When I was a youngster, my parents owned a laundry. It wasn’t the coin-operated, self-serve kind that is prevalent today. You could use the machines yourself, or you could hand your laundry to the person at the customer counter, and a laundry employee would do the rest for you … washing, drying, pressing, folding. My father was an air-conditioning and refrigeration mechanic at a cigarette factory, but he always wanted to have his own business like his father and brother. The laundry was his chance to be his own boss. Which meant every day after work and all weekend long he worked at the laundry. Mostly, he worked on the machines to keep them running. My mother worked there, too. She worked behind the customer counter, taking in dirty clothes, handing back clean clothes, taking in money, handing back change. So, where was I?
I was right there, sitting in a metal chair, bored out of my 8-year-old mind. My parents were strict: I wasn’t allowed to go outside. Not that there was anything to do outside. The laundry was on a busy street in a commercial district. There were no other kids around. I was supposed to sit in my chair and do nothing for the entire time I was there, which was for hours every weekday afternoon and evening, and all day on weekends. There was absolutely nothing for an 8-year-old to do there. It was as bad as it sounds.
There was a plethora of machines: washers, commercial dryers, and extractors. After laundry was washed it was placed in an extractor to be spun to a very high speed, which extracted almost all the water from the laundry. Only then was the laundry put into a dryer.
Sometimes I watched my father work on a machine. A constant problem with every washer was stuff getting into the water pump and jamming the impeller so it couldn’t pump water. The gas-fired dryers tumbled the laundry in a drum which reversed direction several times every minute. The motors were controlled by micro-switches connected to cams, and occasionally there would be a problem with them. Sometimes I would open the lint filters in the dryers and find rhinestones. Oddly, there seemed to always be a few rhinestones in the lint filters.
One day my father brought in a large olive-colored book and handed it to me. It was about two inches thick. On the cover was printed, “Amateur Radio Relay League Handbook.” I had nothing to do so I started reading at page one and was soon hooked. The electronic components it described were easy for me to understand: resistors, capacitors, inductors. I could visualize how these things worked. I visualized moving electrons and in my mind I saw expanding and collapsing magnetic fields. I learned Ohm’s Law, that most fundamental law of electrical circuits. I learned about reactance and impedance and I learned there were real numbers and imaginary numbers. It all fascinated me. When I got to the concept of “resonance” I realized I was over my head. I plunged ahead anyway, reading about series resonance, parallel resonance, Quality factor (Q-factor). Hundreds of electronic mysteries lay revealed on the pages in my hands. I was absorbed for many hours – reading, re-reading, often struggling to understand, but always learning.
I began to study everything I could find about the workings of radios and televisions. I collected every radio I could get, I took them apart and built little circuits at home. When my dad went to night-school to study radio servicing, I attended class with him. By then I was 13 years old but still too young to officially enroll, so I audited the class. I did the homework and took all the exams. When I was about 14 or 15 I got my Novice-class amateur-radio license, which required passing a written test and a Morse-code proficiency test. I spent my hard-earned newspaper-delivery money on building an amateur radio transmitter and I bought a short-wave receiver. I put up a vertical antenna in the center of the back yard. I spent hours in the attic “talking” with people around the country. I communicated using Morse code … dots and dashes.
Dad’s laundry business didn’t succeed, though he put in the hours and worked hard at it. He added pressing and folding equipment so he could offer those services. He added a display case so he could have another revenue stream from selling trinkets like wristwatches and such. But the advent of coin-operated self-serve laundries doomed his business. People wanted the (cheaper to use) coin-op machines, and dad couldn’t afford to replace all his equipment. I still recall overhearing dad and mom discussing what they should do. Ultimately, he got rid of the laundry. He sold it for a fraction of what he paid for it.
And what of the Handbook my dad gave me to help ward off hours of boredom while I sat in his laundry? It launched me on a path to college and an engineering degree. It’s funny, sometimes, how things work out.
After mom passed, I found that Handbook in her garage. I flipped through pages that brought back so many memories and feelings. For a while, I kept the Handbook. But it was old; the front cover was missing, the binding was coming apart and pages were loose, and it was filled with knowledge about mostly obsolete technology. Ultimately, I got rid of the Handbook. I tossed it into a dumpster along with hundreds of other memories from mom’s house.
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