Bitser

DRAFT: This line will be removed when the initial version of this is finished.

This is my dad Jim during World War II, living up to the nickname his ground crew mates gave him: Paddle Props. He taught me an immeasurable lot. I paid close attention to all that he told me until he became a devout Christian (and I tried very hard to follow his lead with that for a few years overlapping high school). And even after that, right up to when he died in my arms I kept on learning from him.

In the late 50s to early 60s we lived in Montgomery Alabama as dad helped build and operate one of the SAGE computer sites for the Air Force. We’d go down to Ft Walton Beach Florida for long weekends and sometimes my cousins Cathy and Steve and aunt Pat and uncle Jack came down from Michigan to join us. During one visit there I remember one morning dad explained to us that he’d fallen asleep while floating on his back in the gulf. When he woke up the shoreline was quite distant but he had no trouble getting back. I listened to this with interest, imagining how comfortable with one’s self somebody would be to let themselves drift out into the ocean and be confident they could get back. Actually it was silly chance he fell asleep and I suspect he wasn’t asleep for long, but long enough to have a story. But this story sums up the notion that my dad wasn’t easily frightened.

During WWII he was part of the ground crew keeping B24 bombers flying on a base in southeast England. His part was keeping the Norden bomb sights and Honeywell  automatic flight control systems going, training bombardiers after equipment upgrades and, most especially, joy riding. He flew every chance he got. The other bomb ground crewmen were very happy for him to fly instead of them. I remember thinking exclusively about how convenient it was that the others didn’t want to go on flights to test or adjust the equipment and that gave dad more time doing what he loved. He’d made model airplanes from an early age and before joining the Army (there was no Air Force yet) he’d worked at the giant B24 assembly lines in Willow Run in Michigan. He told funny stories about a bombardier once flubbing his instructions and dropping practice bombs in a row of people’s back gardens (English garden == American yard). Another time he ran out of oxygen but described it as funny when time slowed down and although he was moving toward a fresh bottle on the other side of the plane just a short distance away he couldn’t manage the swap but a crewman spotted him and finished the swap. I never once considered what a big deal that brush with death constituted. Apart from the fact I would not have been had his life ended back then, the notion he wouldn’t get through that just didn’t jibe with how I imagined my dad.

Flash forward to my first motorcycle period from age 14 to 19. I road the wheels off three bikes: a Yamaha 80, Honda 150 and Bultaco Metralla. Dad borrowed them a lot, going out for a short ride and bringing it back with a big smile on his face or a funny story about embarrassing the local four wheel drivers.  One day he went for a ride with me on my Honda 150. He encouraged me to give him a thrilling ride, so I went for it, approaching 10 10ths part of the time on sections of a seven mile loop road through a park on Mt Sano along side Huntsville, AL. But I forgot the little dip in the middle of a specific  left hander and as it came into view there was no time to stand the bike up and reduce speed before finishing the corner. We went into the dip and for about a second’s eternity we were at the mercy of the coefficient of friction of the center stand in addition to the tire patch of the two tires. There was a flat rock face on the outside of the curve and we would have been killed instantly had I low sided the bike. It was a few years later before I screwed up the courage to explain to my dad how close we came to buying the farm on that curve. His reaction was a combination of “I know” and “No worries.”. This jibed with the attitude he taught me as he was teaching me to park a car with great precision and we’d come within an inch of hitting an adjacent car and he’d applaud my successful learning trial and respond to my momentary horror with “a miss is a mile.”

Dad excelled in what he did. He was the oldest recruit by a number of years among the other recruits to IBM for the Sage work. They nick named him The Old Man. He confided in me by his body language or a chance remark to Mom how he was occasionally unsure of himself to be able to keep up with the new university graduates. Dad hadn’t finished his EE degree at Michigan, filling in gaps while repairing TVs and radios and making one off high performance gear for his amateur radio boss. Dad busted his buns learning all that was presented by the year’s training at IBM/Kingston from about 1957-1958. I still remember him patiently sitting me down at the kitchen table and drawing the schematic of a transistor-based flip flop (“bistable multivibrator” in those days) and slowly explaining to me exactly how it worked. He never talked down to me. He treated me like a buddy who happened to be very, very short.  Around that same time he helped me build a single tube radio into a coffee can.

But the Sage work was hard as a m**** f****.  In their typical infinite but misguided attempt to be fair, IBM rotated the shift work. Sage was a 24/7/365 project to get the country’s air defense network upgraded ASAP. Dad could never adjust to the shift work and had terrible trouble sleeping. A side effect of that was for me to learn how to move through a house while making no sound. I still practice that today to avoid waking my wife. But the rotating shifts seemed to drive dad to use some of his off time to drink and the effect of the shift work on my mother was very severe. It wasn’t helped by the fact that at the time, from the perspective of the only yankee kid on the playground, I judged Montgomery to be the worst place on the planet and still can’t avoid negative thoughts and the odd disparaging remark about it despite the fact that many of the bigoted f***tards moved east out of the city to their safe and shiny fortress suburbs. My brother Dave and I played with the black kids that lived behind our neighborhood and mom and dad were friendly to them although we had a tremendous language barrier with our northern American and English accents and their strong dialects.

But eventually Dad and the rest of his team finished training the Air Force guys and gals to keep the Montgomery Sage site ticking like a watch and he was free to change projects. He chose the Saturn V Instrument work going on in Huntsville and on a very joyous day in January, 1963 between school terms we plowed through the snow of dad’s friends place in Decatur, spent a few nights with them and then got to a motel in Huntsville while mom and dad shopped for a house.

Huntsville was an oasis full of fascinating people and dad simply glowed with satisfaction to be out of Montgomery. He took on the engineering work to help adapt and test two pieces of gear being developed by Space Craft Incorporated (aka “SCI” that morphed into a large contract manufacturing firm). One was a transponder and the other was the command decoder. Dad would give me regular, detailed reports of what he’d done on a given day and, as usual, I soaked it up. trying hard to remember all the terms to look up when I could. He gave me access to his technical library.

But it wasn’t long before dad began to go through heavy changes. I don’t recall us going to church much in Montgomery, but in Huntsville it became a regular thing, much to mom’s chagrin.

Winter and I went to high school in Hunstville Alabama together while my IBM dad worked in the company’s part of the Apollo moon rocket project, starting with 11^th grade when Winter and I shared an Algebra II class after he transferred from some other part of Alabama. We were determined to learn the course material despite the teacher having a very inconvenient nervous breakdown, so we mostly taught ourselves in a back corner of the classroom. In subsequent years, we attended the same church and had a great many heart-to-heart talks in his basement across the street from where I lived, eventually becoming water brothers with an unbreakable friendship.

Winter may be the most individualistic person I’ve known. His nature and upbringing arranged for him to pick his paths and simply refuse to live and die except on his terms.

When I went to Auburn’s engineering school, Winter went to U of Alabama on the main campus in Tuscaloosa. When we both bombed out, at least in part due to our minors in LSD, we both became 1A and eligible for the draft, and we knew Uncle Sam had a need for us both in Vietnam. Most likely I’d have washed out of infantry and flown a desk because of an arm injury as a child. But had we both been drafted we might have stuck together for part or all of the experience.

But then came the lottery, and I drew number 300 (safe) while Winter drew 5. He married his sweetheart Terry at 19 and was gone to boot and advanced infantry training after that. When I drove Terry to Fort Knox to visit him, his first report was of a person killed earlier in the day by a stray mortar round.

In ‘Nam, Winter was the M60 guy of his platoon, and I’m told that put him number three in order of priority for the enemy to kill him ASAP in a fire fight. He was injured one day and assumed it would at least get him R&R, but instead he was sent back to the field within a day. He shared stories with me of the troops sitting on barrels of Agent Orange and going through recently defoliated areas, and he also got hepatitis while there. Another third strike against his liver came from his fondness for tequila. He might have lasted with three strikes but COVID-19 was strike four for that organ of his body and it’s failure took him on May 5th of this year.

After returning from the war as a sargent, Winter resumed his quest to be a clown in the Barnum and Bailey’s circus while finishing his undergraduate and graduate studies in history and English, putting himself through with work in area mental health facilities. He taught at a university in Washington State as well as schools in Japan and Taiwan over the years, finishing with history instruction at the Huntsville Alabama area community college and becoming closely affiliated with the city’s historic train museum that survived Sherman’s March to the Sea. He never made it past his B&B auditions despite trying five times, but he was the consummate guide of the museum and author of its official history. Together with close friend Jacqui, he also conducted ghost tours in the area.

I close with Winter celebrating his 71^st birthday in Huntsville. Goodbye, Winter. You went out on your terms, and I salute you for your service to our country.

The picture above is of mom’s first station with a Kenwood TS830S licensed as KF4OSV .

Above is the extra class license my mother earned at 79.

I spent most of my life thinking I got my best brain genes from my dad, but late in life I lost all certainty about that. Mom took up amateur radio after I unsuccessfully tried to get my dad interested in 1995 (he’d built custom gear for his best friend’s amateur station after WWII and said he was bored with it.) When mom expressed interest I put a super regenerative kit receiver at her house with a long wire antenna over a tree and she started listening.  She started studying for an amateur license and practicing morse code too, using a practice gadget I made her. She got her novice license (including 5WPM morse code) around 1996 at age 75. I set her up with a Kenwood TS830 and 80/40m band trap dipole as a simple but effective 100 watt station. We made a contact on 40 meters CW (morse code) with me in Apex and her 100 miles west and exchanged QSL cards.  I was never the slightest bit competent with that mode and only later used CW with software assistance during the occasional contest over the years. Little did I know at the time that my mom didn’t stop at 5wpm.

Mom grew up in the outskirts of Manchester, England and was working in a factory in 1943 during WWII when my dad met, courted and married her, taking her back to the Norwich area and they shared a little apartment a bicycle ride away from the dad’s B24 base. She worked in the base PX (general store). After the war they lived in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan and mom had other jobs here and there until I showed up in 1950. Mom was a housewife from that point on, except for bit of volunteer work at area hospitals. In the 60s my dad became a devout Christian, and as a side effect of that, implemented a conservative agenda for my mother as his “helpmate”, etc, and this stymied her desire to get out and do things independently as my brother and I were in our teens and soon off to universities. I didn’t have the sense to help her convince dad that his soul would make it OK if she was allowed to develop a life outside the house too. Dad had his church buddies and model airplanes and that club, but mom was extremely shy and only had a few close friends and her books. She read a lot, but nothing technical. Absolutely nothing technical until she was 74 years old.

So, imagine my surprise when, in the middle of the Worked All Europe (WAE) contest in 1997 as my buddy Jim WW4M and I were competing with a Multi/Single station, my wife Jenny stuck her head in the ham shack and said “your mom is on the phone and wants to tell you something”. Something about my wife’s tone made it clear this was urgent. I just pulled the headphone/mike off my head between one “QRZ” and another, handed it to Jim and went to the phone where my mother proudly announced “I got my general class license”. I was disoriented. This was before FCC license restructuring in 2000 and so it included a 13wpm morse code test and in my mind the theory in the general exam was beyond her. I wanted to ask how she did that, but could only enthusiastically congratulate her.  From that point, with callsign KF4VMT and using the station upgrade I’d gotten her (transceiver upgraded to a TS450 and folded 10-15-20m quad on the roof with a little rotator), she started chatting with people in Europe, Central and South America, and kept studying. It took two years of study before she took and passed the advanced class exam, by far the hardest of the series. She never allowed me to help her and I have no memory of explaining anything technical to her, but she did get a bit of help from the guys in a an amateur radio club she’d joined.

OK, you old men out there that know what these tests were like in the “good old days”: yes, this was probably easier than driving 50 miles and sitting in front of an FCC examiner and drawing schematics of superhet receivers. However, relative to my mother’s prior background, words cannot describe how impressed I was by this accomplishment.  Mom kept right on studying until she took and passed the final, extra class exam and the license above reflects that happy day in 2001.

We have a shoe box full of mom’s QSL cards documenting the hundreds of chats she shared with friends made on the radio, and with the cards there are many personal notes. One letter included with his QSL card by a Russian amateur is especially touching. But rag chewing is boring, I can only imagine mom saying to herself. While studying for the advanced license she started contesting and took part in a number of events before her hearing let her down and took this hobby from her when she was around 82.

The one other thing to share is that my mother was an optimist. Despite an extremely stressful stretch in Montgomery, Alabama while my dad worked rotating shifts building and maintaining one of the SAGE computers as an IBM engineer and my brother and I tried to survive being the only yankees on the elementary school playground, she was optimistic. Despite the difficulty of adapting to the very different culture and familial patterns she was abruptly subjected to with her move to the US, and the whole church experience that simply stepped on her personal beliefs and preferences for how she wanted to live, she stayed cheerful, with a sunny disposition right up to the point vascular dementia began to rob her from us. Ironically, her memory of amateur radio was one of the very first things to go, so it seemed apropos to capture memories of that amazing part of her life as a tribute.