had the idea that I would build something from the parts. My dad gave me a copy of the 1963 Amateur Radio Handbook and also a Knight Kit Star Roamer receiver. It was a horrible receiver, but I loved it, and I inched out on tree limbs stretching wires for an antenna... (laughs)

Out of that 1963 handbook I found a 75-watt novice transmitter. And talk about taking on a challenge! No radio experience other than just listening. I got the parts and put it together from the schematic - it didn’t work (laughs). Luckily there was a radio guy down the road, he helped me track down my mistakes and got the rig working. I didn’t have a license so I was confined to a dummy load – a 60 watt light bulb – and I’m sure I was actually getting out, but no one reported me.

About 6th grade my father accepted an assistant ministerial position and we moved to Manitowoc, Wisconsin. A ham in the church tested me and I received my novice license: WN9SGO. I got on the air and called CQ. A station in Illinois heard me; I never heard him but he sent me a QSL card out of sympathy I think (laughs). After that, I did manage to get my code speed up to 12 words a minute, but radio kind of died out in my life. As mentioned previously I enrolled in the University of Wisconsin, did a lot of creative writing but the family needed help and I dropped out to support my father's roofing business.

VRCM: So you were in Wisconsin. What brought you to New England?

LB: In 1991 when I was at the University of Wisconsin finishing my degree, I met a Chinese girl who had just come to the university as a visiting scholar. She went to the tutoring service looking for an English tutor. I went looking for a French tutor. I couldn't find a French tutor and she couldn’t find an English tutor so I said “I’ll teach you English”. So I got together with her regularly and taught her English. We became closer and within a couple of months we were married. I put my life on hold while she continued at school and got her first job at an engineering firm. When she was established I went to the Milwaukee Area Technical College as a programmer/analyst and received the degree. Eventually she was offered a job at the United Technologies Research Center, which brought us to Connecticut.

In Connecticut I tried to get an entry level programming or help desk position. This was just after the dot com bubble and few companies were hiring. I took some courses in graphic design at Manchester Community college and got a job with a marketing company in Hartford. I moved to a branch of Charter Communications and worked my way up to security help desk but the company was outsourced and closed. One of my supervisors left that company and moved to Traveler’s Insurance. Once he got his foot in the door, he hired me at Traveler’s where I stayed until I decided to take early retirement.

But during all that time I still had an interest in ham radio. So in 2003 I went down to ARRL and got my technician’s license. I was mike shy so I got on CW and actually made contacts. Quite a challenge for someone who hated code and could send 12 but poorly read 8 wpm. In 2006 I tested and received my general ticket.

VRCM: Did you ever get over your fear of the microphone?

LB: I did, I did. At the time I was going to St. Mary’s Church Episcopal Church and I ran into Chris Kelling. And this really opened the door, because Chris said I had to come over to the radio museum, so I came out and joined the ham club. Chris got me on the microphone here and made me a lot more comfortable talking to people on the air. I got into contests and really began to loosen up. And I decided to get the Extra class license.

So I’m an Extra now and trying to do more with the museum. I'm still stretching wires, including the cables for Chris's network, and helping build the W1VCM antennas. Around the museum I'm a general grunt, doing whatever I can, from repairing the roof to helping organize. I’m collecting radios and learning to rebuild and repair radios. I’ve gone back to my love of tubes and picked up some really nice Hammerlund receivers – a HQ 140 XA; a great SWL receiver, and a HQ 170 which I listen to for SSB and AM. I love the volume and the great fidelity!

So I’ve come a long way now. I’m back doing what I wanted to do originally. I wanted to go into electronics but got stuck at the math requirements. At that time the only way at UW Madison to get into electronics was to get into the electrical engineering department and that was just impossible for me.

Many times now when I've been listening late at night to the static crashes and the fading weak ones I remember being that young kid falling asleep under the headphones. I get a twinge of the mysterious. The last station has signed and the carrier is holding the frequency just a few seconds then the background noise takes over and I think of that final wave continuing out into space for eternity.

end

An Interview with museum volunteer Dan Thomas, January 21, 2016

VRCM: What I’m interested in is a thumbnail sketch of your background for the website. So if you’ll tell me a little about your schooling, your work experience, the things you’re proud of, how you got into ham radio and how you joined the museum.

DT: I grew up in southern Colorado, a place called Pueblo, from the time I was about four years old. We lived there until I moved to Connecticut just a few years ago. I graduated from South High school, went to Southern Colorado State College at the time; was a speech major.

Got interested in broadcasting through the back door and ended up being journalism major. I was working at an electronics company basically sweeping floors and helping install aircraft radios and a few other oddball things we did, including putting out targets for satellites to look at for the military, which they had a contract for. There was a lot of labor and you never know when you’d get called out for a “corn alert" as they called it. And it was a buck twenty-five an hour. Then a friend of mine called me out of the blue and said “How would you like to be on the radio?” He says it pays a buck twenty-five an hour. It was better than sweeping mass pieces of canvas out on the hot tarmac at an airport, and for the same money. So I decided O.K. and was working weekends at a little station called KFEL. It was owned by a gentleman named Max Cliffton. It was a religious station, but Max liked young people and he gave a lot of us start in the business.
The job entailed everything, so it was a trial by fire - you were on the air reading news off the old teletype; United Press International at the time.

VRCM: What time period was this?

DT: This was in 1966-67 when I started there. I worked Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings, and you played the various programs. Then we did music in the afternoons and a classical music show. But it was a day-timer, so in summer you got great hours because you’d be on. I think the latest we stayed on was 6 or 6:30 in the evening during the summer. But in the winter you shut down at 4:00 or 4:30 because sunrise-sunset back then. And the same thing with opening. But you also did your own logs. So I actually typed up the logs for the entire week. That was part of the duties of the weekend guy. You got a great education in radio, swept floors, did dishes if left dishes in the little kitchen. It was in kind of a little old farmhouse. You learned how to turn on the transmitter and of course take readings every hour.

After a couple of years working for Uncle Max and two other stations, I decided to go full time. I had fallen head over heel for radio. All of a sudden I was 19 and the assistant news director, news was my first love at the time. It was KKFM formerly KGHF and was the original station in our community. It started in 1928 – it was an AM station; 1350. It was non-directional day at 5 KW and 1KW at night directional. I was there all of a month and a half and they came to me and said, “Well, our news director decided he wants to go to Denver; doesn’t want to stay in Pueblo and now you’re the new news director”. At 18! (Laughs)

So I did morning news every day and was responsible for the news department. We had two wire services: Associated Press and United Press International. It was a trial by fire but I learned a lot of skills; did a lot of ambulance chasing, did reports via pay phones and anything else at the time. I lasted there a year and they were having severe financial difficulties; more severe than I knew about. I got married and the day I got back from my honeymoon they had to let me go! I was out of work about 12 ½ hours. I called the number one AM station at the time, KCSJ, and they hired me on the spot doing weekends. It was a full time job again, but I was on the air. Later it was purchased by American Media. I was there for 15 years. I went from disc jockey to production director. Basically all the production plus writing commercials. They put me in charge of that; it was crazy.

I had the news experience and still did some of that too, but a young man named Ray Klotts, came in as our chief engineer and we got to be very good friends. When I started working with him we put an FM station on the air and I actually put the transmitter together under his direction. I designed and built a remote control system for it and fell in love with engineering. Well, Ray left to go to a major market and that left an opening for chief engineer and management came to me and said "you don’t have your ticket yet but we’ll pay for your schooling – go get it – you’ll be the new chief engineer". And that was in 1974 – 1975. I came back as full time chief engineer for a three tower directional AM and a full power 100,000 watt FM station. And I loved engineering so much.

VRCM: This was a first class license?

DT: Yes, You had to have that to do any technical work on the transmission system. I was there for a few more years. Management changed; the stations changed hands and the new FM owners wanted me as news director and chief engineer. By then I was also doing talk radio, which I kind of liked, and I was doing a weekly television show on the local PBS TV station. It was a news interview program. I was also doing a law show occasionally for them as well.

VRCM: You were a busy guy!

DT: I was a busy guy. Well if you had a job, I’d do it if you paid me (laughs). I had a family and two kids by then and the engineering was great because it was a mainstay. If you were an engineer you had no trouble getting a job. And if you were a good, decent engineer – and I thought I was. About that time, it was in late 70s early 80s; I met a gentleman named Mike Bauldoff who was also an engineer and air talent as well. He is still to this day my brother, my bestest friend on the planet. He and I had our own engineering company and we were contract engineers and at one time we had ten stations we contracted engineering for plus we were both working full time jobs. He was teaching electronics at a community college and I was news director and chief engineer for McCoy Broadcasting.

The KCCY years were the cream of the crop years. It was a country station before country was really a format. This was right at the early, early boom in country music. And I’m not a country music fan and never had been (laughs), but I had worked with some of the finest people in the business. From management to the talent to the owners, they were all radio people who loved radio and the number one thing was to have fun. And I teamed up with a young man named Dave Moore, and for fifteen years we had the number one radio show in the market. We pulled a 25 share every year and we had 15 stations in competition with us. At that time we also acquired through McCoy an oldies FM rock station that was the number two station in the area. I also did news for both of them and was engineer for both of them.

VRCM: What brought you to Connecticut?

DT: I had some health issues and got a great offer from Pueblo Community College. I worked there for 13 years as the manager of the schools radio station and I was also the chief technician for distance learning. I learned a lot. I was doing quite a bit of television engineering at that time. We had a very active television department. Education is a devil’s playground for some and I ended up retiring from there - sort of. And I went back into broadcasting for a short time.

My daughter is a software specialist in the local insurance industry. She is a consultant. My son-in-law is a highly placed executive in the insurance business. They said come out and be with us.

My son, meanwhile, married and with three kids, decided to move here as well from Montana. And at that point in time they were all here and we were just, the two of us back in Pueblo, so we decided it was time to move and came out here.

I needed something to do. You talk about Ham Radio. A very good friend of mine, whom I’ve known for years, were having coffee and he said you need to find something to do or you’re going to be bored to death. And I said I know, I’m really scared about that as I am used to being busy. He said you ought to get your ham license and I said I’ve had ham friends for years. But I was spending at least four hours a day on the air plus doing television. I said you know, I really don’t want a hobby where I sit in front of a microphone because I do this every day for a living! So anyway, Ed convinced me he said you’re not going to have anything do to, so I got my general just five years ago. And then I got my Extra. I fell in love with the hobby, particularly ARES. I love activities – I enjoy that part of it. I don’t do DX, I’m antenna restricted by my daughter, but I can do a lot of 2-meter mobile and UHF/VHF. I’m now into the digital modes. DMR has got me fascinated.

It was fun so when I came out, I said I need something else to do. Ham Radio is fine but it’s just sitting at home. I don’t want to do that – I want to work on things! I heard about this Vintage Radio and Communications Museum, and I thought I’d go out and visit it. I didn’t realize it was cash only and I only had my credit card with me. And the gentleman at the time said no, I’m sorry I can’t do it. So I said I’ll have to come back. Consequently I came back on a Saturday and I met John Ellsworth. And that was funny because I’m sitting here talking with him: this giant man named John Ellsworth and he asked what did you do? And I said well I was a broadcast engineer for 40 years. He grabs me by the arm and drags me into the studio which was about a foot deep in cable and wires strewn all over the floor. There was not much in there - it was just a room. He proceeded to tell me about it and he said are you interested in it? And I said Yea! - I’d love to build the studio; that’s what I did. Over the many years I built quite a few. And I said I have found a home!

I’ve been here ever since and I keep increasing the time I’m spending here. I’m here at least three days a week.

VRCM: You do a lot of repairs for eBay sales?

DT: Yes. We’re doing that along with Danny Fitzin. He and I have started a thing with that. And eBay sales are taking a lot of time. I spend a lot of time back there. In fact that’s what I’ll be doing there today. I need to get back into the studio. We’ve got some things I need to do and upgrade. One of these days I’ll get balanced again (laughs) maybe when the weather warms up again. But the museum has been a life saver because I wouldn’t have anything to do without it.

Amateur radio, yes. But that’s not something you can do all day long. I’ve met some incredible people, both here and with amateur radio. I fact I’m amazed that, as many years as I spent in broadcasting, I’ve never met a finer group of people than the hams I met.. I haven’t met a clinker yet. (laughs)

Peter Knight Interview - October 1, 2016
VRCM: Tell me a little bit about your background; schooling, profession, and so on.
PK: I was born at Manchester hospital when my family lived in a part of Windsor called Wapping. When I as four, we moved to Manchester and then to Glastonbury about a year later. I attended Glastonbury High School and then moved after my dad got transferred to Florida and I attended high school there. I received my associate’s degree at University of South Florida and then accepted a position as an engineering technician, writing computer codes at Pratt & Whitney in West Palm Beach. A couple of years later I accepting a position at Pratt &Whitney in East Hartford. From there I went to University of Hartford and received a BS in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics. The program concentrated more on theory, logic, and math than it did on hardware. My job at that time became software developer in a variety of different computer languages and platforms. At that time, Pratt & Whitney had a great scholar program that allowed me to get my master’s degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
VRCM: So how did you get involved with amateur radio?
PK: I had walkie talkies when I was in grade school. I always was interested in communication by wireless. My lifelong friend—and he’s a museum volunteer—Bob Allison and I would experiment with low powered CB walkie talkies trying to make them communicate as far as possible with different antenna configurations that I attached to the house - much to the dismay of my parents! When I was about 14, I attended a few meetings of a ham club in Glastonbury. When I was in Florida, my friends from Connecticut arranged for me to buy a Heathkit HR 1680 HF receiver from a ham. His name was John Drury, WB1DUK. He’s dead now; a silent key. I had a blast listening to hams and foreign broadcast stations all over the world. I’d listen to hams I knew from Connecticut. A few times, I called them up on the phone and they transmitted my voice through the radio microphone. It was a riot talking through the phone from Florida and hearing myself on the radio on the 20 meter band. So, within a year after I returned to Connecticut, I studied for my novice license with Bob’s wife Kathy - her call is KA1RWY, and we got our licenses and upgraded shortly after that. My original call sign was KA1RXY and I eventually changed it to KN1GHT. The solar cycle was very good at the time and I did a lot of mobile work early on. It was fun working DX all over the world while driving around.
VRCM: Great story! O.K. I assume Bob Allison got you get involved with the radio museum?
PK: Yes, but before that, in the late 1980’s, I was on ham radio with an old HA460 6 Meter AM transceiver on 50.4 MHz and ran into Randy Zaremba - NH6LF - a call he retained from when he lived in Hawaii. Randy set up a business in the old Bezzini Brothers building in Manchester selling radio tubes and parts. A number of hams and radio enthusiasts would go to Randy’s shop and hang out on Friday nights and aptly named it “The RF Hole”. The RF Hole also had antique radios on consignment. I had already started collecting cylinder phonographs and that ‘was all she wrote’!
I starting my collecting of primarily 1920’s battery sets. Someone there mentioned the radio museum and eventually in the early 1990’s a small group of us went for a tour of the museum when it was located in East Hartford, near Pitkin Street. I also visited when the museum was in Windsor near the train station when they had a huge record sale. That is when I met museum president John Ellsworth and we talked for quite a while. Around 2011 or 2012, I spoke with Bob Allison and he had been volunteering. He suggested that I come by and just hang out and I would find something I could help out with. I came over on a Saturday and everyone at the museum was very friendly and liked the idea of having another volunteer. It didn’t take long before I found a niche occasionally fixing a radio in the back room and working on writing up and photographing E-Bay items and training others on the E-Bay listing computer.
VRCM: What do find most rewarding about being a museum volunteer?
PK: I come to the museum on Saturdays when a lot of the volunteers are around. Part of the fun here is that I never know exactly what I’ll be doing and I can choose what to work on – it’s informal. Sometimes someone will bring a donation and we can test it or fix it for our inventory. Other times, someone will walk through the door and want a volunteer to discuss something. Occasionally, a docent will ask me to give the pitch on the mechanical phonographs or the 1920’s battery radio section. Those are areas in which I have a lot of knowledge. I always feel great when I can help someone out with a radio problem or discuss the history of something.
The volunteers are great to work with and have similar interests. Everyone works together to keep the museum in good running order. They come from many backgrounds and have different political views. I’ve learned a ton of things that I didn’t know about old technology and the history behind it. Each volunteer has overlapping knowledge and also about different subjects so between everyone it’s a vast encyclopedia of old technology.
VRCM: Great, Peter. Anything else you’d like to add?
PK: I love the time I spend here working with the other volunteer, and the time goes by fast. I’ve been volunteering for 4 or 5 years and every week I learn something new. Like many of the volunteers, I’m a collector of old technology items – primarily radios and cylinder phonographs. In a lot of ways, coming to the museum has quenched my thirst for collecting and that’s a great thing! Instead of going out to antique shops and tag sales I can come to the museum and operate a radio or phonograph and learn about many different things I’ve never seen before.
end

3-11-22

Danielle originally hails from Winsted, CT and has always had an interest and appreciation for history, art and technology. Her father, who was a history buff, antique radio collector, musician and electronics repair guru, sparked her interest in the intersection of art and technology. She vividly remembers helping her father experiment with hand-wound copper radio coils of all sizes, refinishing wooden radio consoles, finding just the right pattern of replacement grill cloth, and fabricating and decorating giant cone shaped poster-board horns for amplification of his home-made crystal radio sets. In her childhood home, there was always a radio playing and always a radio in a state of repair.

Danielle attended Boston University College of Communication and graduated with a BS in Advertising. She is now living in the Hilltowns of Western Mass with her husband, son and cats, adding to her collection of various vintage electronics. She is currently working as Prepress & Creative Operations Manager for Bridgeport National Bindery in Agawam, MA, where she has been for nearly 15 years. She also does freelance book design. In her spare time, Danielle enjoys art & home improvement projects, travel, museums, thrift store hunting & Star Wars.

Danielle first visited VRCMCT in 2009 and always wanted to return. Early in 2021, she revisited the museum with her family and fell in love all over again with the beauty, the innovation and history packed into such a small space. A warm and inviting tour sealed the deal, and she knew she wanted to spend more time at the museum, helping to preserve the history of electronic communications. Danielle has volunteered her graphic design and visual problem solving skills to help the museum in whatever projects they may need. She has helped with updating various exhibits, signage and displays, as well as helping design and overhaul vrcmct.org. She looks forward to her continued involvement with the museum, and collaborating again with the other wonderful volunteers.