September 2024
NOTE FROM PRESIDENT WAG
Members,
Mark your calendars!
These are the dates and link for upcoming AHRS Business meetings for the remainder of 2024. All are on Mondays at 7:00 PM. Details of the December meeting (which is in-person at the Shop and is also our annual holiday social) will be sent prior to the event.
DATES: Oct 28, Nov 25
LINKS:
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86330579924?pwd=ckZLWEJMb0V2ajhBUzh0S2liQnlmZz09
Meeting ID: 863 3057 9924
Passcode: 631140
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Boyd Bailey’selectronics class will be held at the Shop and via web on Saturday, October 5th. This is a continuation of the series designed to take us into solid state electronics, projects, and breadboarding. A separate email has gone out from Boyd and Steven.
Note:
The following link should work for future classes in perpetuity (or until otherwise notified):
Topic: AHRS Radio Restoration Class
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88180351990?pwd=N2lucjB3WVhtR05nTSs5S0xGcURadz09
An email to the “regulars” from Boyd and to the membership at large will be sent closer to the event.
The Society is having a Radio Auction on Saturday, October 19, 2024, beginning at 10:00 AM. Steven sent a separate email on Oct 4thannouncing and including a catalog of the offerings.
The Magic City Classicwill be held on Saturday, October 26, 2024. Generally, the events include a parade that begins near the shop making access challenging. We will check the parade route closer to the event to determine if the shop will be open on that day. The Shelby County Amateur Radio Club Hamfest will be on the same date, 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM at the Helena Amphitheater, 4151 Helena Rd, Helena, AL 35080. Details at www.helenahamfest.com.
We are planning our year-end business meeting and annual Holiday party. John Outland will chair the nominating committee with Willie Henderson and Ray Giles volunteering as Board members. Maurice Hill is on as a general member, and we need at least one more to populate the committee. All officers (Pres, VP, Secy, Treas) serve one year terms and are eligible for re-election; we will have three Board members rotating off, two of whom are eligible for re-election to another three year term. Ray Giles will not be seeking re-election to the Board, so there will be an open seat. Details will follow but if anyone wishes to be considered for a leadership position, let us know or contact John Outland directly.
The “usual” date for the Christmas Party & Annual Meeting is between Christmas and New Years, but we are looking at an earlier day, say Monday Dec 23rd that does not conflict with the Holidays or meetings of our cousin society BARC (Birmingham Amateur Radio Club).
In addition to chairing the nominating committee, Board member John Outland has agreed to take over as its Chairman from Dave Cisco. Dave will remain on the Board as he steps back from the Chairman position he has held for many years. Thank you both for everything andyour continued service.
Officers Steven Westbrook (VP), Treasurer Mike Woodruff, and I met with our accountant recently to assure our accounting practices are in compliance as a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization. We are happy to report, that except for a few minor tweaks, we are complying in that regard and with our bylaws.
We have an upcoming radio history exhibit scheduled at the Homewood Public Library next month. If you can volunteer to help setup, let us know at the Shop, call, or send an email AHRS2000@gmail.com.
Recently members Dave Cisco and Russ McGuire gave a Zoom presentation on their love of DX’ing to NCOCRA (Orange County (North Carolina) Radio Amateurs) recently. This was based on their forum on the topic at this year’s BirmingHamfest and given in person in Tuscaloosa and Gadsden.
During our recent business meeting, whilst speaking on the last newsletter’s poetry, our own Dr. Boyd Bailey suggested another AI-generated poem about antique radios and repair. My friend offered another “spooky” version as Halloween approaches. Once on his phone’s app, I began by asking, “I want it to be about a man working on an old radio who gets shocked and either turns into a monster or a zombie.” (I should have asked for a matching image….)
In a dusty room, the air was still,
A man with a radio, working at will.
The knobs were twisted, wires frayed,
An eerie hum through the silence played.
The old device, forgotten by time,
Buzzed and crackled, an unsettling chime.
He pried it open, ignoring the gloom,
The shadows thickened in the dim-lit room.
Suddenly—zap!—a shocking jolt,
The man convulsed with a violent bolt.
His heart raced fast, then slowed to a crawl,
He slumped to the floor, limp like a doll.
But his eyes snapped open, cold and dead,
A monster now, where a man had bled.
His skin turned gray, his limbs moved slow,
The radio’s hum, a haunting glow.
With each breath, his soul slipped away,
Reborn as a creature at the end of day.
And now he roams, a zombie untamed,
Forever haunted, forever maimed.
In his hands, the radio hums with glee,
As it whispers the curse that set him free.
At the same business meeting, Dave Cisco related a story about Billy Hood, an early Alabama radio pioneer. The storytelling was recorded. After editing by Boyd, Steven, and a final proof by Dave, we have it available for your edification later in this newsletter, so please read on!
Late member Harry Butler was working on the 2nd Edition of his History of Alabama Broadcast Radio 1920-1960, when he passed away. Near the end, he expressed his desire that the book to be completed. We recently met with a couple of his daughters, who brought his draft to us and expressed their desire for the Society to work with the family to edit the manuscript and get it published. They also donated many radio related personal items to the Society from his collection.
Recently, we contacted the The Ashville Radio Museun, located in Ashville, North Carolina, an area hard struck by Hurricane Helene, with the aim of offering needed assistance. We spoke with Stuart Smolkin, Secretary & Curator. He advised the building, at the Buncombe Technical Community College, where their museum is located, was not damaged. The only issue is the loss of water and electricity. We understand the local amateur radio group is greatly assisting with communications. When thing settle back down, we hope to have further intereaction with this group of antique radio enthustist. Check out their website at: https://www.avlradiomuseum.org/
On a personal note, I attended my national ENT Academy meeting last week in Miami and ran into one of the best residents I trained with some-40- odd years ago. He is still practicing in Austin, Texas. I had just served on a panel about, what else, retirement, so I had to shave and wear a tie. He has worked over his career to help delivery and provide access to, medical care in his local community and home state.
Another friend and I met for dinner at a nice restaurant nearby that served what I consider an “unorderable”- an out-of-region item labelled as Cajun…. I’ll add this to my list of unusual places with “cajun food” – Capetown, Budapest, Cambridge. My chicken parmigiana there was outstanding!
On a personal note, I attended my national ENT Academy meeting last week in Miami and ran into one of the best residents I trained with 40-some-odd years ago. He is still practicing in Austin, TX. I had just served on a panel about, what else, retirement so had to shave and wear a tie. He’s worked over his career to help delivery of, and access to, medical care in his local community and home state.
Another friend and I met for dinner at a nice restaurant nearby that served what I consider an “unorderable”- an out-of-region item labelled as Cajun…. My chicken parmigiana there was outstanding!
Respectfully submitted,
Wag
President, AHRS
drminims@aol.com
The Story of Billy Hood
As told by AHRS Member Dave Cisco at the September Society Meeting
As you know we are an organization that's trying to preserve radio history in the state of Alabama, and we had a member who passed away at the age of 101, who was very, very active in our organization in the early days. He supplied us with bunches and bunches of information about early days of radio, plus with his 41-year attachment to the power company, he also provided us with a lot of good information from our power company history as well as WSY history and everything like that.
Pete Sides, before he passed away, and during the time that I was talking to him in the early 1990s, kept bringing up a guy that he kept telling me we needed to get in touch with named Billy Hood. I asked everybody I knew if they knew of Billy hood, and pretty much got a ‘zero’ back. Well, finally about 1997, and for no reason that I can remember that I brought it up at a Birmingham DX Club meeting, One of the members John Drum, said, “You know there's a guy in my church, Episcopal Church in Mountain Brook, who goes by the name of Billy Hood. I'll be glad to ask him if he knows why Sides keeps bringing up his name about radio history. So, he did, and Billy Hood agreed to talk to me. But, let me just go through something of interest.
I want to read you the obituary for Billy Hood. Now once, we found him, and of course he had passed away, I think this is just fascinating, “William Eatherley Hood, cofounder and former president of Indurall Paint, died January 31st, 2005, at the age of 95. A native of Birmingham and a graduate of the University of Alabama, Mr. Hood will be fondly remembered by several generations in the Birmingham community as Santa Claus. For three nights before Christmas each year, for many years, he sat in his homemade sleigh atop a rock outcropping in front of his house on Memory Lane and greeted children and parents who gathered on the bridge below. A member of many organizations, including the Redstone Club, the Mountain Brook Club, Mr. Hood served on the Mountain Brook City Council, and on the Board of Charitable Organizations, including the Community Chest. He was honored as the “Man of the Year” in the 1950s for his civic contributions. Mr. Hood was the first industry president of the National Paint, Varnish, and Lacquer Association. Mr. Hood is survived by his wife Sandra Henderson Hood and their son Arthur Samuel Alexander Hood, by his children with first wife Mary Davies Hood who died in 1963 - etcetera, etcetera, on down through the family.”
In this history, did anybody hear anything about radio? Nor did I. Okay, as I said, in 1997, it just out of the blue came up about a Billy Hood in a church in Mountain Brook. So, immediately I managed to get a phone number and I called Mr. Hood to find out what he could tell me. He started talking and I realized then that I needed to get closer to Mr. Hood, so I made arrangements to go to his office. Now gentlemen, this guy's 87 years old in 1997. He still had a beautiful office and attended just about every day at Indurall Paint, and it is now called, Induron Industrial Coatings. It's the multi-million-dollar company run by his grandson Davies. How could all of this tie into radio history? I knew Pete Sides, if anybody knew that connection, Pete Sides knew about radio history.
Well, here's the story. Okay, Pete Sides lived in Bessemer. Pete Sides and his family, when they wanted – remember, this is in the early 1920s right after the First World War -- when he and his family wanted to shop or go buy something that they couldn't get locally in the little stores in Bessemer, they would come to Birmingham. They didn't have a car, so they rode the streetcar. Well, the streetcar track was on Cotton Avenue in West End, which as you know is still a significant road in West End. This streetcar went in front of the beautiful mansion that was built in the early days, 1840 to 1850, by a Judge Mudd. Mr. Mudd was in the mansion, but not just a home, it was also a plantation. The plantation had almost 500 acres, which, by the way is approaching a square mile. Can you imagine if you go out to West End, how big a plantation a square mile could be? But it was, and when Judge Mudd finished the house, he lived in it for several years. The name of the house was Arlington, and this beautiful home is still there today. Not only is it still there, but it is owned by the city of Birmingham as a memorial. Especially Judge Mudd, who was one of the founders of Birmingham in 1872, lived in that home. Birmingham was almost named, Yep, it was almost named Muddville. By the 1920s, it was owned by the Munger family. Many of you know there's a lot of other things around Birmingham that had the name Munger. I remember Munger Auditorium for example. The same was when Pete Sides would pass this beautiful mansion on the streetcar, there was a building almost right on the streetcar track that had call-letters on it. The call-letters were 5ADS. Pete at that time was approximately 12 or 13 years old, in that ballpark. He was very interested in radio and he recognized that those were radio call letters. Well now guys, realize this is 1920 or 21. WSY had never been on the air. There were no broadcasting stations of any kind in Birmingham or anywhere else? KDKA hadn't even been on the air. What people were what calling radio at that time was wireless telegraphy. Our buddy Billy Hood, whose mother married a Munger, moved into the Arlington house about 1915, maybe 1916, somewhere in that ballpark. Remember he was born in 1910, so he was probably 5 or 6 years old when he moved to the mansion and when he got interested in radio. As I mentioned, it was wireless telegraphy. What everybody was using at that time was spark gap. We don't know whether he was able to purchase this spark gap or able to get somebody to build it? His dad apparently had a lot of money, and he got him a thousand watt spark gap transmitter and put it in the upstairs of the Arlington mansion. Guess what? He got run out of the house. Literally run out of the house, and they built a separate building down in front of the house by the streetcar track for his radio that he had. And let me tell you, now guys, realize this guy is 10-11 years old.-10 or 11 years old! This is a very, very early radio. If you pick up an issue of QST in here around 1922, 23,24, 5ADS [?] was listed in almost every issue as being one of the premier message handlers for the ARRL. In the Birmingham area he was listed time and time again as being a significant traffic handler on his thousand-watt transmitter. Okay, that tells you what attracted me to make that visit to his office at Indurall Paint and sit down and talk to this man. I had a little portable TV that would play VHS tapes at that time, and I took it with me. I had the 80th anniversary of the ARRL saved in there with all the history. He was absolutely fascinated, and not only with that, but we sat and talked I know for at least two hours. He brought me up to date on a lot of things that were very interesting. One of course was the story of he didn't get run out of the house. But, the same story, that I think is it just as fascinating about all of it was that he really enjoyed his radio, and when all of the hams begin to convert to CW, which did away with his spark transmitter, he began to lose some interest in it. I do have a record of a roll that was signed by him in 1926 when he would have been 16 years old. About the Birmingham Radio Club. Now this is not a ham club. This was a club of guys that were starting radio stations, and two of the members, one of them was Carlisle Bell who had started WBRC already. The other was Pop Ansley, who had put in a license request for a commercial broadcast station. Eventually he was given a WKBC call. But, in 1926 he was 16, in 1928 when he was 18, he had graduated from high school and he went to the University of Alabama. He graduated from the University of Alabama in 1932, and guess what, it was the middle of the depression and he couldn't get a job of any kind with his electrical engineering degree. There was nothing, so he was determined he wanted to work. He didn't want to just leech off of his parents, and he didn't. He got a job driving a truck, and this truck that he was driving was hauling paint. And now you know the rest of the story. In 1947 with a guy named Louis Prosch, they formed the Indurall Paint Company. It became a significant company, as I'm sure many of you know, and even today, like I said, it's a multimillion-dollar company called Indurall Industrial Paints. Well, after I had this nice visit with this man, I wanted to do something. I remembered Pete had told me many a time the same story. He had never met Billy Hood. He had seen that shack there, and knew that it was the only the closest he ever got to meeting Billy Hood. He thought Billy Hood was a lot older than him because he had this big transmitter that he was operating. He did not realize that Billy Hood was two years younger. And here he was 12 or14 years old. He thought Billy Hood had to be 15, 16, 18, or whatever. So we, the AHRS, in 1997, decided that Pete Sides should meet Billy Hood. At that time Billy Hood was 87. Pete Sides was 89. We were meeting at the Homewood library where we made arrangements to rent the auditorium of the Homewood library. We invited everybody we could think of that would have any interest in what was a first-time meeting of Billy Hood and Pete Sides. We had hams there; we had a lot of people there that weren't directly related to AHRS. In fact, we even got some members out of that, because people were impressed with what we were doing. One of our members, a guy named Cliff Hill had a movie camera, and he did record it all. I don't have any idea whether we’ve got it. I don't think we do, but Pete Sides and Billy Hood got a chance to meet for the first time. Though we did video it, it turned out to be a very pleasant meeting. Unfortunately, it was the last a meeting that they had. But what's so interesting to me is when you're doing this history, and trying to find out what was going on in these early days, and everything, you can run into some of the most interesting most unusual situations that you could ever imagine. Just imagine getting Santa Claus in the Homewood library with somebody he'd never met that wanted to meet him really bad, and having the conversations that we did. I know my wife was there, and she was just absolutely flabbergasted with all that went on and all of that. A lot of other guys had brought their wives too, so it was really Jerry Lowe and his wife were problem solvers that night. I was glad they were there. I just thought that story is something that all of us realize how sometimes the history is hidden, but it's there. If you ever run into a situation like that, or something close to it, please let us know. Because it's something we need to get involved in over and over! Thank you!
Dave Cisco
Quote of the Month
Why Visit a Radio Museum?
"...If someone had the time and money it would be a beautiful thing to assemble a radio museum. A profitable afternoon might be spent walking through such an interesting collection and looking over the various types of radio apparatus from the days of Hertz down to our latest Super-Hetereodyne and present day commercial sending station equipment. It would be an education complete in itself. We would smile, and perhaps laugh, at the original model coherer, or the primal tuning coil, or the first sending and receiving sets. Just so, the imaginary visitor who visited this radio museum twenty-five years from now would smile at our present efforts, if he did not laugh out loud."
Hugo Gernsback
Editor, Radio News magazine
February, 1925
We meet every Saturday (unless a Holiday weekend) at 8:30 A.M. until around 11:30 A.M., at the one-story AHRS Shop at the corner of 8th Avenue North and 18th Street, (1801 8th Avenue North, Birmingham, AL 35203). Please use the rear (Southeast) entrance.
The Shop is open on Tuesdays at 8:30 A.M. until around 11:30 A.M. Note that parking can be a problem on Tuesdays, so you may have to find street parking occasionally.
Regular monthly members meetings are on the fourth Monday night starting at 7:00 PM with the Executive Meeting starting at 6:30 PM
Please come join us!
The electronics classes are generally on “Zoom” and “in-person” at the AHRS Shop, typically the first Saturday of each month (except when something special is taking place, then we agree on an alternative Saturday)
Check your emails for the schedule and how to participate.
We start from the beginning Ohms Law, inductors, resistor and Capacitors color codes, as well as what each component does within the radio circuits. We also teach how to use test equipment used in the repairing of radios. We teach troubleshooting radio troubles, as well as how to read a radio diagram.
Currently the class is studying advance topics relating to troubleshooting and project radio repair. We are retooling our website in hopes of archiving prior classes for those who may have missed a prior class. Email will provide timely details on date, topics & links.
There are coil winding classes, and one-on-one repair help. Come join these classes!
Membership dues are $25.00 a year, payable beginning in January. If you have questions about your dues, you can contact Treasurer Mike Woodruff at 205-823-7204. Dues can be mailed to AHRS at P.O. Box 131418, Birmingham, Alabama 35213 or paid on-line at https://alhrs.org
Be sure and check out our website at https://alhrs.org, which has copies of all newsletters from 2006 to the present (click on News), videos, photo galleries, museum, Old Time Radio columns, Projects, Reading Rooms, Archives, and Contact Information. Within the next few months we hope to update our website and add additional content and new capabilities
President – Richard “Wag” Waguespack
(205) 531-9528
drminims@aol.com
Vice President – Steven Westbrook
(205) 305-0679
spwestbro@bellsouth.net
Recording Secretary – Grady Shook
(205) 281-3007
gshook@bellsouth.net
Treasurer – Mike Woodruff
(205) 823-7204
woodruff_michael@hotmail.com
Boyd Bailey, Member and Instructor
(334) 412-6996
boyd.bailey@charter.net
Newsletter Editor/Webmaster – Steven Westbrook
(205) 305-0679
spwestbro@bellsouth.net
Web Address:
https://alhrs.org
E-mail Address:
ahrs2000@gmail.com
Youtube Channel: Alabama Historical Radio Society - YouTube