My father was born on August 18th, 1905
in Waterbury, Connecticut, the only son of Minnie Mecabe Grant and
Abraham Lincoln Grant. I don't know much about my grandfather
"Linc," because he died three months before my father was born.
I was told he was born in Concord, California, the youngest of ten
children and ran away from home to San Jose when he was twelve.
He learned the trades of carpenter and mechanic, and owned a small
circus and one of the first Edisonphones in California, which he
used to give "concerts" at Sierra Nevada mountain mining camps
during the winter season. At one point, he visited some
relatives back in New York where he met my grandmother. I've
been told Minnie Mecabe was a very talented pianist.
After Minnie and Linc married, they
settled in Waterbury, for reasons I'm not sure of, but suspect it
was because Waterbury at that period was a major center of US tool
machine manufacturing. After the birth of my father, the
family moved to Wappingers Falls, New York, (50 miles north of New
York City on the Hudson River) where many of my grandmother's
relatives lived. Lincoln Grant's occupation as listed on my
father's birth certificate is "machinist." It seems Dad may
have inherited his manual skills and intuition with respect to
matters mechanical from both sides. His friends would tell me,
"Your father could make ball bearings on a belt sander."
I remember Dad telling me he became aware
of "radio" when he was perhaps 13 or 14 years old (1918 - 19)
because of the news of its role in World War I. Incidentally,
my father did not stay in school beyond the 8th grade, not uncommon
in the working class of those days. His first job was as an
operator of a steam press, manufacturing laminated wooden steering
wheels for the "luxury" automobiles of the time. At age 16, he
was "adopted" by the Mid-Hudson Valley ham radio club, and became
acquainted with both the "spark-gap" rf equipment of that day, along
with the "new-fangled" vacuum tube technology, building his own
station and acquiring from the FCC the station call sign this
website honors.
Throughout the 20s and early 30s, my father worked at a variety of
mechanical trades at various Mid-Hudson manufacturing companies and
as an independent contractor installing domestic radios and the then
attendant long-wire antennas, while still improving and expanding
the technology in his "shack." In 1935, the year I was born,
he became a victim of the Great Depression and was not "permanently"
employed again until 1938. My mother, a career woman decades
before her time, kept the family financially afloat, stably employed
by the local electric utility company.
One of my earliest memories is the
sight of the glowing white-hot graphite anode of the Eitel-McCullough
35T triode in my father’s ham radio transmitter. At about three or
four years old, it was certainly the brightest light I had yet
seen. His whole rig was “breadboarded”…the components simply laid
out on plywood with all wiring exposed, including that of a several
thousand volt power supply. I was sternly warned never to go near
it. On an adjacent table sat an equally fascinating object – a
Hallicrafters SX-28 multiband receiver with two monstrous white
dials on each side of a softly lit Triplett null meter. I hugely
enjoyed sneaking up and twirling the dials, an activity which always
garnered me more paternal attention than I had anticipated or
desired. I knew all this equipment bore some relationship to the
arcane diagrams in his ham magazine, QST, which Dad was
always pouring over. I would fantasize I understood them too,
trying to guess which hieroglyphic was which component, much to his
amusement.
All this bliss disappeared shortly
after Pearl Harbor. My father was drafted and all his beautiful
gear requisitioned by the military. But there was an upside.
Although my father was one of the pioneer amateur radio operators in
the Hudson Valley, his formal education was limited to no more than
one year of high school. The story about how he was able to
"volunteer" for the Navy, instead of winding up in the Army, is
fascinating...in short, a Navy physician present at his induction
physical decided he was "too old" for battlefield service, and, with
a wink of his eye, assigned him to the Navy. His first tour
was as a Fireman First Class on a destroyer escort protecting a
convoy to Iceland. However, thereafter, the Navy trained him as a
shipboard radar technician, and he returned home in late 1945 with a fair
knowledge of algebra and trigonometry which allowed him to resume
his hobby with much increased understanding. It also began my
education in electricity in earnest, right out of the introductory
chapter to the Radio Amateur’s Handbook that same year. It appeared there
was two kinds—direct and alternating—dc and ac. Fathoming direct
current was, in today’s parlance, a “slam dunk.” The first
algebraic equation I learned was Ohm’s Law and that was it for dc.
ac, on the other hand, was a different matter, involving what Dad
called “vectors” and “phasors” and “this jay-omega stuff.” At age
ten, this was more than I could handle, although I did get as far as
appreciating the meaning of the nemonic “Eli, the ice man.” One
thing was for sure…ac was a lot more complicated than dc.
We all know about the triumph of ac
over dc – Tesla vs. Edison – deriving from the simpler operation of
polyphase rotating machinery and the transformer which allowed
efficient long-distance transmission of electric power. Both
devices were invented by Tesla, the patents to which he later sold
to George Westinghouse for ten million dollars, an enormous sum in
those days. Westinghouse, being somewhat a showman, became
associated with alternating current in the public mind. Edison
would continue to claim ac was “more dangerous” than dc, and when
New York State authorized the use of high voltage ac for “humane”
executions, the Edison camp morbidly referred to the procedure as
being “westinghoused.”
Ran out of time
(7/25/09), but not out of story. As content is added, it will
be announced on the What's New page.
12 June 2010...still
working on this story...I hope to post online my Dad's WWII
scrapbook, and photos from his IBM career starting with the 701 in
1948. In the meantime, anyone who "Google-stumbles" across
this page is welcome to contact me at
w2agz@w2agz.com.
