A Vagabond Ham
LYDE DE VINNA is a
born wanderer with the wanderlust in his veins and a job
that allows him to obey its call. He was home in
Hollywood with his family over the Christmas holidays a
couple of years ago, but that was the first time in six
years. Before that he has been in Tahiti photographing Last
of the Pagans, in China for The Good Earth,
above the Arctic Circle making Eskimo, down in
Africa with Trader Horn or in half a dozen other
of the remote places of the earth pursuing his profession.
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He is a motion-picture cameraman--one of the best.
Lately the producers have been keeping him closer to Hollywood photographing such domestic epics as 20-Mule Team, Wyoming, Bad Men of Brimstone and so on. It's just as well. Between his profession and his hobby, Clyde De Vinna has already had about enough adventure for one lifetime. His hobby is amateur radio.
Clyde is an old-timer in both radio and picture business. By 1929, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer decided to send a troupe of seventy-five people into Central Africa to make a motion picture from the popular book, Trader Horn, his background was such that it was he who got the camera assignment. Still a young man, he was even then a veteran of such expeditions and already winner of the Motion-Picture Academy award for his beautiful and skillful photography in White Shadows of the South Seas.
The most dramatic episode in De Vinna's career came within a millimeter of costing his life. It occurred in Alaska where he spent eleven months during the filming of Eskimo.
The party assigned to make the picture set out in the small supply steamer Nanuk in early summer and spent a month cruising the Bering Sea in search of walrus, whale and polar bear. They shot the bulk of the picture before winter set in, established winter quarters in the schooner when it became frozen in the harbor at Teller and returned to the temperate zone in the spring.
The equipment at K7UT, the station used by De Vinna in the Arctic, was in sharp contrast to the makeshift gear of, for instance, XU2V. The Alaskan transmitter was a beautiful custom-built job incorporating the latest in tubes and circuits and capable of a high order of performance. Antenna facilities on the Nanuk and later at the shore installation were close to ideal by comparison.
Yet De Vinna does not recall that experience with the enthusiasm and pleasure of his other adventurings. There are several reasons for this feeling. For one thing, radio conditions were erratic and for the most part undependable. Then there was the long winter night spent holed up in the tiny Nanuk frozen in at Teller Bay. Before it ended that night became a nightmare which erased the few pleasant memories the trip had created--the Bering Sea cruise, for example, or the fascination in learning the native customs and habits of the Eskimo.
The nightmare was born perhaps of the dissapointing radio conditions that prevailed, especially during the winter night. Schedules with California were difficult, even with the old reliable, W6AOR, at the helm. It was often necessary to relay by way of the Hawaiian Islands and occasionally even via New Zealand.
Perhaps it was this periodic need that prompted those regular schedules with New Zealand. Perhaps it was part of the thread from which the pattern was being woven. Possibly the contacts would have occurred anyway from mututal liking and need. But whatever the motivation, in the course of time Clyde got in the habit of talking with New Zealand quite regularly.
There was a lighthouse keeper down there, a lonely fellow who spent his days on an islet off the shipping lanes, tending his beacon and operating his amateur radio station. His name was McLaughlin.
They came to know each other, these two, each in his lonely outpost. They felt a kinship. . . .
De Vinna, seeking more favorable conditions than could be found on the crowded Nanuk, moved out on shore when winter came. He found a deserted hut a short way in from the schooner. It was nothing more than an eight-by-ten shack but it offered privacy and a decent radio location. He sealed the old shack to make it as airtight as possible. He erected a high antenna. He installed the radio transmitter and receiver, confiscated a gas stove from the supplies to heat the shack and there he spent his time.
It was late November by the time all this was organized. The winter night had arrived; daylight came and left with scarcely a pause. One late afternoon, a day or two after he completed the final details of installation, Clyde returned to the shack for early-evening schedules following a visit to the schooner.
The stars were shining high and still, and the night was crackling crisp with cold. He pulled open the shack door and let himself in. Making sure the door was shut tight, he lit the lamp. The gasoline stove had been coasting along while he was gone; he reached down now and turned it up full.
Then he sat down at the operating position, breathing on the headphones to warm the earcaps before putting them on his head. The tubes in the receiver heated slowly; as they approached operating temperature the set came to life with a rush.
De Vinna glanced at his watch. Two minutes to go before the schedule with McLaughlin. . . .
On the instant the minute hand crossed the mark indicating five o'clock the crisp, characteristic tone of the Zedder's signal pulsed across some eight thousand miles of space into his headphones. "G A OM [Good afternoon, old man]," the greeting came.
In turn, De Vinna reached for his key. Steadily, precisely, the black paddles slapped from side to side as the bug poured forth dots and dashes in the one dialect spoken by men without the aid of the human larynx.
Back and forth they tossed the ball of conversation. Outside the lighthouse, far down in the Antipodes, the sea pounded and moaned at the base of the tower, alternately demanding and pleading.
But inside McLaughlin sat beside his warm fire, the intimate headphones excluding the sea's lament while his mind concentrated with undistracted clarity on the signals they brought. He reveled in their smooth rhythm.
"Shack warming up fine business now," they were saying. "Turned stove up full when I came in, and it's up to sixty-two already." De Vinna was in the habit of making a report on his progress with work on the shack. There was a flicker of amusement in McLaughlin's eye.
But what was this? Did that smooth rhythm from De Vinna's key seem to break and then to slow? No--everything was normal for the space of a few more words. Then came that break again--this time unmistakable.
Something was wrong! The dots and dashes hurried for a moment and then lagged. They got tangled up in each other. They stopped for a moment and they resumed in an unintelligible burst of speed. McLaughlin sat up sharply in his chair. His left hand peaked the receiver tuning dial with delicate precision.
"I--I--c--a--dot--dot. . . ."
The beating dots and dashes slowed then stalled and settled into one prolonged dash. Then even that ceased, and there was silence.
The New Zealander snapped switches and pounded his key in frantic alarm. He listened; no reply. He snapped another call. Still silence. . . .
"Clyde's in trouble," he muttered to himself. "Something's happened to him. I've got to get help there. . . ."
Swiftly, expertly, he tuned the band. If only there were another Alaskan station on--but no. Nothing nearer than--Wait a minute, here was a K6 station. Who was that Hawaiian Clyde relayed through? Yes, it was the same one.
"K6EWQ K6EWQ urgent K6EWQ K6EWQ urgent. . . ."
The Hawaiian station came back as though he'd been waiting an hour for just that call. Crisp and snappy--not a single lost motion. "OK GA [All right, go ahead]."
Choosing words with economy and care, but rapping them out at thirty words a minute, the New Zealander told his story. There were no questions, just a brief acknowledgement. Then the K6 could be heard calling Alaska.
The benevolent spirit of amateur radio's patron saint was on the job that day. K6EWQ got an immediate reply to his CQ Alaska. The amateur in Nome took the message. Almost before his pencil stopped moving on the paper his left hand pulled the telephone receiver from its hook. A telegram to the police at Teller, the town nearest De Vinna's shack. . . . Morse sounders took up the refrain, and their clacking dropped word into the laps of the authorities at Teller.
They are calm and imperturbable, those law-enforcement officers of the Northland, accustomed to dealing with anything, surprised at nothing. Within twenty minutes by the clock from the time McLaughlin in New Zealand realized something was wrong up in Alaska they were on their way, a doctor close behind.
Ten minutes later they were hammering on the tightly sealed door of the hut. There was no answer. Two heavily mackinawed bodies moved in synchronism. The door was battered down.
There at the operating table, slumped over, his head on the table and his fingers lying limply over his key, was Clyde De Vina.
The doctor bustled forward, his quick eyes noting details and symptoms.
"Carbon-monoxide poisioning," he barked. "Turn that stove off and get it out of here," he ordered, jerking a mittened glove at De Vinna's gasoline heater. "Stretch him out on the floor--here, like this."
It was some time later when the doctor raised himself from the floor. Sweat beads dotted his forehead even in the cold Arctic air. "He'll be all right," he said wearily. "Some of you lend a hand and get him over to the boat." He looked at the circle of watchers and shook his head. "Another twenty minutes--maybe ten--and we'd have been too late. Say-y, how'd we get here so fast?"
They told him about the telegram from the amateur in Nome, and he nodded his head. They told him about the operator in Oahu, and he grunted. But when they told him about the amateur in New Zealand who first sensed impending tragedy he only stared for a long moment without speaking.
Then his tired eyes turned to the small caravan of stretcher-bearers as it grew smaller in the distance, dimly visible in the starlight. They heard the doctor mutter to himself: "Radio, was it? Mankind is developing strange powers for itself these days, it seems to me. Well, whatever it was, it worked."
And then they heard him chuckle, grimly and without humor. "Call the doctor! The nearest telephone is ten thousand miles away."
He glanced once more toward his patient. They were carrying De Vinna aboard the ship. The doctor buttoned his heavy collar at the throat and pulled on his mittens and started along the trail back to town.