“When former classmates came up and greeted me at our 40th high school reunion, they didn’t call me Bob, They called me by my ham radio call sign, W6PRA. That was kind of my claim to fame in high school.”
Bob became interested in amateur radio by chance, when he was in the seventh grade.
I was at the library when I found an article that showed how to make a crystal set and I decided to try to make one. So, I walked two blocks to Anderson’s Radio Shop. Herb Anderson pulled out his junk box and gave me the parts I needed. He even gave me an old pair of headphones, which I still have, and the wire I needed for an antenna. In a sense, Herb launched my career in electronic engineering that day. From then on, most of my spare time was devoted to electronics.
When Bob went back to tell Herb that his crystal set was working, Herb showed Bob his ham gear.
Herb was a ham radio operator. That’s how I became interested in ham radio. I learned Morse Code, and I took an electromagnet from a discarded doorbell buzzer and bent a strip of tin can over it, and that became my code practice sending apparatus. Herb gave me an old telegraph key to use with it. Bob was hooked. He would exchange messages with other ham radio operators around the world in the morning before school, and write out QSL postcards to document their communication. He continues to communicate using ham radio to this day.
Amateur radio has meant everything to me. That is one reason I wanted to do this – it's a tribute to amateur radio and Herb Anderson, W6IEM.
That telegraph key Bob received from Herb Anderson is on display here. It is one of Bob’s most prized possessions. Bob still finds astonishment in the random events that led to him getting involved in amateur radio, which became such an important pillar in his life. He would go on to become an electronic engineer working on various aerospace and medical engineering projects, and later an ophthalmologist.
The older I get the more I think about it – Hey, if this didn’t happen, or that didn’t happen! How lucky it was that I met the guy who gave me this key! It’s all chance. We all like to think we control our lives, and, to a great extent, I suppose we do. But, looking back, it sometimes seems more like we’re in the middle of an ocean in a rowboat moved along by wind and waves. Major changes in our course are determined by seemingly random forces over which we have little control. And events that seem minor at the time sometimes produce major changes downstream.
Bob regrets never getting the chance to properly thank Herb for being such an enormous influence in his life.
The last time I went by the Lindsay Cemetery, I visited his grave. But it’s a little late. I would have liked to say, ‘Thank you.’ He would occasionally hear about me, but he didn’t realize all the different things that I was lucky enough to get to design because he gave me this telegraph key. We all have people in our lives who are influential, but you don’t think about their influence – at least I didn’t think about it – until it was too late.