About This Blog

This blog features: neighborhood restaurants, nearby restaurants, downtown restaurants, Casa View Shopping Center, nearby shopping, Downtown shops.

I will first list places and my connections with them. For the spirit of completeness, I will then list other places, known to me but not visited. I choose not to list the unknown.

I like the section entitled Places I Wish I Had Visited.

My focus is places and locations which existed from 1953, when I moved to Dallas, until 1965, when I graduated from high school. This list will continue with my college years, until I turned 21. I left Dallas in 1969 and, as I did not return except to visit my parents until 1973, my memory of East Dallas ends at that time.

Some categories were easy to separate – restaurants and shopping. Some experiences are not so easy to categorize, but are still meaningful. They may be all lumped in together, and then teased out as other connections are made.

Music wise, we may have thought we were born of the “wrong generation.” I always thought the older generation (i.e. 3 to 4 years older than me) had a richer and deeper experience.

But we, the beginning of the Baby Boomer generation, had it best – stable family life, rising expectations for the middle class and parents who wanted to give so much to their children, which most did not have in their childhood. We were left to play and roam outdoors to make our own fun. We had the best toys and the best music.

And yet we lived in tumultuous times – the Cold War, Civil Rights, Integration and the Kennedy Assassination through the killings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

Hopefully we came out as loving, caring, sharing adults whose experiences made us better people and gave us the ability to show appreciation and gratitude for the neighborhood and experiences which enriched us and our loved ones.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Crystal Radios - The Whole World Coming from a 50 Foot Copper Line in my Backyard




My first crystal radio was a red-colored plastic rocket-shaped affair with the antenna doubling for the nose of the rocket.

I installed a 50' copper wire in my backyard, complete with ceramic insulators and a ground wire.  I must have gotten all these materials from Allied Electronics in downtown Dallas.

With such an antenna you could pull in all sorts of radio stations across the country.  Not so much from the West Coast, but all through the Midwest up to Chicago, New Orleans and Nashville provided powerful stations.

I also had a Cat Whisker crystal radio with a metal whisker set atop a piece of lead.  I wrapped my own wire around a toilet paper roll and made a fancy crystal radio with a tower in Mr. Baker's eighth grade Electric Shop.

WRR used to play the old radio shows so I got to hear The Shadow and The Green Hornet.
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1 comment:

  1. UnknownJanuary 14, 2014 at 11:53 AM

    I thought this category would have you using the crystal radio you in Mr Baker's Electric shop class at Gaston Jr High

    ReplyDelete

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