It’s a beautiful August afternoon in Ohio as I wait on the porch for a proof copy of my book Electronic Communications with Arduino to be delivered. I flashbacked to working Saturday nights as a teenage DJ at WHOT. I just realized that a severe thunderstorm, a tornado warning, and a cranky cigar-smoking Chief Engineer named Pete are what spurred my interest in engineering. The intense storm made large sparks dance across our antenna system. The Emergency Broadcast System was activated, and as I was reading a prepared script about tornados, the station was going on-and-off the air. Pete was at the engineering controls. When I asked him what was happening to our transmitter, he began to answer but stopped midsentence to say, “never mind, you wouldn’t understand.” That “kick in the ass” got me started. A short time later, I joined the Air Force as an Avionic Communications Technician and earned an associate degree in that field, one of five degrees earned since then. (My high school physics teacher told me to go into basket weaving, and that’s why I have a bachelor’s degree in physics.)
We all have stories to tell about things that make us what we are today, and any positive response to an adverse action merits congratulations. If Pete had taken the time to explain the transmitter problems back in 1976, I probably would have been dumbfounded and walked away, but instead, he gave me a “kick in the ass” and sent me on my way to prove that I wasn’t stupid. We can learn from positive and negative experiences, and people like me sometimes need a “kick in the ass.” With the Pandemic, runaway inflation, and a divided country, I’m hoping students step up to the plate and hit a home run.
My latest book is an engineering textbook in electronic communications, and I’ll be using it at Kent State University, where I now teach. It requires quite a few electronic parts for lab projects, but all my books are available on Amazon, with links from the website: http://www.dukish.com.
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