Salvage yard finds

[J M Fahey]

That was a real kick start of a second wave of growth and the US becoming a major player in high tech. Unfortunately, the bright kids today are funneled into business/finance instead of science and engineering.

Amen to that.
I was also stargazed when visiting our local surplus dealer, Don Luis Deza.
A half block mountain of junk, with narrow "tunnels" where you had to walk sideways because of lack of space.
All sorts of wonderful military transceivers , microwave test equipment, *huge* thousands of volts transmitter capacitors, selsyns, motorconverters, vibrators, etc.
I bought serving tray size IBM boards by the kilo or by the dozen (take your pick) and cannibalized them for parts, using the burn and slam technique.
What's *that*?: it was too slow to desolder part by part, so I took the Zen Buddhist "mind over matter" soft approach: I heated the solder side with a propane torch and when solder became bright I slammed the board over some newspaper, to catch the molten solder, then re-heated a little and slammed it again, component side down, into a wooden box to catch the miraculous rain of components.
Better wear eye protection !!
They were also the only source of now common computer fans, although most were either wonderful cast frame German Papst or Canadian Rotron.
Once I bought a beautiful, bright yellow/orange emergency transmitter, the kind you strap to your chest, power it from protruding hand-churned generator handles, hang the antenna wire from a baloon (which had turned into gunk) and automatically transmits S O S .
When I opened it and started turning the (stiff) handles , filaments glowed and it started transmitting !!!!!!
As a side note, once I visited the shop and the owner was *very* upset.
-"Ungrateful guys these Air Force officers, I buy all of their junk, yet now they call me names, they call me vulture"
- "And why would they do so, Mr Deza?"
- "Do you remember the helicopter that crashed last week at Air Base Morón? ... I heard news on the radio and went there to make my offer for the remains, as-is, as usual, before any other dealer beat me ... Is it my fault that they still hadn't pulled the pilot's body from it?"
Best of all, the crashed helicopter was already in his junkyard !!!!

[imaradiostar]

I wish I had that kind of opportunity when I was younger. I've been learning that even an electronic engineer in this country may not fully understand analog electronics- it's become a lost art! When I moved to Nashville 13 years ago there was a small hardware store with some abandoned tube hardware but that's about it- I've never seen anything in quantity.

I wonder if there are still warehouses out there, waiting to be discovered, filled with post-war era tube hardware?

jamie

[km6xz]

Actually there are such warehouses but they are small and private. Join a local ham radio club and let people know you are looking for old tubes and gear. They might not give them up but unfortunately, most of the members are dying off very fast. It used to be a young person's hobby but those once young people are now in their 80s and 90s. there is a section of the newsletter that will feature "Silent Keys" hams that have died since that last meeting. Contact the widow if she has not already given the treasure trove of parts and gear away, maybe she could use some help cleaning up the ham shack or garage. I was called by the daughter of such a ham who had some only 1960s era transmitters and receivers. She asked if I would buy them. I really did not need them but offered her enough to cover come expenses. When carting of my new old gear, she said, oh, by the way, dad had a lot of old junk in the basement. I had no idea after several visits that there was a basement. She said after her mother died in 1962 he sealed the basement and never went down there again. I was probably the first person to venture down there. It was a complete electronics R&D facility with 1930s through 1950s parts, test instruments, several thousand vacuum tubes still in their unopened cartons. He had invented a LORAN system for the NAVY. There were documents from the War Department on projects he was contracted for. It was all new to the daughter who never knew the father was a major figure in early long range radio navigation or worked through the war in his secret underground lab turning out research for the army and navy. All the history was in those file cabinets and some of the projects were still on the work benches.
For an amateur historian along with being actively involved in electronics since the late 50s, this was a gold mine.
So, I know this story has been repeated many times with different players and different backgrounds but there is still tremendous storehouses of old, but unused parts all over the country, in barns, garages, attics etc. The families of these people think it is all junk and want it in the dump.

[Tom Phillips]

Thanks to all for this trip back in time.
The posts brought back many memories:
* High school electronics club.
* The ART13 we bought at the surplus sale where everything sold for 3 cents a pound.
* Analog meters (Which are still very much a part of my present)
* Building my first piece of test equipment, a Heathkit VTVM, on the kitchen table with my Dad (I still have it)
* Salvaging parts from old equipment (Which I still do)
* Etc.
Anyone else ever use the newly arrived Allied Electronics catalog as bedtime reading material?
Cheers,
Tom

[km6xz]

Yes, and the Olsen and Lafayette catalogs. Every page memorize. I saved up allowances for many months to afford a real copy of the ARRL Amateur Radio Handbook 1956 edition when I was 7. getting my license was hard since I know no person who was either a ham operator or knew anything about electronics. Finally got my license at 9 and waited 6 months for it to arrive. In the prior two years I built a full station with 75 plate input 3 band CW transmitter, with a 30 year old 807 final. My receiver was home made but for Christmas my parents bought a used R55 from Allied. It worked ok but my home brew receiver was much better. I traded the R55 to a kid who was "stuck" with an old Hallicrafters SX-28A built in 1939. It was my dream receiver and really worked great after I repaired it. I used it for years, nothing sounded better to my ears, particularly AM broadcast and SW broadcast. At 13 I started my own repair business(hi-fi, CB radio and tape recorders), in my own rented office and ran it successfully until I graduated from high school mid term. I moved to San Francisco thinking I would get a job in electronics and save until I had enough to go to college. I rented a very nice apartment overlooking Playland of the Pacific with full ocean views for the extremely high cost of $348 a month. I did not realize that most of the time the ocean fog would obscure the view. The first night in the apartment I hear loud music, but could not tell from which direction it was coming due to the moist fog air. I followed the sound downstairs and across the small parking lot to the edge of the cliff. I started down a path which suddenly became very steep and slippery because it was made of loose compressed sand. I slide all the way down the hill, tumbling as I went. The music by that time was very loud. I had slide into the back patio of the Family Dog Ballroom owned by Chet Helms. The kids in the patio must have all been stoned because a couple girls kept asking me what planet I landed from since I dropped out of the sky. I was not into music at the time but soon after some of the local musicians had learned I that I know how to fix things. A steady stream of musicians started coming by the apartment with broken amps a few hours before performances at places like Filmore, Winterland, the Boarding House, and others. I met all the players that were in involved in San Francisco scene in the late 1960s. Carlos Santana was the first guy to bring an amp to me but Steve Miller, Jerry Garcia, all the players in the Airplane, Sons of Chaplin, Big Brother, Blue Cheer, Boz Scaggs, Quicksilver, Sly and the Family Stone, Flaming Groovies and lots more. I never got that job, I was spending too much time repairing and hanging out at the library trying to learn about the subjects that were street corner conversations in that unique time(political science, philosophy, history, comparative religions, literature, poetry and all things that contributed to the last of the Beats and emerging hippie culture). I was a nerd kid from Sacramento so I was not prepared for the intellectually stimulating environment of 1967 SF. I did reluctantly leave SF to attend Sac State and got a BSEE and continued to start businesses related to electronics, and ended up with a recording studio that did very well and for many years had more hit records than any other studio in the world. From 1979 to 1986, there was not a single weekly BillBoard Top 100 that did not have one of our records in the top 10. A number of times, we had up to 6 of the top 10 all by different artists. That was a long trip from sleeping with a the revered Allied catalog as a nerdy 6-7 year old.
The success in recording allowed a lot of other side businesses, travel and more fun than anyone should have but my best move was chucking it all and moving to St Petersburg Russia. Every day has been interesting stimulating and exciting, and not to mention being surround by the loveliest women I've every seen or had the pleasure to know. I still party hard, just walked in from most of the night in a disco dancing until about 4 a.m. when I remembered I needed to go for an early morning helicopter flight lesson. I've has a fixed wing ticket for a long time but started taking lessons when a friend recently bought two new helicopters. Normally I go out on Thursday until 6 a.m. dancing, Friday until 7a.m. and about the same on Saturday night. That keeps me in shape at 61.

[Tom Phillips]

Stan,
All I can say is "very cool man!"
I've met a few people who were in that scene. Some remember, some don't.
Thanks,
Tom

[J M Fahey]

WOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[km6xz]

Stan,
All I can say is "very cool man!"
I've met a few people who were in that scene. Some remember, some don't.
Thanks,
Tom

Thanks Tom
I have been all over the world, 86 countries and have not seen anything like the atmosphere of the 1965 to 1968, a very short period of time unique in the arts where a tiny place, mostly a few square blocks produced the variety of unique creations in music, art, philosophy and social experimentation. It probably will never happen again because there is no place that is isolated enough to evolve with little outside influence. In a 4 block area there were about 100 bands, living working and experimenting yet none were alike or could be confused with anyone else. I doubt any were concerned with "making it", it was living. Some did get national attention but they were not the cream, locally they were just the band next door. Some were more into free jazz, others into early electronica, some were folk and early music oriented, blues, there were new styles that became funk, and R&B, there were country/blue grass/folk style Americana music, rock and the psychedelic groups were often a mixture of all, in one some. There were a few hard rock, Cream before there was a "Cream". Within 40 minutes of bus rides there was Credence, Tower of Power, Sly Stone, the early Dobbies, there were groups playing Indian classical music. They all played out several times a week and often for free in the parks or on the street when not headlining at the Filmore or Carousal Ballroom. They played and lived, pretty much in isolation, yet word got out. A few very unlikel bands got national attention, like the Dead, which were a folk/blues/ jam band in another time would have been unknown outside of SF. They were my favorite band of all time. Seeing them live, jam for hours with such beautifully crafted songs as core. I doubt any song writing team ever created so many wonderfully composed songs, the Lennon and McCartney would have had to work together for another 20 years to have the same depth and quality of catalog. Yet most of the band did not write lyrics much, most were written in open prose by Robert Hunter and sent in a large bundle every 6 months or so and the band just created music for them. But what music they created. It never came off well on record, they were first and foremost a live band. There were a few standout albums, like American Beauty, but the general music audience never got a chance to experience a Dead concert so they are thought of as a hippie drug band with a couple pop hits on the radio.
Due to the crash of the live concert industry, I doubt any band will be heard by more people live again. They stayed on the road a lot and would play 2-4 nights in a city, with all tickets going to the same people for all nights....even in different cities. At any given time they limited their play list to about 200 songs out of a catalog of just under 500 songs that their fans craved to be played. No songs were done exactly the same way twice. They were there to create music, not recite cuts from records. There were no set lists before the performance but the theme evolved during the show based on lots of variables we could never figure out. But their segues where famous. Any member could decide the next song simply by playing a note from that song 2-5 minutes before the start of it. Keen fans were right there with the band. If the others did not pickup on the intention of the signal, 30 second later 2-3 notes were played by that member by that time about 1/3 of the audience knew and gradually over several minutes more and more notes from the next song were added, but different players until the first just melted into the second, quite often a completely different key, temp and genre of song. Everyone was crazy about Jerry but I think the solid core of the best rhythm section in rock was the real key to the complete mastery of their audience. Billy was a solid, perfectly timed power drummer who could play with finesse and Micky was a fusion/world music influence that brought everything in the mix, complimenting each other with contrasts and instantly re syncing to for the tightest rhythms ever heard by two people playing stroke for stroke. There were several bands later with 2 drummers but never with the range, precision and feel of Micky and Billy, and Phil, on bass. Phil was the one people sometimes forgot contributing, but he was the Ringo to the Beatles, but with the exception of having the highest level of formal training and compositional skills. He just never overplayed anything. What a band, what an experience every show was. No theatrics, props or hype, just getting down to business and creating a new experience for the entire audience.
It did not hurt that they had a bunch of hangers-on who were brilliant engineers and inventors (and some who were just nuts) who designed and built one super sound system after another, always with the best sound in rock. I still had a few of the cabinets from the famous Wall of Sound, which had a complete PA array for each instrument, so the sound from each was not mixed to common house feed. If they or other bands were not playing shows that day, they were playing somewhere, like a park for free. Jerry Garcia probably played more gigs than anyone in the business....,if the Dead were not playing he had a 1/2 dozen side bands or would be playing his first love of blue grass and folk with other neighbors like David Grisman.
The audiences were highly appreciative of any style of music that was good. Bill Grahame was intent on expanding the musical awareness of the audiences by mixing wildly different artists on the same 6-8 act typical all night at the Filmore. He found old Delta bluesmen the kids had never hear of, or electric blues like Albert King, or Ravi Shankar, which turned the Beatles onto Indian classical music. Jazz players or a string quartet were sandwiched between say, the first metal band Blue Cheer and a more big band style like Sons of Champlin or almost radio "The Beau Brummels", or Latin Jazz oriented rock of Santana. All for $2-4. The city had an ordinance saying a concert hall could not be a dance venue so the police tried to shut down some of the concert halls, which were mostly old ballrooms. Bill Graham came up with a novel solution. He said there could be no dancing unless by "Cast Members of the show". He stood at the entrance and "paid" every arriving audience member an apple and told them it was their job to dance if they felt like it. More enlightened members of the city council were embarrassed by the situation and passed a rule saying their were no rules.
In the summer of 1968, all started to change. Bus loads of kids from all over the country came streaming in. They had not grown up in the arts and intellectually oriented San Francisco of the 1950s so were there to get away from parents, party and live free. Everything changed quickly and not for the best. The SF scene splinters and many moved up to Marin County or Big Sur, or Mendocino and sort of left SF to the drug overdosed kids from Kansas. I settled in Marin as did the Dead, David Crosby and many others. I also found cheap land in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and lived in the woods for years, at times commuting to Marin for recording. By the 1970s San Francisco was looking and feeling bad, homeless were camped out in a tent city around city hall, the drugs and underground society were seedy and unsavory.
Thanks for forcing the memory core dump....There are not many left who are still in contact with each other. The life it went out symbolically when Jerry died. We all remember where we were when we heard first of Jimi, John, Jerry, and Janis' death. I took it hardest with Jerry, Janis and Jimi because I knew them well, although John did attend, with Yoko, the grand opening party for the studio. Jimi to me, was without equal before or since as a natural player yet was not such an interesting person. Some jazz greats or rockers who were extremely talented in communicating through their instrument, were often semi-inarticulate in personal conversation. Others were intellectual gifted, there was no rule or typical personality associated with talent to communication non-verbally. For an example one rock guitarist I worked with a lot was famous as a axeman but be was much better at even the most delicate nuanced on-the-fly passages that his audience never got to hear, but in person he was intellectually on the level of a 14 year old hormone overloaded teenager. Some, after talking with him would assume he was an idiot, unable or willing to express any thoughtful idea. Yet, picking up any instrument with strings, he had all of us forget what we thought of him on a personal level. One time waiting for a lunch break to be over, he started reading the sports section of the paper and reading it out loud should he could barely read. But as he said the words he picked up his acoustic guitar and using the cadence of the the sound of the written text about the SF Giants loss, played a melody that followed the words but was so expressive, and nuanced, it felt like a classical string composition yet with a bit of Miles Davis influence, in his Kind of Blue phase. The producer was so enthralled he asked for a cassette recorder to capture it. It was truly beautiful. We were all in stunned silence. When he finished we asked what it was, he said it was his team losing, and he did not really remember exact what he played other than it was never a song before. If he was not so outgoing and kid like I would have assumed he was autistic, but he sure could play, and still does, long after popping into world prominence at 16 many years ago. One thing that strikes me even today is how nice most of the most well known players are. Just nice people you would like to hang out with over a couple of beers and talk about life. There were exception...I never could handle Rick James, or the great jazz drummer Tony Williams, and a few others. Luckily I was not in a position where I had to tolerate obnoxious people and refused bookings. The Bay Area music scene was very different than say, LA which was very much hype based and had a Hollywood attitude. As a result I really do no think many great albums came out of that area. The atmosphere of the Bay Area and Marin was 180 degrees from that in LA so the tiny community there generally produced more than their fair share of creative interesting work, and LA produced are fewer than the size and orientation as Show Biz Capitol should have.

[Chuck H]

At 42 I am too young to have participated in the heyday of evolution for rock/pop culture. I have been very fortunate to have personally met many players from the scene. But only met them. It's not like I ever called any of them to talk about their families or affairs. But I have also met a few people like yourself who were there and integral to the process on some level. I don't usually read the really long posts because they can be pontificant and one sided opinions. But I feel I got closer to understanding a Dead show reading this post than any of the other many reverence I've seen. It was indeed it's own time and place that for all else we've seen in history seems somehow isolated and concentrated into a historically relevant event. Certainly as much so as any war or revolution. Amazing. Thank you for sharing the experience.