As for stories,
Jim didn't have a lot of contact with hams
after the 1930's, when the ARRL headquarters
personnel changed. In the early 30's, at
least, maybe longer, QST was practically
edited from his home, a real bachelor's pad
(though I believe his mother lived there too).
It was a large farm, no farming was done but
there was space for tennis courts, swimming
pool, hamshack with sleeping quarters, quite a
spread. The ARRL gang would arrive and spend a
week playing around while knocking that issue
of QST into shape and sending it to the
printer (which was not far away).
One amazing sight was the hamshack, a separate
building near the house, which was basically
just as it had been left in the 1930's: ping
pong table in the center of the room, the
rack-mounted equipment in one corner, the
spare final tubes still sitting on the floor
where Percy Spencer had left them in 1940
after rebuilding them at the Raytheon lab.
When Jim built a hamshack in the house, he
simply left the old building as it was; turned
the key in the lock and rarely went back in.
It was too bad the entire building couldn't
have been moved to a museum site and preserved
intact, but the access road was much too
narrow and overgrown with trees to allow it.
The AWA did move most of the equipment out,
when Jim was still alive.
Excerpt from letter dated
April 1998
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