Author Archives: clem.law@usa.net

1949 Two Tube Superheterodyne Portable

The scouts shown above are taking a break from their campout to pull in some local broadcast stations on the two-tube superheterodyne receiver they constructing from the plans in the June 1949 issue of Popular Mechanics. The set used a 1R5 and a 1U5 tube and a 15 foot antenna to get good volume on the local stations. According to the magazine, the set rivaled any regenerative receiver, without the possibility of an annoying squeal.

According to the magazine, the rugged little set was ideal for camping or other knockabut use. It could be transported in a small cardboard container, or, if the builder preferred, in a cabinet.

The filaments ran off two flashlight batteries in parallel, with a 67.5 volt B battery. For strong stations, a 45 volt battery could be substituted.

1938 New England Hurricane

The article shown above appeared in the June 1939 issue of Rural Radio magazine, detailing an award to Wilson E. Burgess, W1BDS, for his work during the 1938 New England Hurricane. The storm was one of the deadliest to ever hit New England and Long Island, with an estimated 682 killed. It’s the strongest hurricane to hit New England in modern times, possibly eclipsed by the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635.

While this article is short on details, more can be learned from Clinton DeSoto‘s 1941 book Calling CQ.

Rhode Island hurricane damage. Wikipedia image.

The storm was poorly forecast, and hit Burgess’s hometown of Westerly, R.I., with little warning the afternoon of September 21, 1938. Burgess was working as the manager of the appliance department at Montgomery Ward when the storm blew out the windows of the store. Panicked people were running up and down the aisles of the store. It soon became apparent that a hurricane was in progress.

He quickly collected a quantity of batteries and started for home on foot. He struggled up the street as trees fell around him. At the police station, he met up with another amateur, George Marshall, W1KRQ. Together, the set off toward Burgess’s home with the batteries. Eventually, they were able to hitch a ride on a county truck, but it was soon blocked by trees and they again had to continue on foot.

They eventually made it, but he found that the edge of his garage that had supported his antenna had been swept away. He went out in the 65 MPH winds to put it back up, and eventually had to settle for wrapping the wire around his house.

W1KRF, W1BDS, W1KRQ at the makeshift station. QST, Nov. 1938, p. 12.

By this time, of course, the power was out, and there was no way to power Burgess’s normal 600 watt transmitter. Working by kerosene lantern, the two men worked for two hours building a one-tube transmitter to use with the batteries carried from the store. DeSoto reports that the windows had been blown out by this time, and daughter Jane Gail Burgess, shown in the photo above, then three months old, was crying in terror.

Finally, they had the transmitter and a makeshift receiver ready, and Burgess started putting out a QRR–the then-distress call. Unfortunately, nobody really knew that an emergency was in progress, and their weak signal simply wasn’t heard over the interference of a normal busy ham band. They moved their CW signal up to the phone band, reasoning that the CW signal would stand out there. The trick worked, and soon W2CQD in New Jersey answered the call, with W1SZ in Connecticut (QST managing editor) later taking over. For the next five days, the Connecticut station maintained contact.

Neighbors eventually got word to the local Red Cross that radio contact had been made, and the house soon became a center for relief activity. The first official message was to Red Cross headquarters in Washington, but that message was not accepted, since it was signed merely “Westerly Red Cross.” Eventually, the name of the local chairman was added, and the message was accepted.

1959 Springfield Enterprises CB

The gentleman shown here is obviously a mover and shaker, and he’s staying in touch thanks to a portable citizen’s band transceiver that he assembled himself from a semi-kit. The electronics came pre-wired, but he had to do the final assembly himself, a process that took about three hours.

The set, from a company called Springfield Enterprises, sold for $41.90, plus $5.73 for the battery. The set was reviewed in the June 1959 issue of Electronics Illustrated. The magazine had two of the units, and found the reliable range using the whip antennas to be about a quarter of a mile.

The top photo is taken at Times Square, as revealed by this photo.

Meadwell’s Radio & Electric, Saskatoon, 1944

The cover of National Radio News, the publication of the National Radio Institute home study school, for June-July 1944 shows the exterior of Meadwell’s Radio & Electirc, 110-3rd Ave. S., Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Shown by the truck at the left are the owners, Mr. & Mrs. John D. Meadwell, both graduates of of NRI. They wrote to the magazine of their gratitude to the school for the training and cooperation received, and that they owed their success to NRI.

They reported that they had done wonderfully well and believed that they had the largest radio repair shop in Saskatoon.

The building in which the shop was located was known as the Dinkle Building, and was destroyed by fire in 1986. The three-story building had shops on the lower level, with the top two floors being residential. More pictures can be found at the Saskatoon Public Library website.

Kathryn Hutchinson, 1939

Shown here in the June 1939 issue of Radio Craft is sixteen-year-old Kathryn Hutchinson of the famous Flying Hutchinsons. According to the magazine, she was an amateur radio operator, although her call sign was not specified. She is shown here working on part of the Amateur Radio display of the 1939 World’s Fair, which was part of the Westinghouse exhibit in cooperation with the ARRL.

Flying Hutchinsons, circa 1932. Wikipedia image.

The Flying Hutchinsons had earned their fame in 1931, when Kathryn was about eight, when they visited the capitals of all 48 states by air. The next year, when Kathryn was nine, the family achieved further fame in an attempted around-the-world flight. The attempt ended off Greenland when the plane crash landed and the family was stranded for several days before being picked up by a fishing trawler and taken to the U.K. Kathryn’s parents, George and Blanche, wrote two books detailing their adventures, The Flying Family in Greenland (1935) and Flying the States (1937).

You can see Kathryn and the rest of her family in this 1932 newsreel in which her father defends the flight:

You can hear Kathryn and the rest of the family at this 1939 radio program. More information is available at this link. I believe the program is actually a dramatization of the completion of a flight that never took place. Begun in 1939, the Hutchinsons made it as far as Mexico before the war broke out, making impossible a visit to all nations on earth.

Kathryn Hutchinson James died in Florida in 2015 at the age of 92. At the time of her death, she was a registered Republican. Her mother, Blanche D. Hutchinson died in 1995.

Madera (CA) Tribune, 13 Sept. 1932.

Feed My Starving Children

As previously announced, June 7 was OneTubeRadio.com night at Feed My Starving Children (FMSC). Since the vast majority of our readers are places other than Minnesota, USA, it’s understandable that we didn’t get any volunteers signed up through the website, but my family did attend and packed meals that will be eaten by malnourished children somewhere in the world.

The event was held at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds Grandstand building, where we were quickly paired up with the group shown above. They consisted of a group of neighbors and a Bible study group from a local church. In less than two hours, our table packaged about 900 food packages and sealed them in cartons for shipment. After other volunteers filled and weighed the packages, my job was to place the bag in a sealer operated by another volunteer. My son then frantically but neatly placed the packages from two assembly lines into cardboard boxes.

Each package contains rice, soy, a vitamin mix, and dehydrated vegetables, enough to feed a meal to several children. Overall, everyone in attendance packed about 378 boxes, each one containing 36 food packages. This will provide 81,648 meals, or enough to feed 223 children for one year. In fact, on average, everyone who attended the event packed enough food to feed one child for one year.

If you are interested in volunteering, volunteers are always welcome. The charity has permanent locations in Arizona, Illinois, Minnesota, and Texas where volunteers can come for one or more shifts. It also has “MobilePack” events at many locations around the country. You can search for an upcoming opportunity at this link. You can also make a monetery donation at this link. Since FMSC relies heavily on volunteer labor, your donation goes a very long way to feed hungry children. Each 22 cent donation equals a nutritious meal for a hungry child.

1944 Tube Substitutions

Wartime parts shortages often meant that radio servicemen had to be creative, and that often meant tube substitution. If the replacement tube was not available, it was often possible to substitute one that was. The substitute often had similar or even identical electrical characteristics, but had a different size plug or pin configuration.

The June 1944 issue of Radio Craft, like many other radio magazines of the era, carried some pointers. The illustration shows common adapters. The base was made of a burnt out tube (perhaps the one being replaced), and the top was a new socket for the new tube. When tubes became available, the adapter could be removed and the original inserted in the socket.

6 June 1944

DOD photo.

Today marks the 75th anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1944, the beginning of the Allied invasion of Europe during World War II. On the day of the invasion, 4414 Allied servicemen were confirmed dead. Germans suffered between 4000 and 9000 casualties.

When I think of D-Day, my first thought is of a little salt container like the one shown here.

Some time in the late 1960s or early 1970s, my family and I were coming home from somewhere and were passing through Ossian, Iowa, where we stopped for a picnic lunch at a small park across the highway from a gas station.

As we were getting set up, a gregarious gentleman came over and told us that he just got a call that we had forgotten the salt, so he was giving us the container shown here. He was the owner of the gas station, and it turns out that his name was Carey. He handed out little shakers of Carey salt as his business card. I guess it worked, since I remembered his name almost fifty years later.

His full name was James R. “Bob” Carey, Jr. Or more specifically, he was Sgt. Carey. He proudly let us know that he had served at D-Day, and to make sure there was no question about it, he pulled out a copy of The Longest Day and showed us his name as one of the servicemen interviewed by the author.

Sure enough, on page 285 of the book, his name is still there:

“Carey, James R. Jr., Sgt. [8th AF] Carey’s West Side Service, Ossian, Iowa.”

Carey at his roadside park. Waterloo (IA) Sunday Courier, 22 Oct. 1972.

The park where we were picnicking was built by Carey at his own expense as his way of showing gratitude. It later became a city park. Carey described the park in 1972, probably about the same time we had passed through Ossian:

My name is James R. Carey. I own and operate a service station on U.S. 52 at Ossian, Iowa. I moved there in 1951.

Some time between 1945 and 1947 the highway commission relocated a short piece of U.S. 52 outside Ossian, and by doing this left a small piece of land on the south side of the highway in the shape of a piece of pie. When I moved into my station on the opposite side of the road, this piece of land was full of weeds and stumps and high grass. There were two holes, probably wells or old cisterns, which were mostly hidden and dangerous for children to play there.

This was an eyesore, and so I started to clean it up a little at a time when I could do it, and my family helped. First we mowed a strip along the highway, and then we mowed the whole thing; then we filled in the holes and did some more leveling, and started to take care of the trees. Then we discovered that people who stopped at our service station seemed to like to go over into this little piece of ground to have a picnic, or maybe just to stretch and relax a while before going on again. It cost us some money and time to do this, and nobody paid us for it; but we felt repaid by the nice things that people said about it when they stopped there. It meant something to have people say these things, and to see that the) really enjoyed stopping there.

Looking back over some 20 years now, we feel we’ve been repaid many times over for our efforts because this project has brought us together with our neighbors in doing something together that gave us all satisfaction. Some helped with the maintenance of the park: others contributed a tree or a shrub. I recall a man 10 miles away gave us a tree, and we went over and hauled it to the park in our truck.

We built a little shelter for the picnic tables. Then I thought we should put in a gas stove. I had the stove, and my neighbor Vern Meyer said he would donate the pipes and labor. And he did. Another neighbor, Elmer Rosa, said, “I’ll give you the roof boards for the shelter.” There was about $100 worth of roofboards and poles and rafters. The Fort Atkinson Nursery donated a flowering crab tree, and we put in flood lights to light it up in the spring when the blossoms came out. Then one day Fred Doan said we ought to have a little neon sign on the shelter. I said I couldn’t afford one. and he said, “I’ll donate it.” And he did. So we had a sign on the shelter that said “Careys Park & Camp.” We keep that sign on day and night.

The town of Ossian boundary line is just a few feet away from the camp, and we asked if they would put in a drinking fountain on the outside of the shelter. By that time we also had built another building for toilets, and we needed water for that. Everything in the park is open 24 hours a day.

I don’t remember anything in particular that Carey said about his service at D-Day. I only remember (and this is probably all he told us) that he was there and that he was proud of it. He did his part to liberate Europe, and then he came home. He started a gas station and did his part to offer rest to weary American travelers.

Sgt. Carey, thanks for a place to rest; thanks for the salt; and thank you for liberating Europe. The world is better because of you.

For more information about Carey, see His Legend Lives On in Northeast Iowa. Carey died in 1977 at the age of 57 and is buried at St. Francis de Sales Cemetery, Winneshiek County, Iowa.

Please see our earlier posts regarding the D-Day invasion:

The first link contains links to the NBC and CBS broadcast days for June 6, and are well worth listening to.

Voice of America: 1944

Transmitter engineer flipping the switch at antenna farm to beam program to Europe.

Seventy-five years ago this month, the June 1944 issue of Popular Mechanics highlighted the shortwave broadcasting efforts of the Office of War Information (OWI). The magazine dubbed the American shortwave stations the “Voice of America,” a name which would become official in following years.

The magazine noted that the Nazis had a head start on the radio war, since Germany had over a hundred transmitters spewing propaganda to the world. The United States had only sixteen, all under private ownership. But even though it took some time to get going, the OWI wass directing a 24 hour flow of news and information around the world. The magazine noted that America strictly adhered to factual news.

Jamming was rampant, and broadcasts were normally read at a hundred words per minute to compensate. When poor conditions dictated, this was sometimes slowed to 80 words per minute. The OWI knew that there were listeners. After the liberation of parts of Italy, a survey indicated that one in ten families heard allied programs, despite severe penalties for tuning in.

Science Fair Project: Viscosity

If Junior’s science fair project is due tomorrow and he hasn’t even started, then this project is just what he needs to turn the emergency into an A+ project. You probably have everything you need around the house. If you can’t find a couple of odds and ends, you should be able to find them at the trusty dollar store.

The exact layout of the experiment is not critical. You need two cans of similar shape and size, which you should be able to find in the recycling bin. You’ll also need some wire or string–almost any type will do. You’ll need something to hang them from. In this example, the experimenter is using some kind of stand. But a chair or table will work just fine–you just need the two cans to be able to hang freely.

Finally, you’ll need some water (H2O) and some sand. If you can’t find any sand, any solid will work, such as dirt, sugar, salt, etc. You just need something to add weight to the can.

The experiment demonstrates viscosity–the “thickness” of a fluid. After setting up the two cans, you twist each of them an equal number of times, for example, 5 times, and then let go. The can with sand will keep rotating a much longer time. After unwinding 5 times, it will wind itself in the other direction almost 5 times before again reversing. The process will continue for a long time.

The can with water will settle down much faster. This is because the water’s low viscosity means that most of the water is not turning. Only the light can is spinning, and it will lack the momentum to continue as long as the can full of sand.

If Junior wants to be ambitious, he can use other thick liquids.

The teacher will want the experiment to answer a question. There are many possibilities. For example, he can use the question, “how does viscosity affect the rotation of a spinning container.” Or, he can pick two liquids and answer the question, “which has a higher viscosity–water or cooking oil.” The one that spins the longest has the higher viscosity.

The project originally appeared 80 years ago this month in the June 1939 issue of Popular Science.