Memoir

Remembrances of things past, in my own life and those near to me

My Favorite (Or Maybe Second Favorite) Year

Harry Helms recently sent me something he thought I might enjoy: A copy of the 1964 Allied Radio catalog. When I opened the package and sat down with it, I realized that 1964 might well be my favorite year, if second to any then second only to the magical summer of 1969, when I met Carol. (1969 was painful at times for reasons that had nothing to do with Carol, first of which being that in 1964 my father was not dying of cancer.) I turned 12 in the summer of 1964, and had not yet begun to feel the hormone storm that would close in by the summer of '65 and make me crazy for years to come. Granted, many of the girls returned to IC School that September with a couple of things they didn't have the previous June, but apart from a passing fascination with a little girl named Laura that fall (which she never found out about—whew!) the whole girl thing blew past me. Halloween was on a Saturday that year—what luck!—and it was warm. Ten full hours to scavenge sugar from the neighbors, and we didn't need three sweaters under our costumes!

But for me in 1964, electronics was the thing. I had discovered electronics when I was 10, began seriously reading library books about it and building things when I was 11, and had begun to achieve some modest success by the time I turned 12. Simple radios were problematic, because my antenna looked right down the throat of hillbilly rock station WJJD's 50,000 watt directive array a mile or so northwest of me in Park Ridge, so I built other things: A two-transistor organ (with keys made of strips of tin can metal) a cigar-box intercom (put to good use by the Fox Patrol at Camp Owassipe that summer) and a capacity-operated proximity relay, which (being “spooky action at a distance”) was about as close to magic as it came.

That summer my father taught me how to take the CTA bus down to Six Corners (over my mother's strident objection) and always gave me a couple of dollars to spend at Olson Electronics on Milwaukee Avenue, back at a time when a couple of dollars would buy a pocketful of resistors, capacitors, and transistors. Allied was also in town (at 100 N. Western Avenue) but that was a lot farther away, and not in an especially good neighborhood. I knew Allied from its catalog and its catalog alone.

But what a catalog! Anything a boy teetering on the edge of the Age of Lust might want was right there: Ham radio, CB, shortwave, hi-fi stereo, tape decks, portable radios, test equipment, speakers, tools, parts cabinets, resistors, capacitors, transformers, Miniboxes, plugs and sockets and chassis punches and antenna insulators, everything. The first 77 pages of the catalog was the full list of Knight Kits, which were cheaper than finished gear because you put them together yourself. I later went on to build a few and own many more Knight items, including the wonderful T-60 CW/AM transmitter, the nice LC-1 CPO, the so-so R-55A receiver, and the totally wretched T150A VFO transmitter, which wandered across more territory and with more brute persistence than an alley cat. Interestingly, the Knight Kit I wanted the most in 1964 I never got: The Span Master shortwave radio (at left) which I thought then (and may still) to be the coolest-looking radio in history.

The back of the catalog was fascinating, as it listed in minuscule type endless small electronic parts and hardware, some of which I ordered through the mail, careful to send enough money to cover the goods and postage, and often (to be sure I hadn't messed up the shipping calculations) a little more—which Allied always honestly refunded, in the form of 4c and 7c credit slips to be applied to my next order. That part of the catalog is still useful as a reference: If you run across a Knight 61G466 power transformer at a hamfest, the catalog will tell you what the output voltages of its various windings are.

Some of the stuff I didn't want, and often had no clear concept of why it was useful: What good, after all, was a clock radio? I have an inner alarm clock that I can “set” to any arbitrary time and have never had any trouble bouncing out of bed at 6 ayem, often singing. (Carol is a very patient woman.) “You can wake up to music!” said the ad. Indeed. And you could plug your coffee pot into the back of the radio, which I just couldn't figure, as we were a gas household and an electric coffee pot was heresy, pure and simple. Tachometers and electronic ignition systems—no visceral response; when you're 12 and “small for your age” driving is almost unimaginable. The Blonder-Tongue (now there's a name for you!) TV mast signal amplifiers puzzled me; in Chicago you could practically get Channel 9 on your fillings. (You would, if WJJD hadn't already saturated them.)

1964 was the last great year of tube electronics, and the transmitters, receivers, and test gear units were not only big enough to see, they were big enough to cause serious injury if dropped on body parts. (I dropped a Central Electronics 100V transmitter on my thumb in 1998, and my thumbnail has never been the same since. And hey, in 1998 I was 46 and careful.) The prices on much of it were daunting: The Hallicrafters SR-150 SSB transmitter was $689—what the Inflation Calculator tells me would cost over $4600 today. The best a 12-year-old boy could do was look at the pictures and think, Hey, someday I may have this thing! The Allied catalog was the drool book of all drool books.

Yes, it was a great year. When my family went out to California on the Union Pacific that summer, my Allied catalog went with me (along with several issues of Popular Electronics and a couple of Alfred Morgan's books) and I got past the endless wheat fields of eastern Wyoming doodling chassis layouts on a pad of paper. That fall I built a regenerative receiver from a Popular Electronics article, with $15 worth of parts carefully ordered (and paid for by my saintly father) from the 1965 Allied catalog, which arrived without being summoned in October. I could never make it work well (though it picked up WJJD without any trouble) and there were times when I was tempted to give up electronics and just stare at Laura in English class like all the other guys did. But no: Girls were mysterious, and I would be years'n'years figuring them out. (I may still have a few years to go on that score.) But electronics? You flip a switch, and things happen. That was my kind of magic, and the Allied catalog was where it all came from, whether in grand dreams or grubby reality. I had both, and Halloween was on a Saturday! Life was good.

Tabletop Fluoroscopy for Boys, Circa 1913

Mar 31st, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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It took a few minutes of flipping through some books in my workshop, but I eventually found what I remembered: That one of my “boys” books contained a description of a tabletop X-ray setup. The book in question is The Boy Electrician, the first volume of many from Alfred Morgan, who later wrote The Boys' First Book of Radio and Electronics and its three sequels, all of which loomed large in my tinkersome youth. The Boy Electrician was originally published in 1913 and is now in the public domain. The 1913 edition has been reprinted by Lindsay Books and I consider it worth having. There was a significant revision in 1943 that added chapters on radio and a few other things, and as best I can tell, the copyright on that edition was not renewed and it too is now in the public domain. A 40 MB PDF of the 1943 edition is here.

The Boy Electrician explains that “it is possible to obtain small X-ray tubes that will operate satisfactorily on an inch and one half spark coil.” This does not refer to the coil's dimensions; it means a coil capable of generating a spark an inch and a half long. He goes on to say that X-ray tubes cost about four and a half dollars each (albeit 1913 dollars) and may be obtained from laboratory supply houses. Hookup is fairly simple, with the spark coil driven by four of those wonderfully gutsy #6 dry cells with the huge carbon rod running down the middle. The drawing of the setup is shown below:

Morgan explains that you can either view images directly with a fluoroscope or expose ordinary photographic plates by placing an object to be X-rayed between the tube and the plate and leaving it there for fifteen minutes. This includes things like purses, mice, or…your hand. If you have the money, he also explains that a hand-held fluoroscope may be constructed by simply coating a sheet of white paper with crystals of platinum barium cyanide. It looks like the fluoroscope screen is used by basically staring at the X-ray tube with the object to be X-rayed between the tube and the paper screen.

It would be interesting to know just how many boys bought the tube and tried to make it work; though given that $4.50 in 1913 would be about $100 today, I doubt it was many. Nor do I know how toxic platinum barium cyanide is, but I'm guessing a little more than iron filings. (On the other hand, my 1962 chemistry set contained a little bottle of sodium ferrocyanide, which sounds much worse than it actually is.)

I remember taking The Boy Electrician out of the Chicago Public Library when I was 12 or so and pondering the X-ray project. What stopped me wasn't any fear of X-rays themselves, but concern that the whomping big spark coil would wipe out TV reception for a quarter mile in every direction and get me in trouble with the FCC. My friend Art had an old Model T ignition coil, and we could hear it sizzling on Art's transistor radio for half a block. The project had to be safe; I mean, the book was in the juvenile section of the library…

We knew less about a lot of things in 1913; X-rays were in some respects the least of it. But the hazard is significant, if not as bloodcurdling as luddites specializing in radiation insist. People used to self-treat insomnia by inhaling chloroform; well-known Victorian British scientist Edmund Gurney died by falling asleep with a chloroform-soaked cloth next to his nose. We know more now, and understand the precautions a great deal better, which has led to an escalation of conern that (untempered by any grasp of statistics or risk evaluation) quickly descends to rank superstition. One has to wonder how much knowledge isn't obtained these days simply because people are afraid of small but nonzero hazards. Panic over traces of phthalates—then heedlessly drive fifty miles to a football game with a car full of kids. It's the modern way of life.

2008: The Final Odyssey

Mar 18th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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I had breakfast with Isaac Asimov. I shook hands with Robert Heinlein. Kate Wilhelm did a tarot reading for me. I've workshopped with Gene Wolfe, George R. R. Martin, and A. J. Budrys. Nancy Kress is still a close friend. David Gerrold wrote for my magazine for ten years. I saw Keith Laumer from a distance once, and have had several conversations with Larry Niven and David Brin. But I have never been anywhere close to Arthur C. Clarke. Now I won't get the chance; as I learned on arriving at home this evening, he has died in Sri Lanka at age 90.

Arthur C. Clarke was my favorite SF writer for a long time. Asimov was a little dull, and Heinlein's stridency bothered me at times, but Clarke was as close to perfect as SF writers got for me, at least in high school—and maybe still. His SF was about ideas, and he let nothing else get in the way of those ideas. I began writing SF by imitating his short stories. When I later began writing SF novels I was imitating Keith Laumer, because I knew damned well that I could never imitate Against the Fall of Night or Childhood's End.

As I have reported here more than once, when I was seventeen I gulped and asked a beautiful girl to go out with me and see 2001: A Space Odyssey. She said yes. Seven years later, Carol said yes again, when I asked her to share a different kind of odyssey with me. Yup, Arthur C. Clarke landed me first a best friend, then a lover, and finally a spouse. (One doesn't get that kind of service from Barry Malzberg.)

There's not much more to say. When a man gets to be 90 before he dies, I don't mourn, I celebrate. We had him a long time, and now he is free of all the suffering and limitations inherent in flesh. I happen to think that I may meet him yet…but let that pass. We have his stories. He worked his magic on me, and I would not be the writer I am if he were not the writer he is.

Just one more word: Thanks, Sir Arthur. Really. And thanks again.

Treasure Chest and Obama as Pettigrew

Mar 11th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Even diehard comics fans have generally never heard of Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact—unless, of course, they went to Catholic grade school between 1946 and 1972. It was a comic book produced in Ohio for national distribution to parochial schools, and maps well to the era of Postwar Triumphal Catholicism. I was a grade schooler between 1958 and 1966, so Treasure Chest was always kicking around somewhere, along with Our Little Messenger, Young Catholic Messenger, and numerous other things that the George A. Pflaum Company of Dayton was always pumping out. I read Treasure Chest when it was handy, though I did so absent-mindedly and was never a big fan. The comic ran the gamut from preachy (always) to silly (often) and the quality was very uneven. The larger and long-running series were often beautifully done from a writing and art standpoint, though much of it glorified sports, which was a Catholic fetish at that time, in the hopes that young boys exhausted by sports will not go off by themselves somewhere and, well, you know.

I was chasing memories around the Web the other night when I discovered the Treasure Chest archive at the Washington Research Library Consortium. This is a wonderful thing, but for copyright reasons it only has the magazines from 1946 through the end of 1963, which is unfortunate for reasons I'll relate shortly. I remembered only three of the continuing series; the rest of it had fled my brain cells until I started skimming the archive. There were textual letters from some priest (probably advising young boys not to go off by themselves somewhere and, well, you know), illustrated lives of the Saints, and insufferable lectures by Patsy Manners on etiquette and how to throw good parties. (Mixed parties! No, don't read that! We don't do such things in Chicago!) It was a real and sometimes classic comic; if you read nothing else, check out Kidnaped by a Spaceship from 1959. If they ran more like that I might have been an enthusiastic fan, but no; most of what we got was like Chuck White and His Friends, which was about an older guy who took young boys off on wholesome adventures, I'm sure so that they would not go off by themselves somewhere and, well, you know. Funny animals were big, and for a bit of prescient comic surrealism (I flashed on Cerebus) skim The Bear and the Wicked Wainwright. (At one point the Wainwright calls the Bear a “base poltroon,” which became faddish on the playground for a few weeks, though I may have been the only one of us sixth graders who bothered to look up “poltroon.”)

If Treasure Chest is currently famous for one thing, it was for the 1961-62 series This Godless Communism, which still gets the lefties het up. I rolled my eyes a little then and still do; the problem with Communism is not its godlessness but the fact that it murdered a hundred million people in the 20th century alone. Treasure Chest understood its working-class Catholic audience and was completely comfortable with praising organized labor in one of its illustrated civics lessons. No contradictions here; being a liberal has not always meant being a Marxist.

And Treasure Chest was fundamentally liberal, as the term was understood in its time. If it has been famous primarily for This Godless Communism, it may soon become even more famous for something else: a 1964 series called 1976: Pettigrew for President! inked by the well-known comics artist Joe Sinnott. Again, it was a multipart civics lesson: A very slightly futuristic tale of how a candidate runs for President during the election of 1976—12 years in our future—with a little political huggermugger thrown in to keep it from being completely boring. (There were a few scenes with the SST, but in truth not a lot of other futuremongering. I was disappointed. What? 1976? No flying cars?) What none of us noticed at the time is that we never actually saw Mr. Pettigrew full-on. We saw his back, his hands, and so on, but never got a good look at him. I guess we all figured that it was about the process and not the man himself, and in truth we were all taken in and completely poleaxed when on the final page it was revealed that Timothy Pettigrew was Black! He got the nomination, but beyond that the story was open-ended. Here's what the final panel said, courtesy NPR:

“And so this man Pettigrew became the first Negro candidate for the President of the United States. He then went out across the land, this black man, to campaign for the highest office. Would he win? Well, the year was 1976. It was the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Could he win? Well, it would depend in part on how the boys and girls reading this comic grew up and voted … it would depend on whether they believed and, indeed, lived those words in the declaration — All Men are Created Equal.”

Alas, I have yet to see the comic scanned and posted anywhere, since content published in 1964 and after is automatically still in copyright. (The earlier issues had not been renewed and thus passed into the public domain.) The best we can do is a YouTube video, of all things.

It's a measure of our progress that what was seen as an inspiring piece of comic book science fiction in 1964 smacks of tokenism today: So we should vote for him just because he's black? Or dare we ask whether he has a chance of running the country? (The country may end up doing a lot of growing up next year, heh.) And if you ever wanted to invest in comic books, now's the time to hunt down and grab Treasure Chest Volume 19, issues 11-20. They're going to be worth something soon, no matter which way things go this fall.