An old trade school (deceased) and amateur radio

It says on my resume, posted somewhere in a dusty corner of http://www.mkinsler.com, that I taught for a time at a truly hard-luck trade school in Pittsburgh known as Gateway Technical Institute. To their credit, they'd kept it going for years, and they did good training in refrigeration and other trades; perhaps including the electronics I taught. Like most such operations, it was owned by a single family, and had things gone differently perhaps they would have worked out the magic formula and gone the route of another hard-luck private vocational school around the corner and become Point Park College (now University.)

I got there well along on the downward portion of GTI's arc of life. The Old Man (there's always an Old Man at a private trade school) had died, and Mr Gateway Junior, as I call him in the following correspondence, had taken over. His mother still held out bravely in the tiny bookstore they maintained for the students.

The school is long gone, but apparently one of its graduates did a Google search on his old alma mater this afternoon and came upon the mention of it in my resume posted there. Not a sparrow falls to earth...

And so he wrote to me, using the opportunity to take me to task for not pursuing the hobby of amateur radio during my career in electronics. This is not entirely unreasonable, for at its height in the 1940's and '50's, it seemed like every fourth house in most communities had a big antenna sprouting from its roof. If you worked in electronics, it could be safely assumed that you had a ham rig somewhere in your life; almost every TV repairman or station engineer did.

I did not, though my cousin Richard, K3NGP in Pittsburgh, did when he was maybe 13 and I was ten. But I've kept an eye on ham radio over the years, as discussed in this exchange. Perhaps it says more about me vs other males than anything about ham radio or men and hobbies:


Hi Mark,> I went to Gateway Tech back in the late 80's, and came across your >site.>You might have been one of my instructors.>With all your accomplishments, I have noticed that amateur radio is >not one of them.>Now you can get even the highest class amateur radio license with no >morse code.>Why haven't you been bitten by the radio bug yet?>David WQ3T


They're too late. While I have great sympathy and respect for the people who do amateur radio, I lost interest in doing it years ago.

I've written about amateur radio now and then over the years. It was a crowded field back in perhaps 1959, when I was twelve and in a prime position to take an interest, but there were millions of kids my age and it must have seemed to the hams back then that it would all last forever; there weren't any radio clubs available for kids my age back in Cleveland Heights, and it was all pretty intricate for someone with any other options.

Through the Viet Nam era, society became military vs. non-military, and the hams were most decidedly in the former category; the MARS business ensured that. Most hams were older than I was, and I suspect that the political situation made them even more clannish than they were before.

I didn't learn electronics until I was about 22, when I became interested in repair work and broadcast engineering. And so I took the National Radio Institute correspondence course in radio and TV broadcasting. It was a fine course, and I swiped and adapted the labs they'd developed for my own classes for years afterwards. Part of the lab work was the construction of a transmitter--I believe it had a TV-type horizontal output tube for a final and a pair of 6BQ5's for a modulator--and it worked quite nicely, at least to the extent that I could tell.
But when I landed in the New Haven, Connecticut area in about 1972 and wanted to pursue some amateur radio work, I found that they didn't want any hippies, or anyone who might have ever looked like a hippie, anywhere near their clubs. The whole ARRL was arguably like that, and so I said the hell with it and got interested in other things.

But I sort of kept track of the field as I went along. I was in engineering school in 1979-80 when CB radio got popular; I was fixing a good many of the wretched devices. It hadn't occurred to me that ham radio was in any sort of difficulty until I started seeing ads from the ARRL telling people that they should become real radio operators instead of fooling with CB's. I concurred, but the old guard was apparently still holding forth with their code requirement, cackling with glee about how tough it was and how it had kept the riff-raff out.

When Internet communications came out, I was fascinated and took to the field with great enthusiasm, since I had access to big university mainframe DEC computers with their inherent messaging capability. It was only after I got to graduate school that I began to hear mournful cries from the ARRL, hoping to lure a new generation into a field that had suddenly lost about ninety percent of its appeal. And you still had to learn the code.

I taught some of the undergraduate communication labs when I was working on my doctorate at Mississippi State Unversity, and the professor in charge of these had the university ham club's rig in the lab; he was working with packets, which I found interesting, and I offered to take part. Well, it seemed that the whole club had pretty much dried up, and I think I saw the old defiant "You never learned code, you hippie" look in his eyes.

About the code: I believe that it is tied very closely to language ability. I was trying to learn it one day in perhaps 1969--I was finishing up National Radio Institute--when my live-in friend Penny, who could learn new languages just as a hobby, said that she'd learned to send and receive something like five words per minute in maybe a week back when she was about ten.

Someone on my howthingswork discussion group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/howthingswork) said that the story of ham clubs is very much the same as that of volunteer fire departments, which were closed fraternities right up until the time when they realized that they'd excluded all the young people. If I'd been in their place, I probably wouldn't have behaved any differently; men are like that. But being something of an outsider in every field and thus having but a limited number of potential fellow hams to discuss things with over the air, it probably wouldn't have worked for me.

On the other hand, I work at a very large science museum where they know nothing of radio. When we hosted the Titanic show, I developed a fast exhibit on code, spark transmitters, and early radio. While people waited in line for tickets, I broadcast buzzes from my auto spark coil in code to an AM receiver across the hallway. Nobody, but nobody, in that crowd had ever heard of such a thing (and this included the museum staff.) They knew what Morse code was, sort of, but they didn't know that it had anything to do with radio.

Thank you for writing. I don't recall much about Gateway Technical Institute; last I looked a few years ago the building was vacant but still there. I wasn't there for very long; but over the years it's clear that the school did a lot of good work there.

I imagine that the place was doomed when Mr. Gateway Junior took over the place, though there is some evidence that he tried. Unfortunately, I don't think he understood much about anything but office work and cash flow. I did what I could; the electronics they taught was strictly legacy, and old legacy at that. There was no way that anyone could convince the management to update things at all.

My, this got long. Time flies quickly when you're reminiscing. Perhaps I'll stick this in my new-fangled blog.

M Kinsler