When I was attending St. Joseph High School in 1955, I became fascinated by the “radio lab” where, every weekday and weekend, one could find high school boys busy (a) with learning the Morse Code, (b) with building a one-tube (6L6) 25-watt transmitter on a discarded TV chassis, (c) with taking government exams that authorized the use of a transmitter to contact amateur radio operators in and outside the USA.

Mike Stimac, a visionary teacher, was the spirit and the organizer of this dynamic Radio Club. Everyone had something to learn; everyone had something to teach.  I spent thirty to forty hours in the lab each week.  I was being fed on the notion that I could learn electronic circuitry (no matter how complex) and that I could modify and use surplus radio receivers and transmitters taken from the B29s decommissioned after WWII.

Today, Mike is living in a retirement home in the outskirts of Columbus, OH.  I am living half-way around the world with my wife [see pic] in the outskirts of Shanghai, China.  Mike is losing his short-term memory.  He doesn’t remember even half of what we discussed on FaceTime just a week ago.  Surprisingly, however, his long-term memory is entirely intact (as will be shortly demonstrated).

So I offer you, dear reader, a transcript of ten minutes taken from our FaceTime chat that we had five days before Christmas.  With good reason, I am calling it “Following my Star.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~transcript begins here~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A [=Aaron]: What are the changes that you would want to make in your autobiography?  [Note: Mike has repeatedly told me that he is dissatisfied with his autobiography that he is holding in the pic above.]

M [=Mike Stimac]: Well, I don’t like the entire first chapter that is filled with “baby stories.”

A: Oh, O.K.  From what it’s worth, I very much enjoyed your story of how you received a mild electric shock when listening to your crystal set during a thunder storm.  What I heard in this story is how you first encounter radio waves.

M: Yeah, it all started with Jimmy and Johnny coming to live with us on our farm just outside of Cleveland.  The boys were nephews of mine who were escaping the outbreak of smallpox in Chicago.

A: How old were you then?

M: I was between 10 and 12.  Jimmy was a few years older than me.  Johnny was a few years younger.  Both of them, however, were “city boys” and had experience with using a selenium crystal to construct a primitive radio receiver.

A: Did they now?  Tell me about that.

M: My Dad was a part-time engineer with the railroad.  In our attic, he had collected lots of boxes filled with odds and ends of parts used to repair train engines.  The three of us would go through his collection by way of amusing ourselves.  One day, Jimmy recognized a selenium crystal (set in a lead base, it was the size of a dime).  He immediately recognized what it was and what it could be used for.  I helped him find a spool of bare copper wire and a pair of ear phones.  That’s all that was needed.  Jimmy mounted the crystal on a small board and attached it to thirty-foot antenna.  Then he made a “tickler” that allowed him to turn the crystal into a diode that would separate out the audio from the AM radio waves coming off the antenna.  The audio signal was then passed through the head phones allowing the audio signal to be heard in my ears.  Once everything was set up, we heard WTAM transmitting loud and clear from Cleveland, maybe twenty miles due West from our farm.

A: Wow!  That was quite a discovery.  Jimmy showed you how simple it was to design, to build, and to use a crystal receiver.

M: He sure did. I was amazed!

A: I bet you were.

M: After four months, Jimmy and Johnny returned to their family in Chicago.  After that, I had the crystal receiver all to myself.  At night, tucked into bed, I would wind down by listening to WTAM.  On one such night, a thunder storm was brewing.  Now, for the first time, I got some mild electrical shocks from my head phones.  I noticed that I would get a shock every time there was a lightning flash.

A: Hey, what a discovery that was.  [In 1887, the German physicist Heinrich] Hertz was the first man to create a radio transmitter.  It was no more than a spark gap connected to a tank circuit.  I just bet that Hertz, in his youth, had an experience like your own.  He noticed that each time that there was a lightning flash in the clouds, his radio receiver received a strong signal that was experienced as a mild electrical shock in his earphones.

M: Maybe so.

A: Another thing that may be true.  Of all the things that made a deep impression on you, my hunch is that the electrical shocks helped to make certain that you would remember that crystal receiver.  As a boy of ten, you had hundreds, thousands really, of other experiences that have been long-forgotten.  But not “those shocks” that came from your crystal receiver.

M: Yeah!  Now that you mention it.  The shocks that came through the head set were in tandem with the lightning flashes.  This gave me a renewed fascination with the mysteries of Nature.

A: And, let’s face it.  I notice that you remembered “WTAM,” the “selenium crystal,” and “the propagation of radio waves” as well.  All of these associated memories were registered deeply in your long-term memory due to the electric shocks.  Thus, while you might have trouble remembering what you had for supper last night, all of the events surrounding the electrical shocks are fixed in your memory after ninety years.  It’s wonderfully strange how our memory works.

M: I have to agree with you.

A: Let’s go back to your embarrassment at telling “baby stories” in the first chapter of your book.

M: Say more.

A: Well, to begin with, I am in awe that you were able to remember so many stories and to put them into their proper order in your autobiography.  To be sure, you were selecting and deselecting what stories to tell at every point in your writing. Many were left out due to your editing.  I remember that.

As it so happens, Matthew in his Gospel was doing exactly the same thing.  Scholars today believe that Matthew had two reliable sources for his writing: the Gospel of Mark and collections of random sayings of Jesus.  Mark’s Gospel does not have any “baby stories” as you call them.  Matthew, however, had one “baby story” that he wanted to tell.  That’s the story of how three wise men from the East had studied the stars and noticed that a new, bright star had arisen that indicated to them that “a great king has been born.”  This made such a strong impression upon them that they packed their bags and loaded them on camels and set out to follow that new, bright star.“Following a star” is just a fiction invented by Matthew for those [like himself] who do not quite understand astrology or astronomy.  Matthew has the wise men say, “we observed his star at its rising” (Matt 2:2).  Hence, when they started out each evening, the new star was right in front of them.  But, in any given night, this same star would be overhead in five hours and behind them after ten hours (when it was setting).  So, if they literally “followed the star,” they would be reversing their direction during the course of any given night.

Matthew also says the the star “stopped” when they got to Bethlehem: “It [the star] stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child” (Matt 2:9-11).  Here is another fiction.  No star ever stops (save the North Star).  All the other stars are constantly on the move—including the star that induced them to find Jesus.  Thus, only someone ignorant of astronomy could talk about a star “stopping” and allowing them to “enter the house” where the infant-king was to be found.

Yet, you and I know that the bible does not teach us astronomy or astrology.  We overlook these fallacies because the bible is telling us a wonderful story.

M: Yes, I agree.  This was a striking baby story in Matthew’ Gospel.  Who cares that the star movements were all fictionalized.

A: But the story doesn’t end there, as you know.  In Matthew’s story, the three wise men are told by an angel that Herod was not to be trusted.  So they avoided Herod on their way home.  Herod, needless to say, was expecting the wise men to give him the information he needed.  Finally, in a fit of anger, he sent his armed troops into the small village of Bethlehem with orders to kill every male child under two years old.

Many scholars today think that this reported killing of infants never took place.  A Jewish king could be ruthless but not so ruthless as to have a hundred innocent babies killed.  History books that tell about Herod have nothing to say about such a horrendous crime.  Surely the ancient biographers would not easily overlook this ruthless crime?  As I see it, “the killing of the innocents” was put into the story by way of giving “a mild shock” to those who heard the story so that they would never forget it.  So the story in Matthew has the same dynamics that floods your story about the crystal receiver.

M: OK, I get it.  Mark did not tell any baby-Jesus stories.  Matthew and Luke did.  So what now?

A: As I see it, Mike, your story of how you got your first radio receiver and how you discovered that a lightning flash emits powerful radio waves prepares the reader for discovering how, from these very humble beginnings, you would eventually start-up a Radio Club at St. Joseph High School. No one told you to do this.  You were teaching “electricity” to boys in the tech track.  To those who were college-bound, you decided to teach them “electronics.” As a result, over a hundred young men would gain official government licenses that allowed them to build simple one-tube radio transmitters and to send out radio waves that invited other “amateurs” to chat with them using Morse Code. At 06:00, I would fire up my rig because I knew that the atmospheric bounce was just right for chatting with amateurs in CA.

But this was only the beginning. There were field trips to examine the cyclotron at Ohio State, parents’ nights, road shows for Catholic grade schools, tracking Sputnik, retreats with Thomas Merton, etc.  So, your little “baby story” of discovering radio waves served to enable nearly two hundred young men to do the same—and I am mightily pleased to count myself among them.

M: In a nutshell, you liked my crystal set story.  It got you ready to hear a much larger story.

A: Exactly.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~transcript ends here~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS: After our chat, I did some fact checking.  I looked up WTAM.  They are still broadcasting the news from East Cleveland.  Mike got it right!  He was not inventing this part of the story.

PPS: Here’s a little secret of mine.

Now and then I have the chance to do some electronic repairs here at the house.  I recently took apart my back-up power supply for my home computer and replaced the large battery.  As I did the work, I played “Victory at Sea” using my computer’s loud speakers.  This music transports me physically and spiritually right back into the radio lab at St. Joes on a Saturday morning.

I can still feel “you guys” [Radio Club members] working on all sorts of projects right alongside me.  It gives me a wonderful feeling of being ALIVE!