Many years ago, A friend of mine here in Denver, who was nearly 25 years older than I, got to know each other through the vending stand program here in Colorado.  He had a big stand, one of the largest in the state, and my last 2 weeks of training was with him.  We were sitting at an empty table on break one afternoon and Bill was smoking a cigar and we were drinking pop; I didn't drink coffee till I got my own snackbar.  He offered me a cigar and I said, "I don't smoke."  He said, "Phil, you don't smoke, you don't drink.  What do you do for enjoyment."  I said, "Well, I've been a ham operator since I was 14 and that's a lot of fun."  I was 21 at the time I met Bill.  He said, "Really?  I used to be W5LUG back in the fifties.  What's ham radio like now; I let my license expire."  I told him a few things and mentioned 15 meters.  He said they didn't have 15 meters when he was a ham.  He, without studying, went right down and took his general and passed the code and written both.  Bill had a first phone commercial license because he once ran a radio station on the broadcast band in a small New Mexico town just across the west Texas state line.  I forget the name of the town.  His little broadcast station ran 250 watts although he had a 500 watt license I believe.  He made a pretty good living but he did all the maintenance on the transmitter himself.  He also helped maintain a nearby town's small TV stations transmitter for extra money.  He was partially sighted in those days and had a driver or two he had to use to get between towns.  Plus, he was his own general manager at K triple N; his station he owned in New Mexico.  He was on 1070 so he had to run sunrise to sunset since the big KNX news station in Los Angeles is on the same frequency.  I listen to them frequently here in Denver.  One night, Bill was testing something he fixed in the transmitter and although it wasn't his scheduled maintenance time, it was like 3 in the morning, he put a carrier on for a few minutes to make adjustments to the transmitter.  He figured nobody would care or even be awake at that time of night but they did.  In the morning, someone called the station and said "Who in hell is covering up KNX in the middle of the night down there."  But that's not what I am writing about.  Bill told me at the station, they put up a 220 foot tower, omni directional, of course, and laid down long wide sheets of copper and solid copper wiring for a ground plane at that frequency.  I asked how the tower was fed and he said it was shunt fed.  I didn't even know what that was so he explained it to me.  Later, when I had a tower, I shunt fed it on 160 meters just like he did in the forties and fifties.  Anyhow, I asked about a feed line, since we are on the topic, and he said, back then, for little pip squeak stations like his, they built their own wide spaced open wire feed line from the small building, or trailer house, I can't remember which he had, to the tower about 100 feet away.  The radio station was next to a milk processing company.  The milk company used big barrels to transport the milk to the bottling company but there was a large wooden privacy fence, for some reason, between his station and the milk company.  The barrels were ringed with metal rings tightened down to keep the large lids on.  If a ring got bent, they just threw it away.  One day, Bill said the SWR on the transmitter of the station started creeping up.  The next day it was sky high and the reflected power meant they hardly were putting out a watt.  They went out and trailed the open wire feed line to the transmitter.  About half way to the tower, they found dozens of those metal milk rings laying on the feed line.  The guys at the milk company had begun tossing them over the fence and didn't know they were landing right on the feed line.  Bill passed his advanced shortly after getting his ticket again and was W0PPM here in Denver but if he is still alive, he'd be over 90 and living in Austin Texas now where he retired from the vending program here in Denver.

Phil.
K0NX