In Switzerland I was impressed by a movie showing Jackie Coogan, the boy hero, using their radio transmitter. That whetted my interest so on the ship home I got acquainted with the ship’s operator and observed their spark transmitter. At home when I got hold of a Ford spark coil, and reading in The Book of Knowledge about spark transmitters, I rigged up a crude transmitter. I tried it out at our neighbor’s house with a friend and went home and encountered my sister, Zan, on her way to check with me to see what I was doing with their radio, which had been buzzing. That was my first, though illegal, radio transmission.
We used to imagine that our upstairs porch was the bridge of a ship and we transmitted Morse Code messages for Alice to copy on the radio downstairs. We must have messed up the broadcasting for some of our neighbors. As a teenager, I passed the test to get an amateur license as W6LXI and later W7NOE. With a homemade receiver and vacuum tube transmitter I was an active HAM operator communicating world-wide. By submitting proof to the American Radio Relay League, I was issued WAS and WAC certificates that I had worked all states and continents. I formed pen pals (or radio pals) by radio with many across the globe, including the fire chief of Capetown, South Africa. Later I took time out of my Cal-tech studies to go to a radio school in Kansas City to increase my code speed and obtain radio-telephone and radio-telegraph commercial licenses. These served me well later as ship’s operator and as broadcast engineer.
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