(an excerpt from my memoir)
My
father, having been an electrician, knew how to do interesting things that other
fathers of the day in Medford either did
not know how to do or simply weren’t interested in doing. He mostly, but not
entirely, learned his trade at the age of 18 from on-the-job training with his
first boss. Among their projects, they wired many of the houses on Long Beach
Island in the early days of tourism. Whenever we went to the beach, my dad
would often say, “I wired that house over there, son.”
Back in 1927 there was a famous boxing
match between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey. My grandfather invited his friends
to come over and listen to it via the radio that my father had set up by using
a car battery and a set of earphones placed in a bowl as a speaker system. Apparently
a lot of my grandfather’s friends came, but unfortunately, they didn’t get hear
it to the end because the car battery went dead before the match was over.
(Tunney won, by the way, some say because of a technicality. You can read about
it as the match of the “long count”).
Another project that he worked on as a
young man was wiring the movie theater for sound in Tuckerton, NJ. My mother
was a waitress in a luncheonette across the street. My father would go there
for lunch which is how they met. He did accuse her (kiddingly, I’m sure) of having
her thumb in his soup. Apparently it didn’t turn him off, for which I,
personally, am grateful.
As I was growing up, he worked as an
electrician at SKF Industries in Philadelphia, but he did small wiring jobs on
the side on weekends. He often enlisted me as his helper and, as far as I know,
I was okay at it—I learned just enough to be dangerous. At one point, I was
thinking that I might follow in his footsteps, but the era of rock and roll and
taking guitar lessons led me astray.
One memory in particular stands out in my
mind. I was in probably 7th grade when he decided to teach me how to
make a crystal radio. Very exciting and fascinating even now! He first told me
that you could do it using an oatmeal box. You would wrap bell wire around it,
and every ten wraps you would make a loop. The loops would be various stations
to tune in to with something called a “cat’s whisker.” I‘ve often been wanting
to try to do that, just for fun.
But we didn’t do it that way. He actually
got a simple kit of sorts, complete with a dial and, of course, a crystal. We
strung a wire from the upstairs back bedroom over to loft of the garage. He brought a set of earphones home from work
and I had my own radio which I listen to with a great sense of wonder (computer
type technology was Flash Gordon/space age stuff). Many programs at that time
were both on radio and TV, so that made for really fun listening.
If
there is a lesson or point in my sharing this, it is, at least personally for
me, how much it means to a child to have the significant adults in your life,
not only provide you with the comforts of a home, but share the essence of
their life experiences with you so that you’re given a good foundation in
feeling important and loved.
