My grandfather was an avid amateur radio enthusiast. His cellar was affectionately known as the “HAM shack,” and it overflowed with transmitters, microphones, morse-code keys, antennas, and oscilloscopes. Vacuum tubes and circuit boards spilled from drawers and ‘QSL’ greeting cards adorned the walls. For me this was Thomas Edison’s laboratory. I would spend hours by his side in the dull green light of tuner displays as high-pitched whirls and hissing static emanated from the radios. He would slowly turn dials in search of Morse code or human voices drifting through the ether.
Though he was a great storyteller and passionate about his politics, “Poppa” was a quiet man. He never pressed his interests on me, and he was sparing in his advice during my many adolescent years. If asked, he was a willing teacher. He would transcribe pages of Morse code for me and take gentle pride in replying to his radio contacts that his grandson was seated beside him. My curiosity with his radios delighted him, but despite my wonder I always remained just the spectator. My interests focused instead on Tonka toys, motocross bikes then girls. What else is there when you’re a kid?
Henry Eugene Church died on April 15th, 1996. My beloved grandmother, Bomma, followed him two years later in April of 1998. By then I was married and had two young boys of my own. With both my grandparents passed, my sisters, mother and I sorted through their belongings packing boxes of family photos and keepsakes that we divided between us. The boxes found a quiet resting place in the corner of my basement with no time for me to plumb their riches. My days were filled with chasing my boys and naively attempting to form them in my own image.
Within a year or two I did find time to blow dust off the boxes and begin to explore my grandparents’ lives beyond the narrow glimpses I was allowed as a child. I was overwhelmed. Their marriage was a love story that spanned almost sixty years. They traveled across the United States and Europe by camper and motorcar. Poppa was not only a radio enthusiast, but a photographer, a craftsman, and a writer. How I yearned to sit with them and hear all the stories left untold. Only as a father and husband did I realize the lessons they offered me that meant so little then and so much now. Had I been Poppa’s contemporary we would have been best of friends. I longed to sit back in the cellar and take genuine interest in every hiss and crackle, but his radios were gone.
The years rolled on and my own sons are older but not quite left home. I’ve learned they do not have to be like me, but I still enjoy when they take an interest in my hobbies and I often think back to my grandfather and opportunities lost. A curious thing happened though a few years ago. I bought a marine radio book in an attempt to self-install a shortwave radio on our sailboat. I lost track of it, but my son found it, read it cover-to-cover, and then announced he wanted to take the amateur radio license exam. He did and passed with flying colors. Within a year he went on to pass the intermediate exam and then the expert ‘extra’ level exam - all before the age of fourteen. For Christmas that year he asked Santa for his own amateur radio set to put in our basement, and we spent Thanksgiving rigging a sixty-five foot antenna high above our backyard in anticipation of its arrival. It was as if he were channeling his great-grandfather he never knew.
This past Father’s Day my son asked whether he might set his radio up on our sailboat for amateur radio “field day.” I happily obliged, and within a few hours of our arrival he was ensconced in the cabin below tuning radio dials amidst whirls and hisses plucking “contacts” from the air. I sat quietly with him mesmerized by the scene. For the first time I truly realized that Poppa’s passions were not lost, his gifts had simply bridged generations. But it was not only a gift from the past to the present. My son was giving back to me my fond memories from that cellar so long ago. The joy of reunion replaced my deep feeling of loss. Poppa was looking back down on us both – a warm smile on his face.
