Saturday Tube Testing

I used to think I was a modern, emancipated woman. That my choices were my own, and I was striking out into new territory with my career. Now not only is that concept dated, I am also realizing with age that I am, much more than I used to believe, a product of my upbringing. Was it inescapable?

A trip to the hardware store every Saturday to test vacuum tubes was part of the rhythm of my life. My parents had four kids,so my dad didn’t do much without a kid or four. I don’t remember which equipment we owned that had such a voracious appetite for tubes; chances are whatever it was my dad probably built it. For years we went nearly every weekend. Now I realize that was the watering hole for the HAM Operators and Popular Electronics enthusiasts, but as a child I thought it was just a Saturday errand, like the grocery store and the (you kids stay in the car!) liquor store.

I remember him building a Heathkit* meter, and for years I didn’t watch TV without holding a big mirror and suffering bouts of vertical roll as my dad lived happily behind the set he built. In second grade I came home from a sleepover at Joyce G’s house to announce her family had just brought home a COLOR TV. I lived in a small town, we had no color broadcast a second-grader could stay up for, but I remember watching snow with Joyce for hours. Colored snow. My dad’s eyes lit up as another project popped into possibility.

One day he brought home a tape recorder, demonstrated how it worked and left it in the living room for four kids to explore. Who does that? For my fifth grade report on the future he set me up for an interview with the local head of the phone company, who let me have promo shots and details of picture phones – you can see who you are talking to! I never marveled at video conferencing after that; it just seemed inevitable.

In high school the Lions Club sponsored a charity event that pitted volunteers against each other to score big on White Cane Day, their charity for the blind. I sold the crap out of white canes to possess the prize: a beautiful, green, plastic portable record player with detachable speakers. The wages from my first horrible job were used to buy the portable black-and-white TV I had to have.

A plastic GE turntable was good enough for Firesign Theater, but certainly not for the music I was introduced to in college. You remember 1972. The music required better fidelity. It required a Sansui receiver and Zenith Allegro speakers. Since my parents were helping with the financing, I didn’t get to explore all the cool stereo stores (a shopping trip to Seattle only happened once a year at most), but could purchase anything Talcott’s Music carried at the time.

Tired of liberal arts after a couple of years, I tried to enroll in the Electronics program at Bellingham Tech, where an old man explained to me why I could not, even though there was no rule against it. I vowed to make my career in Electronics to spite him. I was later disappointed in myself for selecting a career based on spite, but that feeling is lifting on review. Maybe I didn’t stand a chance.

How about you? Can you see anything in your distant past that may have helped lead you to where you are now? I would love to hear your tech memories.

*Heathkits were discontinued in 1991, but their story is being preserved at the Virtual Heathkit Museum