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Stories IV
and How I became a legend in my own mind. A work in progress.
How not to get elected...
Anyway...Throughout the school years there would be demonstrations of the democratic system under which we lived by holding elections for various position in class. I had become "one of the guys" by virtue of being able to hit or kick a ball a great distance. I could run pretty fast too. So...when an election would come up, I'd be nominated for the position, whatever it was. We would vote by secret ballot, writing the name of the candidate on a slip of paper and passing them forward to be counted. There were a great number of these election. Our class had 13 girls, 16 boys. Well...I must admit that I didn't really know what half these position were, nor the significance there was in winning. I do remember losing most of them by...wait for it...one or two votes. Years pass. Then one day on television, a national candidate is shown stuffing his ballot into a box. A bell went off...I asked myself the question as to whom had the candidate voted for? Then it dawned on me as to a possible explanation for the outcome of all those elections in school many years before. It may have been the fact that I never ever voted for myself! I thought it the height of conceit to vote for yourself. Hence I always voted for the "other" candidate. I was rigging my own loss. What a guy! I rest my case. PS. Three of the girls in my class (pictured above) Carol Hurley, Barbara Long and Vivian Schoenfeld went on to rank in the eleven highest graduates at Franklin High School...class of '62. PS. Forty year after graduating from John Muir Grade School, Seattle, I end up (another story) in Martinez, California (East Bay area, San Francisco). Well now...who's old house is located right there...in Martinez?
Speaking of Lowell School. I'd enter the school year (1952) already in progress. I had graduated the first year of school in Germany. I was initially put into the first grade at Lowell...as I would later find out. It was to see just how well I'd do. In the end I'd graduate with the second graders. Anyway...One day...it must have been very early on, that with classes over...I headed home. We lived on the second floor of a corner house on Malden Ave. The house had bay windows that looked out over an intersection. Lowell School was located about four or five short blocks west of our house. Well...what should have been a uneventful journey, soon turn into a nightmare. I'm guessing, but, I must have walked at least a mile if not more while attending school in Germany...so this relatively short walk should have been a piece of cake. Speaking of school in Germany...There I was...one day...transcribing our next days homework on my slate tablet...(true!)...when I decided for reasons still unknown to me...that I simply didn't like the look of the prescribed periods (full stops). They were...what...too small...or perhaps the wrong shape? So...I took care of that little problem...by making MY periods...square! And substantially large. It looked great to me! You could now really tell where the sentences ended. Well...all hell broke loose when the teacher saw my handywork...my artistic rendition of a period...as it were. She obviously thought differently...and had no sense of humor what so ever...none! Punishment came swiftly and with more than some vigor...more like relish. Out came my palm, which then received...three great whacks with her ruler...and cured me of any further artistic interpretations of punctuations that I may have been contemplating. I mention this little incident to illustrate the possible reason for what follows. I decided to take another route home or it could have been that I simply came out of the school via a different door...and turned left as I would have through the one that I 'should' have...Anyway, before I knew it...I was hopelessly lost. I just kept walking and walking with no plan whatsoever. Hell...I was lost. I must have taken a number of turns...because of where I ended up...and the direction from which I'd come.
Lowell School, 1911. Courtesy MOHAI (Neg. 83.10.6,844) Located on Capital Hill, the school opened in 1890 and was at first named Pontius School. In 1892 the name was changed to Columbia. Confusion set in when Seattle annexed what would become known a Columbia City with its own school of the same name, hence the name was again changed in 1910 to Lowell School, after the American poet, essayist and diplomat James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). In 1959, at 70 years of age, the school was the oldest school house still in use. In 1960 it was destroyed and replaced with a new addition...Anyway...
I came to an intersection...and was in the process of taking my bearings...yeah right...when I just happened to look up. THERE...in the bay window was my dear mother, darning socks...for all I know. She looked out...and seeing me...waved. I waved back.
Some things don't change... Thinking about grade (for me, 3-6) school...I remember being introduced to the thrill and excitement of "trading cards". We had 'Wheels', 'Wings', 'Look-an-See', 'Scoop' and of course football and baseball cards.
I can't tell you the names of players today...but I do remember them from the past. "...the games' not over...till it's over..." Yogi Berra.
Three coins... Coin 1 There is an advantage to being short. When you are a child...you are closer to the ground...which is great for finding things. So it was while going home from John Muir Grade School. My path was always the same. It was pretty easy actually...out the Horton street door and slip onto 32nd...and head north...that's it!
This path would cross a greenbelt at Franklin High School. This greenbelt was designed by J. C. Olmsted of the Olmsted Brothers as part of a citywide park system starting in 1903 and incorporated Franklin H. S. (1914). It looks as though 32nd Avenue was not supposed to cut through because there were no curbs, nor sidewalks. On the west side, the park was cut back to a point were you simple walked in the street. On the east side bare dirt constituted the sidewalk, a product of rain and little feet, going back and forth to school for forty plus years, trampling the grass. I also remember that there was this pipe that was becoming exposed more and more. It ran across the path.
White ">" indicates the location of the find. Photo taken during final approch into SEA-TAC...on a British Airways flight...London to Seattle. So it was that day, when on the ground, I spot a dark round form. I pick it up...it was a coin. An OLD coin which I don't recognize. It did have a visible date...1857. Later I would ID it as a Flying Eagle Penny, 1857. The population of Seattle was 250 at that time. This date is about fifty years before the park was constructed. About the time of the founding of Seattle (1852).
PS...1857 was the year during which Mt. St. Helens last erupted prior to the "big one" in 1980.
Coin 2 The garage was out of hand. A major contributor to the overall disaster was the sauna having been located in the garage. It was decided to move it outside to re-claim space inside. I found a location and was soon clearing the ground. Things went well and I was reaching a point where I would lay down some sand, in effect covering the bare dirt. I thought it would be a shame to cover this area and not know what "treasure" might lay just beneath the surface. Master Richard had received a metal detector for Christmas...and he wasn't at home...so. Damn...right in the middle of the cleared area...a hit! Dig a bit...there...A one POUND coin...dated 1984! Yeah...I know! I was impressed too!
Coin 3 The Dose House had four bedrooms plus two more in the basement. I needed a real darkroom and proposed taking over one of the rooms in the basement and converting it. Well...the whole basement needed remodeling so at one point I started to dismantle some really scruffy shelving. It also meant removing some material that was covering major junction of timber. It was then that as I looked at the joints and...where one four-by-four rested on a unevenly cut second four-by-four, I saw it. The shinny edge that I just knew had to be a coin. Now, this coin was PLACED there on purpose! I can only speculate that the date on the coin matched the date that it was placed there, though the coin is worn a bit.
Some people do think about the future...30 years...in this case.
14W2035 and The night we were raided by the "feds"... I was at Coleman's house when the phone rang. I'm told that the phone call was for me. Walt was a licensed (W7LAL I think he was) HAM...(an amateur radio operator) and I was there checking out his shack. The caller was my Mom! GADS! She told me that the FCC (Federal Communications Commission)...the 'feds"...were there and that I should come right home. I ran all the way...but by the time I got there, the feds had left. She filled me in as to what they had said once they saw our shack. She said, they said, that there was something wrong...etc...and that they'd be back. Well...CB radio was the latest technology to capture the public's attention. I forwarded the idea that we should...the OM and I...build our own gear. We'd need to build the base station transmitter and antenna, a converter for the car's receiver and a transmitter for the car...that would be slung under the dash.
Parts and schematics were collected and I began to build. The base station transmitter was built as three chassis...RF power, modulator and power supply and would be metered. The antenna was to be a half wave vertical dipole mounted on the peak of the roof. The coax was RG-8! Street level was some 300 feet above sea level. The peak of the roof was 40 feet higher and the antenna was above that. Lake Washington stretched out north to south for miles. Unbeknownst to us, the FCC had a monitoring station located just across the lake on Mercer Island. The island was literally across from us...and for all practical purposes just water between. The distance was about a mile, no more than two! The radiation pattern for our antenna must have been awesome. Months passed. We'd already applied for and gotten our licence, 14W2035 was our call sign on channel 14. Well...the receivers were all working and I got the mobile mounted in the car...when the day came that we were about as ready as we'd ever be for a full blown test. AND test we did! Hell...we did more testing than "talking". I those days...you were limited to 5 watts 'input' power. Output efficiency was your problem. The results were not all that great, limited mostly by the mobile half of the equation. Seattle is a "hilly" place so there were places from which you'd just never "get out". So...it was a mixed bag. Federal regulations required these rigs to be crystal controlled. But you still needed to tune them to spec. All we had was a...wait for it...a BC-221 from WWII. Now the BC-221 was a nice piece of equipment, but it only went to 20 Mhz...or 20,000 kc per the name plate...from the days when all they had was kilocycles as opposed to now when we have megahertz...meaning 'lots and lots of hurt(s)'. Channel 14 was 27.125 Mhz. The best I could do was to guess...interpolate. I used WWV to calibrate the '221'. So...we'd been 'testing' for weeks when the FCC showed up in the early evening. The only one at home was the OL. They asked her about having CB gear, and wanted to see it. They were led down into the basement. From the OL's description of events and what they said...they drew the wrong conclusion. The last thing they said was that we were to stop transmitting! I think it was the next day or the day after...when they returned...and we were ready for them. Down in the basement we pointed out the CB transmitter. NOT the ART-13 WWII aircraft transmitter...(used on B-17s and others)...which coincidentally could transmit on the CB band if modified and with a bit more power. It had an input power of 200 watts as I recall. 40 times the legal limit for CB! We had to prove our input power, which I did. They were soon satisfied that everything was proper. There was one thing though, the frequency was a bit out of tolerance. This was taken care of a week later. Years later I'd be able to measure the frequency to a greater degree of accuracy, by many orders of magnitude, than ever required by law, and traceable to the Bureau (NBS at the time, now NIST). I could also measure the actual power output but by that time I had long moved on. Two funny things. In talking with one of the inspectors an interesting fact emerged...get this...they thanked us for demonstrating the capabilities of CB radio! I guess we came in like the proverbial 'ton of bricks" at their monitoring station. I remember asking about the mobile...and they said it was ok...meaning no big deal. But the base station was something else. As I recall our efficiency was pretty good. The antenna was trimmed...literally filed to frequency, (wavelength for you purists).
Time passed. The OM had been a ham radio operator in Hungary and went for a General class ticket. Guess who his license examiner was at the FCC?
Radio station K7YSZ. The black mass in the middle is the ART-13.
Close up of the ART-13 Collins Autotune WWII transmitter.
The day my lie detector lied... There was to be a science fair and I decided that I should enter something. I'd come across an article with schematic for a transistorized lie detector. It worked on the principle of changes in galvanic skin resistance. I gathered parts. I liked to build my projects to the highest standards of appearance. So I planned for a nice metal box and a large meter, a Simpson 100 microamp! The box was by BUD. Power was from a 9 volt "transistor'" battery. First class. Anyway...I get it built and tested. The day that I was to submit my project, I had second thoughts about how to prevent some "idiot" from leaving it (on) powered and hence draining the battery..and not working. So...NOW get this! My solution was to simply disconnect a lead from the battery...hence...rendering it inoperative. It never occurred to me that they'd actually want to try it. I mean "I" knew that it worked. This was not something that you could "play" with as a lie detector. You'd have to be sitting down, hooked up to the two leads, a base line reading set...checked again...and then calmly ask the questions. I thought that they would be judging the workmanship only. Needless to say...
A truly historic event... Eight grade (14 years old)...Asa Mercer Junior High School. I had built a steam driven turbine. The boiler was a copper toilet reservoir float, that I'd gotten from Mr. Gorelick, (not sure, but he could be related to "Kenny G" who went to my high school and graduated 12 years after I did) the plumber who lived two houses up the street. I also got a nozzle from him to drive the hand made turbine. The whole thing was held up about 8 inches by virtue of a real abomination of improvisational engineering that got worse the further it went. It was really bad! I knew it as I was doing it, but it took on a life of its own...I assure you! It kinda had stilts and wire braces...and more stilts and struts and more wire...on it went. All of it soldered together. Well...it did hold the boiler off the table top. My source of thermal energy was in the form of a Propane torch. I would fill the boiler with some water, close the inlet port, fire off the torch and positioned the sharp concentrated flame right in the middle of the bottom of the boiler. After awhile the water would boil and once there was enough steam pressure, the turbine would spin like "a SOB", I kid you not! NOW...I took the turbine to school for what would be something of a "show and tell" before they had "show and tell". This was science class...after all. Oh, the teacher was Miss...yes...Miss something. She was a looker. When I mentioned to Mr. something, the head PE (Physical Ed.) teacher, that I was in Miss something's science class, his eyes lit up really big! I was sure that there was something between the two somethings. No kidding! Update: August 2003, I was contacted by Rick Cinn. This was a result of a search he'd done looking for information from his Air Force days. From references found in my "stories" pages he concluded (rightly) that we'd been neighbors during our school days. After a number of Emails, I asked about teachers he'd had, hence those at Asa Mercer. I asked him if Mr. Ledbetter (PE) was still there, having forgotten the head PE teacher's name as per the above. He told me that ...yes...Mr Ledbetter was still there as was Mr. Richardson! And he went on to volunteer that he was married to "another teacher at the school"! Well now! There we have it! Mr. Ledbetter would later go on to a head PE position at Franklin High. Mr. Ledbetter and I would run laps...and for an "old guy" he was able to keep up with me...Or was it the other way around? So as I was saying...I set up the turbine on top of the lab table. Filled the boiler with water. Closed the inlet port. Fired off the BUNSEN burner and placed it in the center of the bottom of the boiler! The class sensed that they were about to witness a great moment in the history of the school. This, I assure you is not an exaggeration nor an idle boast since this was the very first steam powered turbine that was ever about to be demonstrated in the short history of the school. This being its first year in existence. In that sense, anything I did would be of great historical significance. Well now...I could hear the water starting to boil...this was a good sign. It was just a matter of waiting. We did. I had done this more than a few times so for me it was no big deal. Time passes. The Bunsen burner was not as hot as my torch but the flame spread out all over the bottom of the boiler. In fact it spread out onto my struts and braces. Just about the time that there would have been some steam...the whole thing collapsed in a heap of wire, struts, braces, melted solder, water and steam! It was a scene that was forever etched into the minds of every member of the class and will never be forgotten... Lesson learned! As I think about it now, I should have re-built it and demonstrated it again. But...I was moving on to a solar powered hot dog cooker. Something the world needs a better one of...no?
The day we nearly burned down Montana... Ok...not really...BUT almost...well...ok...could have. Alerts had become common at this time. There was tension over a Central American country that we were invading...Those of us on base would pile into our pickup truck and head for the GATR site...our duty station. The GATR site was about nine road miles from the base...but only two miles line-of-site across the Milk River and up on top of a bluff.
Left above: The main gate to "Cylinder" GATR at about the time of the story as viewed from the inside. (GATR...Ground-to-Air Transmit/Receive) (Cylinder...the callsign for Cut Bank) Right above: The same gate as seen from outside the site...during winter. Since we had so many troops to spare...and the alert could be short...we'd set up short periods of guard duty...and hour at a time...or so. This gave all the young troops a chance to...guard the gate, which they appreciated very much.
He shall remain nameless! Out he went to guard the gate. The rest of us were inside...killing time. I can still see it in my mind. The kid comes running in...and along with wild gesticulations...says...god knows what...and returns back to the gate. It was not clear as to what exactly we'd just witnessed...and were still trying to figure it out...when he returns...and more or less repeats the performance...ok...with a bit more vigor...and leaves again. "What the hell was that all about?"...someone thought they had heard the word fire. FIRE...what? There was nothing out there of ours that would burn...much less catch fire...by itself. Well the third time did it...he HAD said the "f" word! FIRE! Now...one of the thing they taught us at basic (training) was about the various types of fires...and what it took to put them out. We at GATR had electrical stuff...so we had electrical stuff fire extinguishers. I remember the first time I was on site...and saw the biggest CO2 cylinder I'd ever seen...on wheels...it was.
Well...we all ran outside to take a look. Sure as hell...the grass was on fire...driven smartly by a strong breeze out of the south south west at about 10.2 mph, I'd say. This did not directly endanger the site...but if allowed to continue there was only the Milk River to stop it...miles alway. Someone was rolling out the CO2. It was obvious that we were not going to win this battle...so...back inside...call base fire for help. As I'd said...the site was nine road miles away...and it would take time to gather up equipment and personnel...Jeez...half of Montana...could have burned by the time a crew got to us. The fire was hard to see in the bright sunlight. The large CO2 cylinder was spent in about twenty seconds and didn't do the slightest good, but it was fun to watch. Time passed, the wind had become variable...and we could, at last, hear a siren in the distance. All our smaller extinguisher were used up in no time. I remember thinking that we'd now be in a "real world of hurt" if we had an electrical fire inside. The fire was spreading out minute by minute...and my greatest fear was that it could soon reach a point where even with the crew that was on its way we'd not be able to contain it.
The nearest source of fire fighters...I'm guessing...(there was Canada which was real close to us, less than a mile to the border) would be Cut Bank...42 miles away. Oh...we didn't have the classic "fire truck"...you know...the one with long, large gauge, hoses...etc. So there would not be massive amounts of water involved. Anyway, the crew arrived. Some in the base ambulance...it had the siren...some in the "fire truck", the rest in a pickup truck. They had the gear to fight a ground fire. After a few hours Montana was saved. What had Smokey the Bear been telling us for years? The fire was started by a carelessly tossed cigarette!
Continued: Stories V
Copyright © Steve Tuba 2003-2012. Photography Copyright © Steve Tuba 1999-2012. |
War
stories
Dateline: Seattle, WA 1953-1956
I
attended John Muir Grade School in Seattle, Washington USA
(1953-1956). I started in the third grade, having transferred from
Lowell School. My English was not very good but it was getting
better. English would be my third language at seven years of age. I
did enjoy watching television. And it was one way to learn the fine
points of the language(?). I enjoyed the westerns and science fiction
like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.
It
was from these films that I not only learned English idioms, but a
code of conduct, a sense of honor...as it were.
Photo
taken in 1952. My brother and I surrounded by kids in the
neighborhood. The house in the background was 'kitty corner' from the
'Malden House'...the intersection mentioned below. The only name in
the group that I remember was...Terry Cross. I had a 'thing' for the
little girl on the extreme left...holding a toy six-shooter.
If
coins could talk...
Dateline: The Elmbridge House, London 1999
So
there we were up at the site...on alert. (As I think about it
now...there were no NCOs (Non Commissioned Officer) with us, and I
don't remember how this came about). Anyway...this meant mostly
waiting around though it did require the posting of a guard on the
front gate. We had just gotten a new group of personnel and it didn't
take a genius to figure out who would be doing the guarding. The
weather was great. It was late summer I think...and the ground was
covered by the stubble left from the wheat harvest. Our site was
surrounded by it as far as you could see...a sea of golden dry...stubble.
Part
of the GATR crew, 1964. Left to right: A2C Sumye, A2C Kennedy, TSgt.
Grover (NCOIC), A2C Readore, A2C Stiltner and A2C Hight. Except for
Sarge, Stiltner and Kennedy...the rest were new troops.
More
of the GATR crew, 1965. Left to right: A1C Coomes, A2C Toto, A2C
Kennedy, A1C Mullins and A2C Sumye. Mullins, Stiltner and I arrived
about the same time. At the time of the photos, we were the
"old guard". Coomes, and Kennedy arrived a bit
later...Toto, Sumye, Readore and Hight were part of the last to
arrive. Coomes had come from a base in Scotland (very hush hush) and
had married a Scottish girl.
In
the distance, looking north, the U.S./Canadian border as seen from
the junction leading (west) left to Cut Bank GATR. About a mile later
we'd turn left (south)...
Cut Bank GATR looking south along the access road.