Speaking of interesting history about things radio-related, I've often 
wished that I'd have been older and thought to sit down with my dad's older 
brother with a tape recorder before he died--I was only a kid at the time 
and such things hadn't yet occurred to me. My dad's family lived in 
Wilkensburg, Pennsylvania, and my grandfather was a fairly well-to-do 
pharmacist who owned several drugstores around the suburbs east of 
Pittsburgh. Dr. Frank Conrad lived a few houses away from their home and 
somehow, my uncle got involved in a very low-level way in Conrad's radio 
experiments that ultimately led to station KDKA and the birth of commercial 
radio broadcasting. From what my dad told me, his brother wasn't much more 
than a gopher, running errands, fetching coffee and sandwiches, etc., but it 
sure would've been interesting to have heard my uncle reminisce about those 
days. I wasn't even aware that he'd played this very minor role until 
several years after his death, but he was, according to my dad, something of 
a gadgeteer and electricity hobbyist--there's a great story that my dad used 
to tell about how he and his brother rigged a model railroad transformer to 
a copper drainpipe at one of their father's drugstores to persuade a 
particularly difficult dog to stop relieving himself against the downspout.

 --
 Walt Smith - Clearwater, FL
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