When I was a
teenager I spent most of my free time on the radio, ham-radio, talking to
people around the world. In those days there were no computers and my main
connection to people who lived in other countries was the radio. Besides books,
magazines, TV series, and cinema, my main connection to a world full of wonder
was the ham radio. Nothing fueled my imagination more than my long
ham-radio-chats with people abroad. I wanted to learn about them, their
culture and their land.
I was introduced
to ham-radio by my father, who loved foreign languages, and who spent a lot of
his free time talking to foreigners on the radio. For years I sat next to him,
in our ham-radio room upstairs, and tried to pick up a few words of those foreign
languages here and there. I was crushed every time dad would turn off the
radio to go back to his work and chores. One day while I was begging him not to
turn the radio off, he looked at me and said: “Neda, why don´t you get your own
ham-radio license? Then you will be able to sit here and talk to people all
over the world the entire day long if that´s what you want to do.” That idea
hit me as something quite impossible. I was actually afraid I would never learn
Morse code, but I decided to try it anyway; otherwise, I would never be a
ham-radio operator myself and would forever depend on my father for a
connection to people abroad.
In order to get
a ham-radio license one has to go through a series of tests, one of which is
Morse code. I studied hard and finally learned enough Morse code to pass the
test and get my ham-radio license in 1979. That was one of the best days of my
life. I was 17 then. I could hardly believe the independence I had attained by
becoming a ham-radio operator myself. For me, the radio was the key that
would unlock the entire world for me. Getting my license meant that
I was independent from my father to operate the radio. From that day on,
my days were filled with longs hours of chats with people around the globe.
I hardly knew any English back then, but I asked dad to write down some basic sentences that I could use again and again, such as “My name is Neda. I am 17. I am in High School. I live in Fortaleza, Northeast Brazil. It´s always warm here. We only have two seasons: the rainy season and the dry season. And the temperature today is 30C”. My call sign was PT7-WY. Phonetically, I would say “Papa, Tango Seven, Whiskey, Yankee”. Every single day after school I was on the radio calling “CQ, CQ, CQ DX” (calling long distance stations) on 14.255 (20 meter band). No wonder everyone on the 20 meter band wanted to know who that “gal” was. They wanted to know who I was and I wanted to meet someone my age, with whom I could talk about things I liked, but I hardly knew more than a few sentences in English. Despite my lack of words and knowledge of English, I wanted to talk about all the things that I liked. I liked stamps, for instance. I collected them. I loved music too, especially Wings, the new band that Paul McCartney had started after he separated from the Beatles. I loved Bee Gees too, of course, and Olivia Newton-John, John Denver, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, and many others. I had two cassette players back then, one in my bedroom and another in my bathroom. So, I was always listening to my favorite songs and trying to sing along, even when I was in the shower.
I dreamed of
talking to a ham-radio operator who loved music, who collected stamps, who
liked books, such as those of Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, and Jonathan
Swift. Most of the ham-radio operators I ever met, however, were retirees.
Nevertheless, they seemed to absolutely love this young female voice with an
accent saying “CQ, CQ, CQ DX, this is Papa Tango Seven Whiskey, Yankee calling
from Fortaleza, Brazil.” Dozens of them would line up to talk to me. I felt
famous and often ran downstairs saying "Mom, dad, there are so many people
calling me at the same time that I can hardly handle them". In our front
yard we had a one-hundred-foot tower with an antenna up on top, and I would
purposely often point it towards the USA. We had a rotator. I could rotate the
antenna towards anywhere I wanted. In the afternoon I would usually point
it northeast, towards Europe, because, due to the time difference, it was easy to
talk to people there in the afternoon. Once I talked to Russia. Wow! That was
quite an awakening experience for me. I thought that Russians had no freedom to
be ham-radio operators. They were communists. In my mind communists had no
freedom. Their heavy English accent, however, was not appealing to me.
I wanted to learn English, but not from Russians, not from Germans, not from French. I wanted to learn it from Americans. Thus, I started pointing our antenna northwest, towards the USA. I had never been to the USA, but that country brought magic to my mind. It represented many things related to my childhood and to my life in general, such as July 20th, 1969, the day Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon. I was seven years old then, but I can vividly remember my dad listening to our short wave radio and telling us that Americans had landed on the Moon. I could hardly believe what he was telling me. We had no TV set then, but dad always relayed to us the news that he would hear on his short-wave radio. The night he told us that Apollo 11 had landed on the Moon, I went outside to our front yard and looked up the moon and really could not see anybody there. The Moon seemed too far away, but I thought to myself “they must be there since dad said so”. The entire story sounded incredible to me and I could not stop thinking about it for days.
Dad had always
had a heart-mind connection with the US because during the Second World War,
the USA had an Army Air-Force base in Fortaleza and dad, as a teenager, picked
up his English with the GIs. He often told us stories about GIs here in town
and how much he enjoyed learning from and with them. The GIs arrived in
Fortaleza on August 1942 and left on February 1946 and during those years my
dad seized the opportunity to learn English, mostly from Sergeant George
Williams, who had been a History teacher in the town of Orange, New Jersey, and
who was then a telegrapher in the Air Force Base here. I heard all these
stories a zillion times from my dad. They all filled me with wonder. He
would tell us that some of the GIs were friendly and kind and would accept his
invitation to come to my grandmother´s house for lunch or supper. Others were
quite reserved and did not want to have much conversation with the locals.
Grandma was a widow then. My grandfather had died of typhoid fever in 1933,
when grandma was only 27. She was left with three children and went to work at
my great-grandfather´s print shop, Minerva. She was a modern woman for those
days and did not mind at all that her teenage son would bring the GIs home for
a bite to eat.
Later, I would hear stories about the USA from Americans themselves. All through the 1960s and 1970s there were many Peace Corps volunteers who came to Brazil. Many ended up here in our poor northeast region, working in the countryside. Several of them often came to our home because dad spoke English and could hook them up, through the ham-radio, with their families through the so-called "phone-patch". Dad would look for a ham-radio operator in the area where one of our Peace Corps volunteer friends came from. The ham-radio operator there then would connect the radio to the phone and would make a phone call to their families (the Peace Corps volunteer´s family). There were no computers then; thus, no Skype, and a telephone call from Brazil to the US cost a fortune in those days. So, our home often became a base for these young men and women who were here as volunteers. The Peace Corps was established by President Kennedy in 1961 to help people outside the United States to understand American culture and help Americans to understand the cultures of other countries. The work was generally related to social and economic development. Many of those volunteers became our friends because they found in our family a home and a connection to their homeland via our ham-radio.
To be continued...
