W3NAV Startup
|
|
I am trying to remember how the Coke Center Radio Club got started in
the 1950's. I first got my Novice license in1954 so the club may have
restarted in 55 or 56. Actually, it was a restart since the club
traced its roots back as far as the 1920's, I believe. I remember that
we talked about Cree Corpenny (sp-?) being involved in the early days.
Cree moved to Ohio to invent the D-104 microphone prior to WWII. He
may have been 3UG. The club reestablished W3UG as our second station.
It was operated from the Connellsville Fire Station for RACES. Harry
Laughrey also may have been the original club.
As for the start of the club, Joe Armon, W3TTV; Paul Heffley, W3NCE(?)
and myself were certainly in it. I think I almost remember the
organizational meeting. It may have originated when Ned Culler, W3JW
started RACES (Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service), a part of Civil
Defense. Those were the days of THE BOMB! Dr. Culler was the
Superintendent of Schools for Connellsville Joint School System.
Therefore he was my dad's boss and I was a student in his schools. I
bought my 3-element 20-meter beam from Ned (for $15 I think). Guys
like Harry Dolde and Chuck Weihe came later as graduates of the club's
code and theory classes. Bill Brown was a kid younger than me who hung
around with me at the club a lot.
Somehow the club got the use of the old radio range station between
Uniontown and Connellsville. There were two small blockhouses there,
each surrounded by 60' or 90' telephone poles. The National Guard used
the one at the bottom of the hill and we got the one on the top. The
underbrush was like a jungle at first with copperheads everywhere. I
remember going there with Paul Heffley and finding the blockhouse
filled with dust and debris. We cleaned it out and installed a large
ventilation fan in the only hole in the wall. I still remember Paul
pounding bolt anchor holes in the blocks with a star drill. Many of
the parts we used were donated. To prevent anyone sawing through the
bars over the ventilating fan, Paul put steel rods loose inside the
tubes he used for bars so that a hacksaw would come up against the rod
and it would just turn and could not be sawn through.
Ned Culler got an old Navy surplus 2-meter transceiver through RACES.
We sold raffle tickets to raise money for the B&W and NC-300. Browine
and I cut down the weeds and brush to keep the copperheads away and I
climbed the 60' and 90' poles to put up antennas. 90' is really a long
way up! I was pretty scared on them but I mounted a broom on top of
the eastern 90'er. I never went over 50' on the western 90' pole
because woodpeckers had made a large hole in it 30' up. I think Harry
Dolde and I ere the only ones dumb enough to climb the poles. Harry
was line chief for Bell Telephone and had raced up poles using belt
and spikes in company contests. I remember sitting in a meeting once
when one piece of coax by the 2-meter rig started to move. It was a
copperhead and Harry nailed it from across the room with a pack of
duct seal.
As we got more into RACES work, we set up additional stations in the
Connellsville Fire Station and in county Civil Defense Headquarters
south of Uniontown in an old folks home (I believe). Once we had a
large work party there and Paul Heffley and I were on the high roof of
the county HQ building when Paul got an urgent call. His wife had
just gone into the hospital to have a baby so Paul had to rush home.
A couple of people had ridden down with him and they had to pile into
my old Pontiac to go home. Ned Culler was one of them. As I was going
through Uniontown, everybody suddenly started yelling at me. As I
looked back at the back seat, Browine yelled, "Look out, Beezer.
(Beezer, my nickname from W3BZR) You just went through a red light."
"Where, where??" Ned Culler (my superintendent of schools) yelled
from beside me, "Look out! You just ran another one!" Ned never rode
in my car again.
We worked on many projects in those days. Paul Heffley, Harry Dolde,
Bill Brown and I were the regulars then. We could work 10 hours,
driving to and from some location and eating lunch together and Harry
Dolde would emit a continuous stream of jokes that kept us all in
stitches.
I lived on the top of a big hill on Cedar Avenue above the railroad
yards. I got a call for a Civil Defense alert, "This is no drill." I
jumped into my car and started down the hill to the fire station, which
was by the bridge and the police station, across from the post office.
As I rushed down the hill, the brake pedal went to the floor- no brakes.
That was how I learned to use the emergency brake to drive. I made it
to the station ok and got it fired up. I used to work traffic on the
Pennsylvania Phone Net all the time and Paul Heffley was a radio
operator from the war. Fayette County thus had the best traffic
handlers on the whole statewide network. Every message sent over the
Civil Defense network was "QSL. QRV." While other RACES stations asked
for repeat after repeat.
We also worked every Field Day contest from Mount Negro, the highest
mountain in Pennsylvania. We operated several stations from the fire
tower location. One of the Field Days, I used a portable 2-meter
walkie-talkie from the top of the tower and contacted another radio
club from the Washington, D.C. area who was seven miles away on the
highest mountain in Maryland. The fellow I talked with was visiting
with the club there while he was on a business trip to D.C. from
California. Years later while working as an engineer for Northrop
Aircraft Corporation, I restarted the Northrop Radio Club, W6VPZ. One
of the charter members (and still active in the club) was Nilan Kincaid.
He said, "Your call sounds familiar." As we talked, we learned that
Nilan was the guy I talked with on the other tower that Field Day years
before. It's a small world.
These are some of my memories of those days long ago as I grew up in
the Coke Center Radio Club. After I graduated from Penn State I
migrated to California, married Chuck Weihe (W3HTG)'s daughter, had 6
kids (5 girls, 1 boy), worked 25 years for Northrop, owned a store in
Lynchburg, TN and got divorced. Most of the memories from those days
are clearer than last week.
|
|