I've know since I was a kid that my dad could fix radios and TVs, the old ones with tubes. Today I was looking at a 1936 Ford car radio I bought.

After looking the radio over I was thinking replace the capacitors and vibrator, and check the tubes. Yup, that's right the expert said.

Well I was asking dear old dad(age 92) how he learned to fix a 1936 car radio. When he was a teenager in the 1930s he built a crystal radio and some 2 or 3 tube radios from a kit and read a few books. He sure didn't get it from my grandfather who was a farm boy with a 3rd grade education. Dad went to grammar school in rural western Montana in a one room school house(that is still there.) He lived far enough out in the country in Montana that there was no bus to take him to high school in 1932(age 12)so he went away to high school/college 300 miles away at Gonzaga.

Turns out he helped out in a 1 man radio repair shop on the weekends while away at school. He said one time he and the shop owner bought 55 trade in radios from Sears for $1 a piece. The first one they fixed they sold for $60!

He went on to earn a BS in Electrical Engineering from Gonzaga. As I later learned he was the only Electrical Engineering I ever met that could fix a radio or TV. As I've reported here before, he went to work for the Boeing company in 1944 and launched Saturn V Apollo rockets to the moon in the late 60s. Turns out he is a genius from way back!

What a charming story, mrtexas, and how fortunate that you still have your dad to enjoy. My father, too, was like your dad. He was so incredibly smart. He got his degree in Commerce (Economics here in the USA), but had a huge engineering background and he could do some incredible things. I remember back when I started college at UC Irvine. It had just opened up the campus, and he was helping to start a Sigma Chi chapter there. They had a tiny computer science program (this is back when computers took up 3 floors of a building, one for the mainframe, one for the cables, and one for the air conditioning system). The students had just suffered a huge data loss from a power outage, and a few of them were Sigma Chi fraternity boys, so they came to my dad to help them with the problem. So, my dad, with all his electrical engineering background built a little endless loop device that would capture the power outage and then turn on the back up battery for 3 minutes or so, giving the students enough time to power down the computer. He did that all for free. Never though to patent the device. Sadly, he could have become a billionaire, as he invented the first Uninterruptable Power Supply.

Great stories!

Sad truth ...

Good guys are never selfish and give away what they do for free ... and this society ruled of the bad guys punishs them therefore ...

Well, I don't know if I'd go so far as to say he got punished by bad guys, but I guess he just didn't think that this device would be something that could be patented and then sold. Which is unusual for my dad, but I think he was just so busy at that time in his life, he didn't pursue it. He always regretted it, he told that story every now and then.

Yes !

What I mean ...

That guys at university of course knew the value and instead of being thankful for the donation, they did not even help him to understand the value and helping it to patent and market it ...

Maybe they even sold the patent then ...

Ah, those "guys" at the university were just college students, Laaz. And, even a professor wouldn't really be thinking "business". My dad, however, was an entrepreneur and understood that concept of patenting a good idea to make money. I just think he was in the frame of mind of doing those frat boys a favor and helping them out, more than, "hey, this could be something I could patent and sell." Very unusual for my dad to miss something like that, and I think it was that exact thing that kind of bothered him all his life. He was a sharp guy, and didn't miss much. He had a couple of things he had patented actually, throughout his life. None made him any significant monies, but this one idea would have. Luck of the draw, Providence, don't know, but he missed that "brass ring".

I still think, that at least the management must have known about it .. and about the value of a complete new and very necessary device ...

Some of us still use quite a few tubes...

Does that Marshall stack go to "11"? lol

Rock N Roll!!

Yes it does.