Chapter One
Electricity and Math

It was March of 2011 and I was on top of the world in more ways than one. I was sitting in one of the seats behind the pilots looking out at downtown Seattle from the #5 test 787. The tall buildings sparkled in the afternoon sun and I couldn't help but smile, we were returning from two weeks of testing in Hawaii. As pilot Mike Bryan banked the plane onto the final approach into Boeing Field, I thought back over the events that had brought me to this point.
From an early age I was interested in science and especially electricity, I'm not exactly sure why, I was just drawn to it. There was a friend that I met in second grade, David F who had the same interests. He and I were real science bugs in elementary school. He got the name David F because there were three David's in our class so he was David F and I was David I and then there was David K. David F was the same age and came from a similar 2^nd generation northern Europe immigrant household and we became best friends. We still stay n touch almost daily. We'd order multitudes of catalogs from radio and electronics companies now long gone and go through them, examining telephones, radios, antennas and what all else that was offered.
In third or fourth grade we acquired a pair of surplus 1940's era Kellogg Switchboard telephone handsets that could be hooked together along with a battery, a long piece of three conductor wire and two people could talk. The problem was there were nine possible combinations to wire them and only one combination would work and we never noted the hookup. I spent hours under David F's basement stairs with he and I talking into the handsets trying to get the right combination. Always trying to out do each other in science class, it got really competitive in fifth grade.
One week he'd make something like a large model rocket using a big mailing tube and the next week I'd try and bring something better to show. After that, he and I started collecting old telephones, telephone hardware and equipment and got the idea to start a "company" we called D&D Telephone Company. We got a tour of the local Bell Telephone central office from our neighbor across the street and had a rubber stamp made.

Then we started the Aerospace Division. Catching on to the popularity of the NASA Mercury space program in the 1960s, he and I wrote a letter to the Boeing Co. asking for scrap metal with which to make a space capsule. Instead of going in the trash, the public relations unit got the letter. They contacted our elementary school and our teacher Miss Duncan and ascertained that we were serious science students. The Boeing aerospace division ended up giving us a used BOMARC ramjet engine. The ramjet was about 3 ft in diameter and 15 ft long, a rocket! A couple of Boeing upper management types were waiting in our backyard along with a photographer as David F and I ran home from school. I had to sign for it and promise not to resell the thing. We could never get it open but it generated a nice article in the Boeing newspaper.

It was a tongue in cheek story which said they were helping out the "competition". The ramjet sat in our backyard as a neighborhood curiosity for the next 15 yrs. My dad, Earl had studied electronics in the Navy at the end of WW2 but these days he was more interested in photography and woodworking. My mother was a stay at home mom and did a ton of volunteer work, mainly for her sorority at the UW, Sigma Kappa. Dad caught my enthusiasm and we started experimenting with science projects and electricity. He was a Postal Inspector and worked at the main post office in downtown Seattle. I thought it was cool he carried a gun and worked on cases involving post office robberies, break-ins and mail fraud.

We began to build basic chemical batteries from the Edison days and electromagnets from books and it just took off from there. He'd come home from work and after dinner, instead of watching the news or relaxing, he and I would go to the basement workshop and try and build something from an book or hobby magazine. Of course it wasn't all that easy.
Getting the transistors and the other parts took multiple trips to local parts stores and supply houses and that was a job in itself. Sometimes I'd ride the bus downtown after school and go to his office. He and I would walk to the downtown surplus stores, electronics parts houses and pause in the windows of pawnshops on 1^st Avenue. Then I'd ride home with him.
One super project was a Tesla Coil. It generated several thousand volts and would jump sparks up to an inch and lit up nearby light bulbs with an eerie purple light. The coil needed hundreds of turns of magnet wire which we carefully wound on a cardboard tube. I eagerly read all about Nicola Tesla, his life and his contributions to AC power. We entered the Tesla Coil in a city-wide science fair and spent a fair amount of time taking photographs of the sparks and making the presentation materials. Dad was a photography enthusiast and had a darkroom in the basement and the project was also a good lesson in the rudiments of B&W photography, developing and use of an enlarger.
Unfortunately I was away from my exhibit buying a hot dog and a coke when the judges came around. Not sure if it would have won, the exhibit next to mine was a working model of the Ballard locks. (with water)
Dad and I continued to work on projects in the evenings and another notable  circuit was a loud electronic siren that would not shut off once it was activated. Electronic sirens were new in those days and used a basic circuit called a multivibrator. Dad took that one to work and left it in the coffee room. It had a sign, "Do Not Push this Button". He said the siren went off all day long.

A friend of ours gave me an old shortwave receiver and Dad and I climbed up on the roof and put up a wire antenna. Dad related a story of a similar wire antenna erected by his uncle on the roof of their home when he was six years old. Radios at home were new and everyone was getting one. He fell through the skylight and caused everyone in the room below to jump up in surprise. Apparently he was not injured.

I was fascinated with the glow of the tubes, tuning the dial around the bands and listening to all the strange sounds, faraway broadcasts, Morse code, shrieks and whistles. This was the beginning of a lifelong interest in radio and communications and a deep seated curiosity of how all things work. Soon we built a Heathkit shortwave receiver and took the ham radio course at a radio store downtown.

Learning the Morse code was more than I wanted to do at age ten. A few years later we became interested in CB Radio. I perused the catalogs and we ordered and installed a radio in our 66 Volvo. Next we built a Heathkit transceiver for the house and soon had another antenna on the roof.
It was all very serious in those first days of CB. You sent $10 to the FCC and received a call sign and everyone was very disciplined. We talked from the house to the car and it was fun. Since we lived on a hill, we had coverage all over north Seattle. One time I had ridden my bike to our local Radio Shack store to get something and noted that he would be one his way home.
I called him from the demo radio at the store and quickly had an interested group of shoppers gather around me as we conversed about the traffic downtown. In high school one of the clubs needed a scheme for a fundraiser and we built a driver's red light "reaction" timer from junk parts. It was centered around a small timer motor and we built a replica traffic signal that sat in front of a chair. Using plywood, we made a gas pedal and a brake pedal that had switches wired to a control box and a record turntable.

When the red light came on, the turntable started with a pen connected to a tone arm and it began to draw a circular line on a piece of paper. When the brake pedal was hit, the pen made a mark from an electromagnet. Dad and I figured out the record speed and time and made a clear Mylar template that you put over the paper and it showed your reaction time. Each person that did the test got to keep their sheet of paper with their name and reaction time on it.

Later that year DavidF and I became interested in a local non-commercial FM station (KRAB-FM 107.7) Non commercial stations were a new thing on the FM band in the late sixties and KRAB was sort of an eccentric station with a zest for odd counterculture themes and programming. It was on a hill in north Seattle not far from our house and resided in the building of an old defunct donut shop. The antenna was on top of a tall telephone pole in the side yard. The owner was a guy named Lorenzo Milam. He was part eccentric and part luminary and had a long history in starting community non-profit radio stations. We hung out at the studios after school for a time and got to know the staff. The whole place was sort of techno-ramshackle and I was especially fascinated with the control room and its broadcast control console and the walls festooned with egg crates for sound deadening. The only other big room was the main studio with a large round table and an expensive mike hanging from the ceiling. The corridor held an antique Collins FM transmitter and more walls lined floor to ceiling with vinyl record albums.
The manager urged me to study and take the test for a 3^rd class FCC license so I could work as a volunteer running the control board, logging transmitter readings and announcing.

I studied, took the test and was instructed on how everything worked, how to operate the transmitter and how to log hourly readings of the transmitter parameters. The station published a monthly schedule of programs and soon I was responsible for airing the program and logging transmitter readings during my weekly evening shift. It was hard to believe they entrusted the station to a 16 yr old but it was the early days of non commercial listener supported radio and they needed people and money. Some nights, I was the only one there. Learning to run the professional audio equipment and the 10Kw transmitter had me smitten. Broadcast Engineering quickly rose to be my #1 career choice. In 1970 my dad was promoted and we moved to San Francisco. It was my senior year in high school and the change was tough for me. The California high school was cliquey and cold but the science dept did offer a basic electronics class. It was the first formal electronics training I had taken. It was easy, fun, and I loved it. Looking for a college that senior year, I decided on DeVry University in Phoenix.

My folks gave me the family 1966 Volvo as a graduation present and I drove to Phoenix that summer with all my possessions in the back seat. My goal was engineering but I soon realized that I had a serious lack of advanced mathematics ability. I'd known it since middle school but now it became glaringly obvious. I needed to figure it out if I wanted to move ahead in engineering.
I hired a tutor but no matter how hard I tried, calculus and differential equations just killed me. For some reason I just couldn't get it. The applied electronics came easy and natural but the advanced math was a real stumbling block, but more on that later. I elected to take the electronics technician path which used algebra and trigonometry but no calculus. Thirty students started out in my class and six graduated. DeVry was an excellent but tough school. Upon graduation, the Vietnam War was still raging and I was due to lose my student deferment.

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