Not necessarily, Brian, but studying for an amateur ticket gets kids
fired up about learning. I can certainly see Jim's point about kids
becoming interested in geography, the sciences and math. It didn't work
toward interesting me in geometry though. I was caught reading QST
hidden within my open geometry book.

Should have been a copy of Playboy..... ;-)








For the first few weeks of my interest, my dad actively discouraged me
with talk of amateur radio being a passing fad for me. He had visions
of mounds of equipment gathering dust in a closet. My mother encouraged
me and was able to convince my father that some of the meager family
income should be spent on a transmitter for me if I earned the money for
the receiver from my paper route.

My dad had and has no technical abilities whatever. My mother was
deathly afraid of electricity and wouldn't even clean my ham shack. She
just knew that lightning was going to enter the house via my antennas.


Reminds me of the story about some little old lady sueing the trolley
company
because they caused a lightning bolt to run thru her bedroom late at night.
What probably happened was the trolley pole comming off the wire causing
an arc to flash. She must have went nuts during a real thunderstorm....

We once had lightning take out a tall tree in the back yard late one night.
Wooden shrapnel all over the back yard; good thing nobody was outside
when that happened. SOme of the light bulbs that were on blew out.
This was back in the early 60's, before line operated solid state
equipment was at all common. The tube stuff (all of which was off)
didn't mind.