When you visit the bio pages for modern day amateur radio operators posted on QRZ.com, you often see vintage pix of hams and their shacks from their childhood or teenage years.
Alas, about the time I was getting INTO the hobby, my dad was transitioning OUT of it. So, to my knowledge, he never photographed our set-up. I've never seen any photos of the equipment we used for all those years when I was first exploring and then falling in love with the hobby of ham radio.
I always thought it was a shame that he was disinterested in our radios about the time I "caught the bug." It was a missed opportunity for some father-son bonding time. And, moreover, I'd love to have a photo of the shared K4KYN/WA4ZJW ham shack now.
My parents' old house was one of those 1970s "split-level" homes. The downstairs floor was mostly underground. And part of the underground was a garage. My dad's rig sat in the southwest corner of the house.
After a few years, he built an exterior garage/workshop and turned the old garage into a family room with an adjacent laundry room. The ham shack stayed in the southwest corner of the room. I operated from that little corner for years - summer days and late nights. Whenever I had some free time, I was on the radio.
When he installed a central heat and air system, the ductwork emanated from a small control room he located just across the way from the radios. I always thought it was cool when I'd pick up a little radio reverb from the HVAC.
Later, he converted that area into a photography dark room and moved the ham shack one room over to a small utility room in the center of the lower level of the home.
To my knowledge, there are also no photos of the second set-up.
But last week, when we were cleaning out my late father's bedroom closet (more about that project to come in a future edition), we unearthed a cache of old family photos. And in the stack of pictures was one from February 1960. On the back of it, in my dad's very precise penmanship, is the inscription "where I spend many hours."
It's a photo of my dad's first "ham shack."
It's how homes looked when I was growing up. So, to me, the photo is very nostalgic. The black and white format leans into the mid-mod vibe.
If memory serves, dad set up his first ham shack in his bedroom. He connected to the world with a wire antenna strung out the window into a near-by tree. He told me, once, about talking to an English operator (via voice rather than morse code) with very low power, just after midnight one night. He felt proud of that achievement.
In the 1960s, your entry level license was called "novice" and it was temporary. You had to, then, study and progress up the ladder of license classifications in order to continue operating. Dad got his novice license in 1959, just after coming back from serving in the U. S. Army while still living at his parents' home in West Tennessee. You might recall, I mentioned previously, he was a radio telegraph operator for his unit.
His first licensed address was, indeed, the family farm just north of Memphis. I think I told you about this, recently, when I wrote about The Callbook. Anyway, that's the backstory.
By February 1960, he had been hired for a job in East Tennessee, moved to Knoxville, rented a house, upgraded his license to the "General" classification, and set up shop as you see in the picture.
I can't really identify the equipment he was using in 1960. By the time I remember his earliest operating, it was a much more robust set-up. But, clearly, what he has here was enough to whet his appetite and get on the air.
Anyway, it's a real treat to have come across this picture.
And who knows, maybe we'll get lucky and find some other undiscovered photos when we dig into the hall closet clean-out project later this year. Wouldn't that be something?
For the moment, however, it's pretty cool to have unearthed this treasure and caught a glimpse into a by-gone era. It's a window into a simpler time, for sure, and a piece of family history we had not previously seen.
JG
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