Saturday, Feb. 13, 2016, 1:30 a.m. — Just got back from the shack to my PC in the library of our home. I know “library” sounds pretentious, but the truth is, it is not. A central room in our home is filled with bookcases of the books I’ve collected, my wife and our kids have amassed over the years. We all love books (nearly as much as I do Morse keys).
Our main TV is in this room too, as is the wood stove, so this time of year its a nice place to sit and write … which probably explains why I’ve become so prolific as of late.
In today’s mail I received a 1940 QSL card I won on eBay originally sent by W9ZKW, Clifford Ludwick of Bardstown, who had a fone QSO with W2FPM on March 3, 1940 at 9:55 a.m. Central time on 20 meters. Despite QRM, he gave the W2 a 5-8 report, though he notes that his “xtal osc quit on me when I tried to change frequency.”
Cliff had a pretty nice station too — he was using a then fairly state-of-the-air Hammarlund HQ-120X (“X” denoting crystal filters). The HQ-120X was unveiled in Dec. 1938, with a price tag of $129 (designed to be more competitive than their high-end rcvrs), so I expect Cliff could not have owned his for much more than a year.
For a transmitter, he was running 400 watts, though I can’t make out exactly what the transmitter is …looks like Pnt 55S, or maybe TNT? Interestingly, the card’s address is rural route 1, which was my father’s rural mail route that he ran for more than 25 years. If he were alive today he would probably have know of some of Cliff’s relatives.
MORE ABOUT CLIFF…. He was born in 1913 and in 1920, he and his family lived in Louisville.
The 1940 census shows Cliff as being 27 years old and living with his parents Alvin Leslie, 59 and his mother, Nannie D. Ludwick, 50. He had a younger brother, Roy, who was 18. Nannie’s mother, Mary Jane Davis, 84, also lived with the family in their home on Louisville Road (about 4 miles south of where I live).
Actually, I found that his son, Al Ludwick, is a ham in Atlanta, NN4ZZ. I just finished an email to Al about his father’s QSL card, which dates from about 10 years before he was born.
Time for bed …. 73 es GN de KY4Z SK …. dit … dit