The local paper ran a spread this week on ham radio operators in the area. It was a great story and brought back memories of long, long ago, well, fifty years or so, when my son was going on eleven and his sister thirteen.
Judy was intrigued by a series of teen novels from the library about teen-aged ham radio operators and their adventures. She spoke of them often, evincing a major interest in the subject. Christmas was coming up so I decided to test her interest by giving her a receiver in a kit, thinking if she could put it together, perhaps she would pursue the rest of it – all based on first learning Morse code, which seemed to me an almost insurmountable chore.
What happened is now almost laughable but at the time was grounds for major annoyance. Judy’s father, distinguished for his devotion to his work which kept him away from the house until after we had gone to bed, and gone again before we rose up, so that we rarely saw him, decided to put the receiver together, thus defeating my whole purpose. While we were innocently sleeping, he didn’t go to bed at all but spent the entire night putting the receiver together! Where was her test? I was really ticked off.
Unknown to all of us, however, a different test lay ahead, one we could never have imagined. I was still reeling with disappointment at the outcome of the radio receiver when Christmas vacation was over. The kids went back to school.
Not many days into the new year, Eric’s teacher called to tell me he was continually complaining he couldn’t see the blackboard. She moved him closer, but his complaints kept on, so she thought I should know about it. Perhaps, she suggested, he needed glasses.
So we made our first visit to a doctor which was to be the first of many visits to several doctors, although I didn’t know this at the time. By now, Eric was complaining of a sore throat so a visit to our family doctor brought a diagnosis of strep throat for which antibiotics were advised by our g.p. That did nothing for the headaches of which he now began complaining. The ENT doctor admitted the cause of the vision problem was a mystery, and, strangely he found, Eric had no sinus cavities, so something was definitely wrong. Altogether we visited five different doctors, each of whom came up with a different verdict. It was the beginning era of psychosomatic diagnoses, a fad which swept through medicine for a time. If there were no bones sticking through the skin and blood wasn’t poring out the cells, it had to be psychosomatic.
Earlier in the fall I volunteered to publish a booklet on the Crimes of Khrushchev, for the National Minute Women of the USA, Inc., Handbook for the Summit, since Mr. Eisenhower was scheduled for a summit meeting with the Butcher of the Kulaks in June that year. The booklet was written by a group of former Intelligence Officers, SPX Associates, so while Eric and I sat in medical offices waiting for tests and conferences, we folded press releases, stuffed envelopes and licked stamps to announce the publication to a waiting world – we hoped. These chores occupied our time and gave us something to think and talk about besides his growing illness which was becoming more acute each day, with these puzzling symptoms.
I was, however, no longer puzzled as I knew in my heart there was a growth on the brain, a diagnosis I kept to myself, but which in my heart I dreaded and didn’t want to hear, but was convinced. The mysterious symptoms kept advancing: There were days when he seemed very feverish but the thermometer recorded a subnormal temperature. Other days he suffered from incredible dizziness which made him think he was falling off the bed, even as his head ached and his vision was disturbed, and his throat continued to hurt. By February, however, he was losing weight, he was very pale, listless, and now began wheezing as if he had asthma.
We went to a Beverly Hills physician who examined him from his toes up, looking at the rough knees and elbows which I often accused Eric of not scrubbing and sent him back to scrub. All, said this strange doctor, indicative of a shortage of Vitamin A of long standing, and eventually scheduled a brain scan. The technician there called my attention to the fact he seemed to be burning up, but the temperature was subnormal.
Very shortly the test results came in and I was advised to take him to a Neurological Center at an address in East Los Angeles. I didn’t know what a neurological center was until we arrived to find it was the 4th floor of White Memorial Hospital, housing brain surgeons. On the way to the then unknown destination we stopped at the mailbox. Eric was so excited, the first orders for the Handbook were in the mail which he eagerly tore open on the long trip to what turned out to be a hospital.
As it turned out, Eric did not leave the hospital, because like Job, that which I feared had come upon me. I was given a grave prognosis: surgery had to be scheduled for the very next morning, because the statistics were against us.
That was the beginning of a long siege of doctors and hospital visits, which was how ham radios got into the act.
The hospital in East Los Angeles was a very long way from where we lived on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Things did not go well at the medical facility. I was dividing my days between Eric’s needs at the hospital, which was a drain on his sister,Judy, whom I enrolled in Marymount located on the Peninsula with a bus for pickup and delivery.
Thus she became a latch key kid. The situation was very stressful for her, so the ham radio seemed a great diversion from the medical problems confronting us daily. Judy needed something that would engage her attention, as well as make her the center of the activity, something of her own to alleviate her anxiety so I elected ham radio to fill the gap.
Before a ham operator can become a “general” and actually converse on the airway, he/she has to master Morse code and transmit that way, while learning the basics of talk radio, all of which Judy did, pretty much on her own, although I would take her to whatever classes were needed. Ham radio operators are great family people so when there were weekends of gatherings at the beach, I would take her down to mingle and meet others with similar drives. I admit I had no hesitation in leaving her with some of the families we met there. The local paper featured her story as she was the youngest female, self-taught, which also helped her to overcome the anxiety which pervaded the household.
Eventually, through a miracle, Eric returned home, and began a period of recuperation before returning to school. Judy was by now a general and could talk with young men around the country. She had a soft sweet dulcet voice (still does actually), but by this time Eric had become a mean little boy! Throughout his long convalescence at home, Judy waited on him hand and foot, played games with him, just generally doting on him, and he repaid her kindness by shouting across the room at the mike while she was talking with the operators at the other end. In fact, there wasn’t much he didn’t think of to torment her.
By then we knew he would live a thing which had been doubtful for so many months, I volunteered to take him to Morse code classes, too, so that the two of them would be able to communicate by radio in the days ahead which I visualized as eventually coming to this country, but he didn’t want to do the work.
Judy, however, had visualized herself as a missionary using the radio to report to civilization from the jungles somewhere, and much later that is what she did do for years, plus teaching other missionaries the elements of ham radio. Of course, she also dragged along her 7 children through those years on the field, and several of them have followed in her footsteps, except they are now computer whizzes. It all started with ham radio, half a century ago.
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