Chapter 4

AT JACOBY'S PLACE - Part c:

 

 

The National Election Returns of 1920 were broadcast by the experimental radio station KDKA, Pittsburgh, which was owned by the Westinghouse Electric Company. I was eleven years old and became intrigued by this new thing and began reading everything I could find about "wireless" and radio. For the next ten years I was completely obsessed with what is now called electronics.

 

It was when I was in the seventh grade in the Washington Avenue school building, which also contained the High School, that some of the Senior boys, with the help of their science teacher, began building a three tube radio set in the cloak-room of the science room. I think the School Board supplied the parts.

 

Well I cultivated a friendship with those young men and was under foot as much and as long as my commuting schedule allowed.

 

I borrowed some amateur radio magazines, was allowed to buy some others and sent for radio parts catalogs. In this way I became familiar with radio parts and terms.

 

I think it was in 1922 that KDKA went on the air as the first commercial radio station. A year or two later I began dreaming, of making my own "crystal" radio receiver. 1 had instructions on how to make a variable-coupler with the primary coil made of windings of cotton covered magnet wire wound on a round oatmeal box. The rotor was a winding on a smaller cylinder and mounted inside the primary coil on a spindle. There was also an illustration on how to make a variable condenser by hinging two pieces of cardboard covered with tin foil and moved open or closed by a cam on a shaft.

 

To get permission from Papa to use my "piggy bank" money I listed what I would need and what it would cost. I needed 100 feet of aerial wire and two porcelain insulators, a spool of magnet wire, one fixed condenser, a galena crystal and a headset or ear-phones. The whole schmear would cost all of eight or nine dollars.

 

Papa was very skeptical about radio actually working. He had never seen a radio or knew anyone who had one. He was especially doubtful that his little boy could make one. After much coaxing he said, "well you might as well try; all you can do is lose a lot of your money".

 

I figured I could do without a bakelite panel, so I used a thin dry piece of poplar wood taken from a bureau drawer bottom and screwed it to the edge of a pine board. I built my vari-coupler, twisting a tapping lug every few turns of the magnet wire. To control the number of turns in the circuit, I soldered leads from the twisted ears to a semi-circular row of small flat-head nails driven through the panel board. The contact selector was a piece of brass mounted on a bolt. For knobs I used wooden spools. Next I made the variable condenser and then made a mounting for the crystal. For the "cats-whisker" I had begged a short piece of German silver wire from the high school science teacher.

 

I was then fourteen and in eighth grade. Next I had to erect the aerial wire. From the ridge of the barn to the ridge of the house was just under a 100 feet. I put it up alone. Mamma was afraid I'd fall, but I made it safely. For a "ground" I used a piece of pipe driven into the ground beneath my bedroom window. For the radio I put a shelf beside that window in my room.

 

Now it was testing time. For many evenings I fiddled with the controls; I'd hunt for a "sensitive spot" on the crystal. Nothing! I could see Papa thinking, "Just as I expected." I decided that my homemade variable-condenser was the troublemaker and asked to be allowed to buy one. It would cost less than two dollars. At last Papa said, "You may as well try it, but it still won't work".

 

I bought a variable-condenser at Goodman's in Ephrata and installed it. With mounting tension I again began looking for a signal. Did I hear something there? Was that a few words? Was that music? I was too excited to be sure. Wait! Sure! Yes! Yes I hear a voice listing stock market reports! I ran downstairs calling, "Papa, I hear a man giving stock reports." We raced up the steps and I gave him the phones. Nothing! I listened. Nothing! Again I hunted for a "sensitive spot" on the crystal. Nothing! Papa went back downstairs saying, "You Just imagined it." I was sure I hadn't. I hunted a long time before I heard the faint voice again. Very carefully, so as not to disturb the "cats-whisker", I called for Papa again. I said, "Walk softly." I handed him the headset and he heard. He paled! He trembled! He said, "I didn't think you could do it." I listened awhile but lost the signal before the station identified itself. I supposed I had WKJC, Lancaster, owned by Kirk-Johnson Company, a music store. Their station had gone on the air about a year after KDKA.

 

There was then already a listing of radio programs in the daily paper so I said to Papa, "Which station was giving stock reports at the time we heard it?" He said the only stock reports near that time were on KDKA. I couldn't believe it! Not over two hundred miles on a homemade crystal set!

 

Later that evening and many evenings following, I did hear the announcer saying, "This is KDKA Westinghouse, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania". I never found another station on that crystal set. It was a fixed tuner.

 

I played with my "crystal set" about a year. Then I began to long for a "battery set". To convert my radio to a one tube "Armstrong Regenerator" all I would need was a few more parts. Again I made a list; one vacuum tube, one socket, one more fixed condenser, a rheostat, a dry-cell for the "A." battery and a 22-1/2 v. "B" battery. I don't remember what that cost, but by that time Papa was a "convert." I think he bought the parts.

 

With that converted one-tube set I logged, through the next few years, almost every radio station east of the Mississippi. The most distant were Omaha, Nebraska and WJAX Jacksonville, Florida. My favorite-stations were WGY Schenectady, New York; WBAL Baltimore, Maryland; KYW Philadelphia; WOO Waterloo, Iowa and KDKA.

 

My interest in technical radio continued even after I was married. My best friend, Peter R. Rutt and I had a "radio shack" in a small shed at his parent's home in the early thirties. By then we were planning to build a mechanical TV scanner. TV was then in the experimental stage. We could hear the "buzz" of the TV signals on our short-wave set but that was not a "picture." The picture could be produced, two inches square, by a rotating a 30-inch diameter disk with a series of small holes arranged in a spiral, with a two inch offset around the perimeter of the disk. Behind this spiral of holes would be a light bulb whose intensity was modulated by the transmitted signal and a separate signal synchronizing the speed of the rotation. We never got that past the talking stage.

 

There came a time, after I was sixteen years old, that automobiles and girls, in that order, assumed a par with radio. Our first car was a new 1919 Model T Ford touring car. It had no battery; it had to be cranked. There were no demountable rims; the tires were "clincher tires." With only a magneto for ignition and for head and tail lamps, the light for night driving became very dim at slow speed or at idling.

 

Some time before Papa got his Ford, Gideon Eberly and his wife stopped at our gate to talk some business. They were on their way to Jake Pfautz's, about a mile up the road. When they were about to leave Gideon said, "Would Landis like an automobile ride?" I was too excited about my first automobile ride and too timid to ask them to wait a minute while I went down to the privy. My first ride was also one of my most dangerous; I almost had an accident!

 

The new Ford came equipped with an owner's manual. I studied that book too until it became dog-eared. I knew in theory how every thing worked and I soon could even drive in my mind. Papa had an old wooden turning lathe that came from his uncle's wagon shop. I would sit at the end of that lathe and Pretend that the different levers and. movable parts represented the wheel, the throttle and the pedals of a Model T. I could drive all the way to Ephrata and back. I could feel the time it took to each turn and stop. What a fantasy!

 

By the time I was fourteen I was allowed to back the car out of the garage and bring it up to the house. Of course I had no license, but did sometimes go out the "Little Red Road" to the trolley stop to pick up Mabel when she came home from Ephrata. Sometimes Papa would let me solo up the "Petersheim Hill," now Akron Road.

 

One day, the summer I was fourteen, Papa suddenly got severe pain in his back. Mamma called Dr. Regar who lived on the southeast corner of South Ninth and Broad Streets in Akron. He said it sounded to him like kidney colic, but he could come only if someone came for him. Papa was in terrible agony and there was no one near to help so Papa said, "Let Landis take the Ford and go for the Doctor." I did go for the Doctor and I took him back, without a driver's license. It was real "John-boy" stuff!

 

Papa had hardly learned to drive himself, when he wanted Mamma to learn to drive too. One day on the way home from Ephrata, with Mabel and me on the rear seat, he stopped just below Sam Stahl's farm and had Mamma get behind the wheel. He stood on the left running board with the emergency brake lever in his right hand. If there would be trouble he planned to pull the brake and stop the oar. That's the way the Ford salesman had taught him. He had explained to Mamma all about the throttle and the pedals. So he said, "OK, start going". Well she was on a slight grade down hill and soon had shifted into high gear, but the car drifted right off the road into the gutter end hit a fence post before Papa could pull the brake. He asked, "Why didn't you turn the steering wheel to the left?" She started to cry and said, "You never told me what the steering wheel was for." That was the last time Mamma ever tried to drive a car. Papa "limped the car home" and tore out the front axle. With a sledgehammer he straightened the bent axle and radius rod and put it all together again. There was never any trouble with the repair job.

 

As soon as I turned sixteen, Papa took me to Lancaster for the driver's test and I got my driver's license. I had no trouble with the test, but Papa had a lot of trouble with the State Policeman about the wiring of the Ford. He had installed some plugs for hooking up the taillight for his trailer and they were not up to regulations. We spent many hours at a Ford garage in Lancaster getting everything fixed. Papa was somewhat vexed!

 

My Grandfather Elam B. Landis and I reading the paper.

Sometime during my early teens, after my Grandfather Elam B. Landis's third wife had died, he came to live with us. It was in the summer of 1925, just before I turned sixteen, that he decided to get a car for himself. He bought a used 1923 Model T coupe from E. T. Line, the Ford dealer in Denver. I don't know who was teaching him to drive. I suppose no one. I think he hoped to learn by himself. One day he took his coupe out and turned east toward Ephrata. I had a set of small field glasses and with them I watched as he went about a quarter of a mile to where he tried to turn around at Abie Stoner's lane. As I watched he backed right into a fence post. I saw him get out and look at the bent fender. He drove home, put the Ford away and never said a word. He didn't know that I was watching. He never took the car out again and one day said to Papa, "John, I think I'll sell my car." Papa bought the coupe for what Grandpap had paid for it.

 

Another event, when I was twelve years old, was a trip to eastern Ohio to visit my mother's sister and her family. It took three days to drive out. We spent the first night with relatives near Hagerstown, Maryland and the next night at a sleazy hotel in Washington, Pennsylvania. It was a big trip for a Model T. Over the mountains Papa had to take up the transmission bands a few times.

 

My parents, after moving to Ephrata Township in Sept. of 1913, transferred their church membership from the Weaverland Mennonite Church to the Metzler Mennonite Church. That church building is about two miles south of where we lived. It is just off of Farmersville Road on Metzler Road in West Earl Township.

 

The Metzler Church held Sunday School and preaching service only every two weeks on Sunday mornings. There were no evening meetings then because the building could be lighted only by "coal-oil lamps."

 

So on alternate Sundays we attended Church and Sunday School at the Ephrata Mennonite Church on West Fulton Street in Ephrata. That building had electric lights and held scheduled Sunday evening meetings; also Young People's Meetings every Saturday evening. Papa often remarked that we belonged to Metzler's Church but attended Ephrata oftener because they had more meetings.

 

At that period most Mennonite Congregations conducted, every year for two weeks, i.e. fifteen evenings, what. were called "Protracted Meetings" or "Series of Meetings." Now they are called revival or evangelistic meetings.

 

When I was eleven years old we were attending a series of meetings at Ephrata with a Rev. Sanford Landis as the evangelist. After one of the services Mamma took me to meet the preacher and after a little nudging from her I said I wanted to serve the Lord and join the Church.

 

The next morning at the breakfast table Mamma, looking at Papa, said, "I guess Landis will want a 'plain’ suit.'. He said, "I guess." They didn't ask me directly, so I assume that I had acquiesced. A few days later we all went to Lancaster to the Missimer and Yoder Store and I was measured for a tailored suit. It was of a good gray herringbone, all wool cloth. It of course had a "plain coat" and long "shorts" for pants; i.e. the pants were hemmed at the kneecap. I didn't get "long pants" until I was sixteen or seventeen years old. At that time all young boys wore knickerbockers and long cotton stockings. My "knickers" were always buttoned above the knee; only rowdy and "bad boys" buttoned them below the knee.

 

Some months later I was baptized at the Metzler Church and held my membership there until 1932 when I married. At that time I transferred my membership to the Ephrata Church where my new wife was a member.

 

This period of my life from 1913 to 1925 was an eventful and albeit, happy time. From standing inside the front screen door at five years of age wearing only my "night gown" to say goodbye to Papa as he left for a week to work at a new School House in Manheim (Old Wilson Hertzog saw me and called, "You better go to bedt," and I was ashamed.); to the thrill of my "own-made" radio at fourteen; to the satisfaction of a driver's license at sixteen. It was a good life.