Mr. Fisher was my sixth grade teacher. I think he lasted either one or two years as a teacher in our small town.
I'm not really sure why he had such a short term teaching. Don't know if he was asked to leave or if he wanted to move on.
He was a cool guy.
He named his daughters after the months. April, May, June....
He was a Jehovah's Witness. The reason I know this is he would not stand up for the national anthem at basketball games. His highest power was God and he believed he owed his allegiance to that highest power alone.
He told us he had a great idea for a career after teaching. He said, "you know a lot of cafe's have things that need to be cleaned. Take the grease hood over the stove for instance. Have you ever noticed how dirty those are sometimes? Well what I could do is go to that cafe owner and say, "You know that dirty hood over your stove? Well I would be willing to clean that for 25 bucks."
He wanted to start his own janitorial and specialty cleaning service. My guess is whatever he did it turned out just fine. He was a good guy, not afraid to work and stand up (or not as the case may be) for what he believed in.
He touched my life, like all good teachers do. I was very bored in school, at that point. Mr. Fisher asked me what I was interested in. I told him I thought learning more about how radios work would be interesting. He said he would make a deal with me. Once I'd finished my school work in class I could work on building a radio. I built a four band Allied kit radio in class. Got to read about the radio, follow the directions, cut wires, pick components and solder, during class. Not sure what ever happened to that radio maybe it's in RadioHeaven.
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Nothing quite like an old tube type radio. Some of them are really nice looking pieces of furniture, others cool tech-looking with lots of dials, knobs, lights and switches.
Many kids grew up playing with a shortwave radio in their living room or their grand parents house. You might hear radio free Europe, some foreign language, an airplane pilot, police, firemen or a ship's crew talking. Just turn the dial and dream about who might be out there. And if you got the right antenna set up you could probably hear about anything from anywhere. Or thought so.
I remember being so excited listening on an old Hallicrafters shortwave and hearing a scratchy voice using the phonetic alphabet "alpha alpha foxtrot this is one lima peru" or something like that. I imagined it was an Air Force training flight I happened to tune in on given the military use of those codes. I speculate that was the case because around that same time you would hear sonic booms occasionally as the flyboys flew faster than the speed of sound around that fairly remote part of Montana.
Some Nice Looking Radios
Antique Radio Gallery
How many transistors does your radio have?
Not many people ask that anymore.
Pocket and Portable Transistor Radios in galaxyM31 has lots and lots of pictures of classic cool transistor radios.
The two transistor radios were called Boy's Radios. If you were a big boy you got maybe 6 transistors or even more. It was a symbol of power or status to have an "all transistor radio" whatever that meant, or at least more than a two transistor boy's radio.
I had a no-transistor radio...it was a crystal set. Only problem was the nearest station was about 40 miles away and it didn't get good reception. Like a lot of boys my age I made a crystal radio. I also won a crystal radio at the fair one time when I was little. Man was I excited. It looked like a transistor radio...except it didn't work. It was fun for awhile anyway.
