Member-only story
Growing Up
Installing Antennas and Talking with New Zealand
Unexpected Lessons in Communication
My dad is on the top of a 40-foot pine tree next to our house, but it’s okay. No, really. He has emphysema, a bad heart, 40 year’s worth of very hard-living, an unfiltered cigarette addiction, and clearly a lack of trust in others. He believes he is the only person who can install a new CB/short wave antenna even if it is at the top of a 40-foot pine tree.
CB (citizens’ band) radios were a big thing then in the 1970s. Once he installed it, he could talk to new friends as far away as New Zealand. He’d sit in his room with a large shortwave radio shouting: “Skip-land, skip-land, skip-land. Come in, skip-land,” which was a way to describe how the radio waves actually bounced off the atmosphere and were directed back to the other side of the earth. The radio waves literally “skipped” off the ionosphere and landed in New Zealand.
Several seconds later, you’d hear the reply from the other side of the world: “Go ahead skip land,” but in a New Zealand accent. Which was cool.
And so it went, for months. It was great having a short-wave radio in the house. The radio was a small window to the larger world that I would not experience until years later. I was a shy teenager and the anonymity of…
