Calling CQ

Of course it would have been more natural for his boy to have helped him
on the roof, but the boy's cousin would do fine. He was 11, and big for
11, so the two of them should be able to hoist up the home-made antenna
structure without any difficulty.

He had been working on his ham rig for several years now, soldering
the basic parts of the transmitter together while living in that tiny
little one bedroom apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, an abode
he and his wife had been fortunate to rent, and a rather pleasant spot to
live with the two kids (one a newborn) during the final days of the war.
He had acquired his amateur radio license the previous fall. The hard part
had been that Morse code test, in which you had to correctly interpret
at least thirteen words per minute and, as easy as that may sound,
he had struggled to do it. Learning the code itself wasn't all that
difficult; after all it was just combinations of dots and dashes---or as
the cognescenti called them, di's and dah's. But unravelling those di's
and dah's he heard in the headphones at a rate of five or six per second,
and then having to scribble down on paper the corresponding letters had
been a struggle.

He had also taught his boy the code, and he knew one day that kid would
surely get his own license and they'd both be on the air communicating
with hams around the world. It really would have been better had he
been able to have his boy help him install this damn antenna on the roof,
but the nephew would do nicely. He was 11, and he was strong.

"Dah-di-dah-di dah-dah-di-dah, Dah-di-dah-di dah-dah-di-dah, " he'd
say to his boy, and the kid was quick and repeated it right away.
"That's how you call CQ, CQ," he told him, "and then you listen to see if
somebody calls back. It's the way you let somebody know you're wanting
to connect." He told him that you needed to let the others know your
call letters so they could respond, and the way you indicated that was
to send the word "de," which in code was dah-di-di di. This word meant
"from," probably was Latin or something, and then after that you'd send
out your call letters. His call was W1OCW, so that meant you'd send "CQ,
CQ, de w1ocw." The boy caught on immediately and could type out the code:
"dah-di-dah-di dah-dah-di-dah dah-di-dah-di dah-dah-di-dah dah-di-di
di di-dah-dah di-dah-dah-dah-dah dah-dah-dah dah-di-dah-di di-dah-dah"
He was proud of his boy.

After all the soldering was done and the basic transmitter built, he
bought a receiver from some commercial outfit, and then he was ready to
get on the air. But he never wanted to broadcast CW---in code---he wanted
to use "phone," meaning install a mike and use voice transmission. To
accomplish that, the transmitter had to be a good bit more complicated,
but he thought it would be worth it. In fact, he never really liked the
dots and dashes as much as his son did. That kid would turn out to be
a mathematician, the kind of guy who'd relish codes and ciphers and such.

Then later, the war being over, relocated with his family in Florida,
the home-made transmitter properly upgraded to phone, and his call letters
having been changed to W4OCW from W1OCW, he was finally on the air.

"I'm using two 6l6's to drive a pair of 807's," he'd describe his
transmitter to whoever had responded to his CQ---now broadcast by voice
instead of with those di's and dah's. The boy would sit with him in
the ham shack, the dad constantly watching to make sure the boy's hand
wouldn't accidentally touch a hot wire, while he himself called out over
the air to talk to another amateur radio guy.

"The handle here is Larry," he'd say, although his name wasn't Larry
at all. That was his boy's name. He himself was called Button by all
of his family, and he must have reckoned that, though Button might be
a kind of clasp, it was not a fit ham's handle.

Never mind your 6l6's and your 807's, if you wanted to have some
real broadcasting muscle, you needed a personally-designed antenna,
one especially configured for your shack's topography, your local
atmospheric conditions, the frequency band to which you were assigned,
etc., and that's what he'd finally learned how to make. After several
months of intently studying antenna designs in ham magazines, and then
running his plans by fellow radio enthusiasts at his work, he built two
6-foot wooden squares out of 1 by 2's, each having antenna wire strung
in a critically-designed criss-cross pattern. Then he joined the two
assemblies using a metal rod to form a kind of dumbell, maybe ten feet
long, with the wired squares as the two ends. This whole apparatus
was to be mounted on a rotatable wheel at the end of a vertical post
sticking up out of the roof, allowing the antenna to be precisely aligned,
from inside the shack, with the incoming radio waves. To get this damn
thing in place was going to take some coordinated muscle. He would have
preferred his boy to be helping him, but the nephew would do fine. He
was big for his age, ...

He was a quiet man, a temperate fellow, an accepting and accommodating
gentle man, whose voice was rarely raised. He had sat patiently for
hours carefully soldering little wires to little posts to build his radio
transmitter, had calmly sat on the couch practicing his dots and dashes,
displaying naught but commitment and diligence, and had unselfishly
spent many days explaining to his boy as best he could---with his own
limited accurate knowledge of electronics and radio transmission---just
how the electromagnetic wave came in here, was modulated there, filtered
through this condenser, then amplified here, and finally converted to
audio in the speaker. He sounded, actually was, that same calm fellow
when he was on the air---never bragging about his 6l6's and his 807's
and how they were designed in a push-pull circuit that would efficiently
double his power---but just pleasantly used his on-air time describing
the beautiful Orlando weather, agreeing to exchange QSL cards, and
wishing his conversationalists the best of luck with their equipment.
"73's," he say, using the ham's code for "have a nice day."

But he couldn't ask his boy to climb on to the edge of the roof, and try
to balance a six foot square of wires, while his dad drilled a hole in the
post and tried to secure the dumbell-shaped antenna onto it. the boy was
also 11 and strong enough, but it just wouldn't do. The cousin didn't
know anything about dah-di-dah-di dah-dah-di-dah, but he'd do fine to
help erect this highly-improved access to the ham world.

His boy stood in the yard listening to the construction on the roof, in
a way longing to have been up there helping. He couldn't see anything,
but he imagined them wrenching the big bolts into place so that South
America, India, Norway, and everywhere else in the world would come in
loud and clear when they next cranked up the rig.

But then something went wrong. Was there some wind, a breath of a
breeze throwing something off balance? Did his cousin drop his end of
the antenna? Did some wire break, ruining the whole antenna circuitry?
The boy didn't know, and he never really was told exactly what
happened. All he heard was his dad saying something, in an unfamiliar
loud voice, like "OK, never mind, let it go, it ain't gonna work, just
step back." And then apparently his dad had somehow taken hold of the
entire contraption in his own hands, releasing the cousin from duty,
and had thrown the whole goddam thing, probably his most ambitious ham
project, off the roof and sent it crashing to the ground midst the orange
trees beside the house.

The boy wondered if he could have helped out. Was his father crying?

Vignette

A Quantum Moment

by Larry Baggett

"Oh, I think I cut myself!" I remember saying that.
In truth it may well have been my Mom who told me that I said it.

That June day in Mobile, my friend Glen Presley and I had slingshots,
which nobody's mother had forbidden us to play with, and our plan was
to arm ourselves with a sack of rocks and go somewhere to hone up on our
slinging. We found some rocks, but it was getting an ammo belt that was
our problem. It had to be some kind of pouch that could be attached to our
belts or shorts, so we could have both hands free to load and sling. The
perfect solution appeared in my mom's kitchen: a couple of those string
bags that potatoes came in. The bag had a nice wide opening at the top,
and the mesh was just fine enough to hold our ammo. The only problem
was that the string handles needed to be cut so we could tie them around
our belts. Easy enough. Just get a knife and cut it.

"Use your scissors," my mother said, as she always did when I asked for a
knife. I had some silly baby scissors that would hardly cut tissue paper,
let alone a real ammo belt loop, so her wise safety directive was ignored.

There are events in life that people might call bifurcative moments,
an unperceived fork in the road, or a wrinkle in time that keeps you
pondering what would have, could have, happened if ... What if the
trajectories of the shots fired by Lee Harvey Oswald or John Hinkley
had been just a couple of inches different? What if Princess Diana's
chauffeur had consumed one fewer cognacs? Name your own favorite flip
of the coin moment. I like to call such an event a "quantum moment."
Modern physicists teach us that the state of a system, though ordinarily
flowing along smoothly in time, can appear to switch instantaneously to
a totally different state. We tend to think of this as a quantum leap
forward, but Heisenberg and company would tell us that it equally well
could be a leap backward or even more likely a leap sideways. It's an
unexpected discontinuity, at least to our perception. We do indeed like
to believe that there is the other fork.

For me such a quantum moment happened like this. My mom was in our
kitchen preparing lunch, I walked in and saw a paring knife on the
counter. What if I'd obediently turned around and found my scissors?
No, I took the knife to cut the string on my potato sack.

"Never cut toward yourself," my dad had instructed me over and over. Yet
I cut toward myself with the paring knife. Yes, the point of the knife
went straight into my right eye. "Oh, I think I cut myself!"

Well what was a mother to do? Her five-year old is standing there in the
kitchen, the dagger in his hand, his lifted eyelid revealing an enormous
gash in the eyeball, and Glen Presley there, barefooted holding a potato
sack full of rocks. The details of what happened next no longer exist
in my memory, but no doubt there was a rapid trip to the hospital or
doctor's office or whatever place was available in Mobile in June of
1944. Certainly there were no cell phones to call Dad and maybe not even
a land line in our little military project house.

I believe that a Dr. Sellers immediately operated on me and sewed up
the gash in my eye, and everybody went home to wait and see what would
happen to Larry. But Larry wasn't all right. Indeed my right eye was
seriously damaged from the injury, so that its likelihood of regaining
any vision at all was quickly deemed by Dr. Sellers to be minimal. And
then the story got worse.

One day, just a few weeks later, we were in a city park, and at some
point my mother realized that I couldn't see what she was sitting
on. "What's this?" I must have asked, while running my hands over the
seat and the back. "Oh, it's a bench," I figured out. She probably asked
me some questions: "Can you see the bench? Can you see how many fingers
I'm holding up? Do you see your dad over there?" I think I gave wrong
answers to all these queries, no doubt throwing everyone into a frenzy. I
was evidently totally blind in both eyes, and, surely unfathomable to them
all, I hadn't even noticed that it was happening. Could I see yesterday?
Could I see two days ago? Could I see last week?

"Sympathetic Ophthalmia" was the final diagnosis. Sometimes, when one
eye is seriously injured, the other one goes totally blind due to some,
not well understood, cooperative link between the two optic nerves,
and that's apparently what happened to me.

Now, some sixty-five years later, I am retired, thinking back
on my career of forty years as an active and, I immodestly say,
internationally-recognized mathematical researcher at the University of
Colorado, where I have taught hundreds of both undergraduate and graduate
mathematics students.

What if my particular quantum moment hadn't happened? Would I have
played baseball in high school, in college, maybe made it to the Majors?
How would I have performed as a hunter, a bicycle rider, an operator of
a lawn mower, or even a bagger at the grocery store? Would I have been
popular with girls, winking at them during class, swirling one around
the homecoming dance floor, or showing off in front of them at the beach?
Could I have flown an airplane, hitchhiked to California, become a movie
critic, been a surgeon, ...?

Not even Heisenberg knows. Maybe I would have been a mathematician.

Light in August

I really need to belong to a book group.
So many characters, so many stories.

That Faulkner is damn good!