[GreenKeys] Newbie seeking help please

[Sean Kelly]

Chris,

I'm new to TTY also. I used them in the Air Force and now I'm a ham who's also interested in vintage computers. It might help if I admitted my axe to grind is this hobby is an excellent way to make up for the lack of socializing Americans suffer from. I suspect the Navy "C" school manuals that were used to teach sailors to maintain teletypes would help, and they are on John's website (along with 999,997 other vital things and 3 regular ones, link below. But also, this sci-fi book I'm excerpting below goes on to spell out the benefits of learning to fix things:

Have Spacesuit – Will Travel

Chapter 1

You see, I had this space suit. How it happened was this way:

“Dad,” I said, “I want to go to the Moon.”

“Certainly,” he answered and looked back at his book. It was Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, which he must know by heart.  I said, “Dad, please! I’m serious.”

This time he closed the book on a finger and said gently, “I said it was all right. Go ahead.” “Yes … but how?”

“Eh?” He looked mildly surprised. “Why, that’s your problem, Clifford.”

Dad was like that. The time I told him I wanted to buy a bicycle he said, “Go right ahead,” without even glancing up-so I had gone to the money basket in the dining room, intending to take enough for a bicycle. But there had been only eleven dollars and forty-three cents in it, so about a thousand miles of mowed lawns later I bought a bicycle. I hadn’t said anymore to Dad because if money wasn’t in the basket, it wasn’t anywhere; Dad didn’t bother with banks-just the money basket and one next to it marked “UNCLE SAM,” the contents of which he bundled up and mailed to the government once a year. This caused the Internal Revenue Service considerable headache and once they sent a man to remonstrate with him.

First the man demanded, then he pleaded. “But, Dr. Russell, we know your background. You’ve no excuse for not keeping proper records.” “But I do,” Dad told him. “Up here.” He tapped his forehead.

“The law requires written records.”

“Look again,” Dad advised him. “The law can’t even require a man to read and write. More coffee?”

The man tried to get Dad to pay by check or money order. Dad read him the fine print on a dollar bill, the part about “legal tender for all debts, public and private.” In a despairing effort to get something out of the trip he asked Dad please not to fill in the space marked “occupation” with “Spy.”

“Why not?”

“What? Why, because you aren’t-and it upsets people.” “Have you checked with the F.B.I.?”

“Eh? No.”

“They probably wouldn’t answer. But you’ve been very polite. I’ll mark it ‘Unemployed Spy.’ Okay?”

The tax man almost forgot his brief case. Nothing fazed Dad, he meant what he said, he wouldn’t argue and he never gave in. So when he told me I could go to the Moon but the means were up to me, he meant just that. I could go tomorrow-provided I could wangle a billet in a space ship.

But he added meditatively, “There must be a number of ways to get to the Moon, son. Better check ‘em all. Reminds me of this passage I’m reading. They’re trying to open a tin of pineapple and Harris has left the can opener back in London. They try several ways.” He started to read aloud and I sneaked out-I had heard that passage five hundred times. Well, three hundred.

I went to my workshop in the barn and thought about ways...

~~~~~

And here's John's website: http://www.navy-radio.com/

Sean Kelly,
Seattle