Cindy & I got married in 1974 at her parents' house in New Carlisle. It was a very relaxed wedding, with my parents & her family sitting around on kitchen chairs while Judge Lorig of the Springfield Municipal Court performed the ceremony. Cindy was wearing the dress that Eva, her mother, had worn over 20 years before when she and Max got married. Afterwards we had cake & opened the various presents. Then Cindy & I went home to the apartment in Dayton which we had been renting for three or four months by that time.
    Back at our own digs, we sat around for a while, watched some television and then Cindy sat reading a book while I played radio in one of the large open rooms in the apartment.
    The apartment manager had allowed me to hang an antenna off the roof of the three story building, but even at that elevation my Argonaut & its amplifier were hard pressed to make a dent on the ionosphere. It was the bottom of a sunspot cycle & even 50 Watts was barely enough to cause trouble. Especially on the ears of the 3968 crowd (the OVTN mentioned in the previous page).
    Of course, that all changed the day I went out and bought a Heathkit HW101. I'd seen my first live one the previous year on vacation in Canada. We'd met Austin Brake (VO1AU) and his family & had spent some time with them, talking politics and history, places and, of course, ham radio.
    About the time I got the HW101 built, Cindy was pregnant with our first son, so we moved to a small rental house in Park Layne, a housing development south of New Carlisle. From there, with the ground system afforded by the local county water well-field, and some judiciously hung wire on the roof of the house, I held forth on HF and reacquainted myself with the 3968 gang.
    By this time most of the OVTN was well past teenagerhood. In fact, most of them were in college or otherwise gainfully employed. It was a rare time. We'd meet every afternoon about 6:30 or so and play at passing traffic. When the first son, Ian George Bull Young, came into the world, a couple of the gang even sent me messages via the net in congratulations. And, as if you'd expect something less, when Ian got around to talking, one of his first words was "wee-oh" (radio). He liked to sit on my lap and twist the knobs and press on the CW key. You'd have thought that he'd be a shoo-in for a family-member ham ticket. But that's another story, much later in this recitative.
    Cindy & Ian and I lived at that rental for nearly four years. Then, being much more motivated by comfort & probably at the suggestion of her mother, Cindy found us an affordable place where I could hang my wires, terrorize the neighbors & get on with life. 
    Of course, by that time most of the OVTN gang had split up or had found other pleasure resources. One had even had his license revoked. So the Late-Nite-Radio sessions with transcontinental alternative philosophical groups ground to a slow halt & we all got older. Little else explains that, but for the rest of this story.

The New Carlisle QTH

Updated 25 July 2004

Cindy & I and our oldest (and at that time only) son had been living in the Park Layne plat for about four years when Cindy came up with the idea of putting in for one of the government repossessed homes offered for sale by the HUD. We went to a realtor who handled that stuff & went through the process. And we ended up about a year later moving into a place on the edge of New Carlisle, a few blocks from Cindy's parents' home.
    It was quite a change. Not only was the rent going into paying for something we ostensibly owned, but we had more room. Naturally, I commandered the end of the garage & put my ham stuff in there. I also finagled a tower & other stuff & ended up with quite a set up.
    The HW101 had died during a blizzard runnin' emergency traffic on the Ohio SSB Net. But soon, and with the employee discount at the R.L. Drake factory, I had my very own state of the art transceiver: the TR7. This was hosed up to an amp that I'd gotten third hand from one of the OVTN/LNR guys. First time we turned it on, two different kinds of smoke came out of the box. (It had been used at some point as a dope stash.)
    Over the course of the next six years at that address, I worked a lot of DX, came in fifth place in the Dutch Activity Contest & actually worked someone in Colorado on 160m. I was having pretty much the same kind of fun that I had enjoyed in Puerto Rico. By this time I also had changed jobs & was working at Wright State University as the "audio-visual repair guy." Electrons flowed & my signal was heard even in Australia and Kyrghizistan, which was then another chunk of the greater Soviet Hegemony.
    I even worked a couple half-dozen folks in the Romanian contest and in the grand MIR contest sponsored by the Central Radio Club of Box 88, Moscow fame. . . which leads to the next page.