A Story About Education...

Bopnopper and Lint Monkey are often asked to proof-read articles I write as fillers for the local ham radio newsletter, under the pseudonym, "The Opinionated One". I'm hereby asking them to proofread this month's article below, and give me their feedback. Other readers may find the article, ummm, well, interesting. That is, if you have nothing to do and actually can afford to waste the time it takes to read it. Thanks for comments and corrections. ------- I was talking with my friend Verman Krabbliess the other day, and the subject of education came up. Now before going further, you need to know that education is to Verman like water is to the Sahara Desert. “That’s not true,” Verman would protest. “I had 12 full years of formal education.” “Yes, but all of them were in grade school,” I reminded him. "A lot depends on the value of the experience." “What’s the most valuable educational experience you’ve ever had,” Verman asked me. That’s an easy one. The most valuable educational experience in my life occurred on Saturday, July 12, 1970, when I was a teenager in Jacksonville, Florida. I remember it quite well. I learned more in that one single day than any day, week, or even month, before or since. A local ham by the name of Fester Rengwerm offered to give me a 100-foot ham radio tower in exchange for helping him take it down. He said he was moving into a retirement apartment and getting out of the ham radio hobby. Never having participated in a tower party before, I agreed to come over and help him. It was an educational experience of a lifetime, and one I’ll never forget. To start with, I learned that Fester was a bald-faced liar. As it turned out, I didn’t “help him" take down the tower. I helped the other four guys he’d talked into helping him take down the tower. Fester didn’t do anything except provide some hard hats and a cooler full of various beverages, all of which, because I was under age 21, were illegal for me to sample. Fester felt bad when everyone else was enjoying the liquid refreshment before starting work, while I just stood around looking like a lost puppy. He went into his garage and dug around, and finally brought me a dusty old can of Dr. Pepper. The second thing I learned that day was not to ever open a can of lukewarm Dr. Pepper, especially after having shaken the dirt and insect parts off of it. All four of the guys (Peet, Henry, Stan and Zahn) were totally soaked in Dr. Pepper from head to foot, much to the amusement of Fester and me. I quickly learned that you don’t laugh at hams when they are soaked with lukewarm Dr. Pepper. Next, I learned that I had gotten the short end of the proverbial stick. Fester had offered each of the other four guys one of his radios plus generous portions of the beverages, in return for their assistance. To sweeten the deal, he also offered them assorted tuners, amps, meters, cables, and all kinds of other neat and expensive gear from his shack. And since they were still hesitant (I learned later that most of them were pretty smart), he offered them $150 each. As for me, not being smart and never having experience with towers, I had agreed to help only for the promise of the tower itself. I next learned an age-old tradition among hams which dictates that those who douse others with Dr. Pepper earn the privilege of serving as the “ground man” on the tower team. The "ground man" is the sucker who has to stay on the ground while the others climb the tower to take it apart. Periodically, the hams on the tower will lower pieces of the tower for the ground man to grab and stack, or will lower a bucket for the ground man to put in more tools and be hauled back up, etc. The ground man usually gets a crick in his neck from looking up, usually within 10 minutes of the start of the project. I was no exception. I learned that Dr. Pepper isn't quite as effective at diminishing the pain of neck cricks as the beverages the others were drinking. As the day wore on, I learned that the ground man works harder than all four other members of the team combined. The position of ground man is the modern day equivalent of the position held by former Kenyans, Tutsi’s, Hutu’s, and Rwandans living in the southern United States along about, say, 1845. But I was happy to be part of the team. I kept my eyes and ears open and I continued to learn. The fellows carefully instructed me in the proper protocols of ham tower work, such as the rule that once a ham climbs a tower, he doesn’t come back down until the job is completed. This is what makes the ground man’s job so important. And unpleasant. Six times during the day, the team up on the tower could've sworn they heard the sound of nature calling, and I had to take refuge under Fester's carport as they answered. Many other aspects of tower work I picked up myself, just by watching and listening. For example, by carefully observing the proceedings, I learned an awful lot about Gin Poles. The most important thing to have when working on a tower is a good stout, reliable, and sturdy Gin Pole. We had two Gin Poles that morning. One’s name was Stan Stanislowski from Danzig, and the other was Zahn Uffavitch, born in Warsaw. Both these Poles could empty a gin bottle faster than Deb can empty my bank account. They both downed two bottles of the stuff before starting up the tower, and tucked three more bottles into their pockets and tool belts for consumption later in the day. I learned how exciting it is to be working under a tower where four hams are perched 100 feet above you, especially after two of them have consumed enough alcohol to put the entire Democratic National Convention over the legal driving limit. From watching those guys, I learned why it’s called a “wrench”, and why it’s called a “nut”, and the difference between a “bolt” and a "%@#$* bolt!” I learned what the “D” stands for when referring to a safety belt’s “D” ring. And I learned why the ground man always wears a hard hat. I learned the folly of not taking a can of hornet spray with you when you and three other guys climb a 100 foot tower after having been thoroughly soaked with Dr Pepper. I learned that it takes four hams an hour and a half to loosen the six screws holding the beam to the top mast. Based on the heated conversation going on way up on top of the tower, you might think this was due to rusty hardware, perhaps complicated by the shortage of hornet spray. But my personal opinion is that the Gin Poles played a big part in the situation. For a while there, I thought it was raining screwdrivers. I learned that Florida fire-ants can climb a 100-foot tower and make a nest inside the traps of a tri-band beam. From the dancing going on up on top of the tower for the next half hour, I figure the other team members learned something more about fire ants, but they didn’t share it with me. I learned that when you leave a coil of 500-pound-test nylon rope lying in the grass in the Florida sun and rain for nine years out behind a shed, the rope won’t actually hold up 500 pounds anymore. In fact, it won’t even hold 68 pounds. I learned that the drum cadence in the opening credits of the Hogan’s Heroes TV show isn’t played by drums. No, it’s a recording of the sound made by a 68-pound antenna rotator as it dismantles itself by bouncing down the rungs of a 100-foot tower, after breaking loose from a 500-pound-test rope that’s been sitting in the Florida sun and rain for nine years. I learned how hams can use a car jack to dislodge a stuck top section from the section of tower beneath it. I learned that you’re supposed to make sure the jack is fastened to the tower solidly, so that when the top section finally breaks loose, the jack doesn’t come sailing down 100 feet to imbed itself three feet into the sandy Florida soil for the ground man to have to dig out. And speaking of soil, I learned what happens to the pants worn by a curious neighbor who happened to wander into Fester’s back yard to see what all the hubbub was about, at exactly the time the car jack missed his head by half an inch. Sometime along about noon, the four guys up on the tower decided to take a break. Because of the rules of tower protocol already mentioned, they didn’t come down the tower, but merely rested from their labors while staying up on top, leaning back against their safety belts. Peet and Henry lit up cigarettes, while Zahn and Stan pulled out their bottles of gin and began swigging away. Then it happened. I’ll never forget. The scene will live with me the rest of my days. Stan sneezed. Ordinarily, sneezing is fairly inconsequential. But being on the tower, Stan sneezed right into Peet’s face. Now even this normally doesn’t create too much of a lasting impression, as I expected Peet to react normally, such as by playfully tapping Stan’s head with the 15-pound sledgehammer to remind him of his insensitivity and breach of common courtesy. But no, this sneeze was different. It was memorable. When it happened, Peet was in mid-draw on his cigarette, and Stan still had a mouth full of 180-proof Beefeater gin. A bright yellow fireball twenty feet in diameter engulfed the top of the tower, Fester’s sliding glass patio doors shattered, and the seismograph at Florida State University registered the only 4.0 magnitude earthquake in the state’s history. Dogs began barking four miles away, and for a brief moment, the tourists over on Interstate 95 thought they’d caught a glimpse of an oil refinery’s flare stack exploding. Fortunately, the safety belts kept the four crew members in place, saving me the trouble of digging them out of the sandy Florida soil. Although a three-day search was conducted, we never found any trace of Peet’s mustache or Henry’s eyebrows. I also noticed that Stan and Zahn’s bottles of gin had disappeared. I learned later from Peet that the bottles will probably be found the next time Stan undergoes a thorough colonoscopy. My education continued. As the day wore on, I learned about guy wires, and why you should always wear leather gloves when working with them. I also learned at least fifty new words that day, none of which my mom would let me use until I turned 40 or became an Army drill sergeant, whichever came first, she said. In fact, even today, Deb won’t let me use those words, although all of our children are fully grown and gone. I learned that once a tower was up, it seemed best just to leave it up. In spite of that, at the end of the day, ten sections of tower lay neatly stacked in Fester’s back yard, along with a dump-truck load of guy cables, pins, bolts, nuts, thimbles, and other assorted hardware. I learned that although the tower had looked gray when it was up in the air, now that it was down on the ground, it looked a deep chestnut brown. “If I’d a know’d that tower was so rusty, I’d a never climbed it,” said Henry. “Yup, yup, me neither. it’s a good thing we had a few drinks a’fore we went up, ain’t it,” laughed Zahn, through his bleary eyes and red nose. “And I’m shore not as think as you drunk I am, neither,” he said, jabbing his finger at his chest. One by one, they loaded their radios and other gifts into their pickups and drove off. Because of their conditions, I didn’t want to ask any of them if they would mind giving a lift to me and the tower sections to my house half a mile away. And not being old enough to drive, I ended up carrying the tower, section by section, on foot from Fester’s to my own back yard. I learned that although it really should be, it isn’t technically against the law to give a rusty worthless tower to a Novice class 14-year-old. And finally, at the very end of the ordeal, I had learned that I really didn’t want a tower after all. That's the value of education.