Wow! Just wow!
When I was a baby, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, my father worked on a river boat. In those days, no one had cell phones and computers - we were lucky to have a party-line home phone - and it was difficult to know when/where Daddy would be leaving the boat and coming home. My parents' solution was to buy a Hallicrafter ham radio receiver. We did not have a transmitter, but we could find the boat's communication channel on the radio and figure out approximately where it was and what time Daddy would be getting off the boat. For an antenna, Daddy strung a copper wire out the living room window to the top of a nearby willow tree. That radio would pick up channels all over the world.
Daddy quit the river boat when I was a toddler, but the radio still served us. When the TV would blow a sound tube, we could pick up the TV station on the radio and listen while we watched the mute TV. The words and the mouth movements sometimes didn't *quite* match, but that was the case sometimes, anyway.
Daddy loved that radio. Eventually, it migrated from the living room to his bedroom. He would listen to it, on and off, all night. He loved "Radio Reader," and got my boys hooked on the program. They'd lay in bed with him and listen to Dick Estelle reading books aloud. But by the 90s, the radio had quit working. The old tubes and parts were hard to get. The radio became a dust collector. I bought Daddy a small radio that picked up stations other than am/fm radio, but it wasn't nearly as enjoyable for him.
In about 1991-1992, I took the radio to a repair shop to see if it could be fixed. The manager of this now-defunct chain store was a ham operator and belonged to a radio club, and he had good hopes of finding the parts needed to fix the old radio. At that time, I was operating a business, myself, and was working long, stress-filled hours. The radio was the least of my worries.
Maybe more than a year later, I remembered the radio, but when I went to the repair shop to check on it, the shop was closed, out of business. I had known the owner for quite some time and was able to get him on the telephone. He said that the stuff from his shop was stored, somewhere in the county, in a pole barn that belonged to a fellow radio club member. He said he'd see if he could locate it. I "knew of" the guy who owned the pole barn and figured my chances of getting the radio back were slim to none. My repair guy never called me back.
Yesterday, I remembered the radio again. It has been 25+ years since I've seen/spoken to the radio repair guy. I didn't even know if he was still alive. I found his son on Facebook and sent him a message. He replied with his father's telephone number. I called him last night.
He has the radio. Twenty years ago, he took it to his brother, an electronics whiz, to see if it could be repaired. The last time he tried it, it worked. He is going to hook it up and try it out today. Whether it works or not, I'm going to pick it up this afternoon.
I am thrilled, and utterly surprised that he still has the radio after all this time.
Son #1 loves radios, has a nice CB radio setup, himself. If he wants it, the old Hallicrafter may live at his house.
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Yesterday's rain changed to snow around 6 p.m. We got a pretty good dusting.
It's not sticking on the roads, but bridges and over-passes are treacherously slick with "black ice."
Today is painting class day, but I don't know if the ladies are going to venture out. If they open the studio, I will probably go.
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