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About Siletz news / (Siletz, OR) 199?-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 1, 2004)
TRIBAL PROGRAM NEWS Highlights from Siletz Tribal Head Start Above: Head Start staff attend pre service training in August to get ready for classes to start. Right: Sarah Naegele looks over the Second Step curriculum at Salem's open house that will be used during the 2004-05 school year. Far right: Springfield parents Bambi and Craig ReGester and their son, Riley, look over Policy Council information for the school year. Walt’s Words of Wit and Wisdom by Walt Klamath Well by golly, it’s been a while since I have had anything to say, would you believe. Have not been doing too well on the communications end of the whatever it is. Trying to think of something to write about is sometimes difficult; have written about everything I know. Some times while cutting wood, I point out where these different homesteads were. They tell me I should write about them. Well, I have written about all of them in the past, I think. Anyway, today I think I will write about CB - citizens band radio. This was quite the rave at one time. I started CBing around 1959. Then, we had to have a license that cost $5. We were supposed to sign off with those numbers. I don’ know if anybody did. All of us had skip names (handles). As time went on, the license went to $20. Then for some reason, it was re funded and we didn’t have to pay for a license, but were supposed to have one. *• • Siletz News CB radio was an addiction. At the dinner table was a Lollipop microphone. We would talk and eat, mostly talk. We lived in the valley of bent needles. In the area between 65th and 82nd and Clatsop and Flavel streets in Portland, there were 100 antennas in trees poles and on rooftops. There were large drooping ones, forgot what they were called. There were ones that looked like wind stripped umbrellas, there were straight sticks, and everyone thought they had the best reception. If anyone did have good reception, they were experts and were on demand to put antennas up. Cars had two or more. They called them co-phased and they were sup posed to do great things. Then there was a little box and amplifier that boosted the four-watt output to several hundred watts. These were called lenears. The box cost a dollar a watt. They did get out, and attracted the FCC be cause they are a little illegal and Portland seemed to have a surplus of FCC agents. October 2004 I traded a White’s metal detector for my first CB radio, approximate value $4. It was a five-channel Johnson, the Cadillac of radios at the time, according to those who owned one. It cost around $500. Now, a 40-channel costs $29.95 The one I had was a Laffette. It had 29 tubes and 19 transistors, and it worked on battery or house current. A car battery would run down in about 20 minutes. The favorite pastime was talking “skip,” talking to people all over the world. Skip is some kind of atmospheric phenomenon where radio waves go straight up, hit the ionosphere, and come back to earth at least 750 miles from the transmitter. Where it hits, one can talk as if you are next door. That has changed some over the years, but not too much. Most of us had QSL cards. I don’t know what QSL means or meant, but when we talked to someone on skip, we asked for a card. Some of these cards were very humorous. Many of us had kind of a cliche. That is, say, the channel 7 bunch that the higher channels looked down on. The channel 19 bunch considered themselves the elite, channel 11 was a trash channel. The biggest and most powerful sta tions were those who were on welfare. They had the big 1,500-watt lenears and ham radios to trigger the lenear. I still have a radio or two around the house, one in the hunting rig and one in the car, but very seldom hear anyone except during hunting season. I hear truckers on the road, on the free ways. Sometimes I can tell when it’s time to find a detour or sometimes the road conditions in the winter. I had one on the boat when I was commercial fishing, listening to all the lies out there and adding to them. I guess it was fun, but it was spendy. They also have been a big help to some people. For instance, channel nine is reserved for emergencies and many of us have responded to someone’s call for assistance on nine and directions on getting places, so I suppose they also could be called a tool.
