After 60 Years, Ham’s Friends Span The World
Happy anniversary, Jack Baker. Sixty years ago today, you flubbed your first call. But things got better.
At 79, the Dalton Gardens man still is embarrassed that he was so flustered at age 19 to hear a voice from North Dakota over his amateur radio. He had signaled from Winnipeg, Manitoba, about 100 miles north.
“I couldn’t believe I was talking to someone that far away,” Jack says with the patient chuckle elders save for inexperienced youngsters.
Since 1935, Jack has chatted over the radio with people in 92 percent of the world’s countries. He has contacted Jordan’s King Hussein and hammed it up with former Sen. Barry Goldwater.
When Italy and Germany declared war on Canada in 1941, Jack sent the first signals to Canadian ships. He steered emergency workers during Winnipeg’s flood in 1952.
He was the only North American a U.S. soldier in China could reach during the evacuation of American troops from China in 1948. On his amateur frequency, Jack informed U.S. military officials of supply and troop movements.
A postcard from China bearing the soldier’s call sign is encased in filmy plastic along with hundreds of others in Jack’s finger-worn scrapbook.
People from around the world have mailed Jack their call-sign cards. He pulls a handful from a desk drawer and admits he can’t bear to toss any away.
“I like people. I like talking to people,” he says. “It still intrigues me to reach out to friends this way.”
Jack reaches the world from his basement on an amplifier he built from a kit. He also has expensive ready-built equipment and a 40-foot antenna that looms like a trapeze in his back yard.
He says he liked the days when hams built their own equipment. But he’ll sacrifice mechanical fun for clear conversation with old friends in New Zealand and other distant places.
“That’s mostly what I want now - to keep in touch with friends,” Jack says, shrugging off the significance of his many years on the air. “That’s what makes it all so interesting.”
Good ol’ days
Post Falls’ Marsha Dornquist liked Coeur d’Alene “when we didn’t lock our doors and my mother didn’t worry if I walked home from the Wilma Theater.”
She rented two-runner ice skates to use on the rink at McEuen Field, rode the bumper cars at Playland Pier and watched the Desert Hotel on Sherman Avenue burn down.
Marsha ate beep burgers at the Rocket Drive-In and watched the hydroplane races on the lake. Any guesses on her age?
Medicine man
Coeur d’Alene High graduate Rob Cheeley of the Class of 1975 took his compassion and medical degree to China’s poor Yunnan province three years ago. He’s teaching medical care to peasants in 11,000 villages that have no health care now.
Rob needs equipment and medicines. Boeing will let him fill a new 737 with five tons of supplies. The jet will leave Seattle for Kunming on June 8.
Send cardiac monitors, ventilators, fax machines, penicillin and lots more. He’ll arrange and pay for shipping. For a list of needs, call Betty Cheeley at 664-2612, send a fax to 765-7158 or reach her on Compuserve at 73720,2024.
Kidding around
Coeur d’Alene doesn’t do much for kids. They’re not welcome downtown unless they act 20 years older than they are. It took a monumental effort to get a skateboard park started. There’s no indoor place for them to swim or play because the town’s private health clubs want adults. What gives?
Everywhere I lived as a child had a YMCA or community center where I had a low-cost blast year-round.
What do Coeur d’Alene and other North Idaho communities need for kids?
Share your solutions for keeping kids out of trouble with Cynthia Taggart, “Close to Home,” 608 Northwest Blvd., Suite 200, Coeur d’Alene 83814; send a fax to 765-7149 or call 765-7128. Hurry - summer is almost here.