Hey, Papa

By Tim Glennon

When a six-year-old asked her grandfather, “Hey, Papa, what was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?” a barrage of stories about Tim Glennon’s early and professional life emerged. His own childhood curiosity about an electrical outlet developed into a lifetime of electronics engineering work.

Glennon presents in this book tales and anecdotes both amusing and factual. With digressions into technical aspects of his electronics engineering products that related to historical events, this selective memoir extends far beyond stories of interest to his five grandchildren. Rather, it records significant activities and characters, describing briefly Glennon’s journey through education, work, family, friends, and achievements.

Recounting many events familiar to the generation that lived through the 1930s and 1940s, Glennon records here his memories without intending to change or distort the facts. His memoir includes his marriage and raising of two talented and accomplished sons, developing retirement hobbies from long-standing interests, and now enjoying five grandchildren as they share with him their knowledge of twenty-first-century technology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532048210

Tim Glennon

Tim Glennon was born in Gary, Indiana, and worked as an electronics engineer for Rockwell Collins, Raytheon, Delco Electronics, E-Systems, Raytheon, and DataPath; where he did hardware and system design for various types of military communications equipment. While in the U.S. Army, Tim attended three military electronics schools and was later a civilian electronics instructor at the field artillery school in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He authored papers in the fields of Radar Warning receivers, and Night Vision Lighting, and a magazine article on a portable power system. He holds three patents and a Ham Radio Extra Class license with a call sign of KQ4TQ. In his retirement he enjoys ham radio on 20 and 40 meters, woodworking, homebrew electronics. Tim and his wife, Sondra, live in Roswell, Georgia, where they enjoy being involved in the lives of their two sons and five grandchildren.

Book preview

Early Years

Green Acres

Elementary School

High School

Shenanigans

Learning to Drive

I was born on a Saturday, November 20, 1937, in Mercy Hospital in Gary, Indiana. I’m told that I lived on Tyler Street in Gary; since I was quite young I don’t remember anything about those early years.

In the fall of 1940 my family moved from downtown Gary to a rural neighborhood called Green Acres, located south of Gary and east of Merrillville, Indiana, by two and a half miles. We lived on the top of a hill in a neighborhood of seven houses on the old Interstate Highway 330. Ours was the end house of the row of seven, across the road from a farm.

Route 330 was the original Lincoln Highway that went coast-to-coast, from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco, California. Later on in the early 1940s, route 30 replaced 330 across Indiana to Illinois. Route 30 was a four-lane divided highway located a mile south of our house. We lived two and a half miles east of highway 53, which went down through the middle of Gary as Broadway. I only have two memories of moving to Green Acres since I was three years old at the time. I probably turned four shortly after we moved since my birthday is in November. Dad had made an agreement with the bank so that he did so much work on construction of the house as part of the down payment; today they might call it sweat equity. I remember going with him one evening as he was completing work on the house. He was painting a built-in bookcase in the living room and as it got dark, he worked by light from a kerosene lantern. The second memory that I recall was the day we moved into the house. When I went into the downstairs bathroom, when I looked down into the toilet and saw water, I was astonished. Why, I don’t know, but then I was only three years old and probably it was something that registered in my memory for the first time, since I’m sure the house in Gary where we lived had water in the toilet.

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Green Acres house (circa 1950)

The house had a large porch on the right (east) side and a small porch on the left (west) side where the door eventually was to go into a garage or carport. The house had four bedrooms, one full bath upstairs, one half-bath downstairs, a living room, dining room, and kitchen, as well as a full basement. We had our own well and septic system. Two big thorn trees stood on each side of the driveway. These thorn trees would get what we called hedge apples on them in the fall; these were not something you ate.

Our house was on two acres of land. When we moved into the house, the yard was not landscaped; when I got older, it was my job to take my wagon and haul dirt from the adjacent lot to build up the terrace around the front of the house. Later, in the summer I had to mow the one-acre lawn with a reel mower (sometimes called a push mower). By the time I got finished mowing the whole thing, it was time to start over again. When Dad left for work, he told me that I had to haul 10, 20, or 30 wagonloads of dirt that day. I don’t remember the exact number––just, that it was always a chore for me and I never seemed to get it done.

One of my earliest childhood memories was listening to the announcement of the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. We had an upright tube radio in our house in Green Acres. On a Sunday morning while waiting for all of the family to get ready for church, we were listening to the radio and heard the announcement of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which prompted the start of the U.S. involvement in the Second World War II (WWII) in 1941.

My grandmother––we called her Grandma––was a heavy-set woman, and she always had a good disposition. She sometimes babysat for our family. I remember her living in an apartment in Gary, across the street from Holy Angels Church (now the Cathedral of Holy Angels). She didn’t have a refrigerator, just an icebox. She would put a sign in the window, with a number on top to tell the iceman how many pounds of ice to deliver.

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The ice sign

Grandma made noodles from scratch, rolling out the dough. Later in her life she lived with Paul and Kay, Dad’s brother and his wife who lived in Crown Point, Indiana. Occasionally Grandma would move and stay with my Aunt Rose or Aunt Rita. During one summer she came and stayed with our family in Green Acres. She would have me lay my head on her lap and she would clean out my ears using a wide bobby pin to get the wax out.

Back to the slow, at-home food, Mary Virginia: We had hamburgers one day a week, liver and onions one day a week, and fried fish on Fridays. In those days––prior to 1966––the Catholic Church had a rule that you were not to eat meat on Fridays because Christ died on that day of the week. We always had fried fish and I didn’t like it because it was always fried. Today, with the way they prepare fish, I love it, baked or broiled, with a light lemon butter and panko crumbs. In 1940/41 the U.S. became involved in WWII and food was scarce; you ate what your parents put on the table. During the early 1940s, there was a program called the clean-plate club. You had to eat everything on your dinner plate at each meal to belong to the clean-plate club.

What was left over from Sunday’s dinner, we would get in our school lunch on weekdays, more than once. I had a sandwich of baked beans, mashed potatoes, or carrot salad. We didn’t take lunch money, because lunches were not provided at school and my family didn’t have the money to give me to take to school.

Talk about recycling, my mother saved in a can that we kept by the stove all of the grease and fat from frying. When it got full you took the fat to the butcher and he turned it in to the government. Somehow they used this grease to make explosives. During the war, we had to save all of our tin cans. After you emptied them, you cut the two ends out of the can, then put the ends inside and flattened the can by stepping on it sideways.

Green Acres

We lived in the country in Green Acres, had a Crown Point address, and a Hobart phone number. Our milk was delivered to the front door of the house and we always had to set the empty glass milk bottles out for the milkman to pick up when he delivered the milk. The milk we got was not homogenized so the cream in the milk rose to the top; in the winter this cream froze. The top of the bottle had a cardboard cap on it and the cream rose to the top, expanded, and pushed the top off, causing two or three inches of frozen cream sticking out of the top of the milk bottle.

There was no swimming pool near our house in Green Acres, and in the summer, we sneaked off to the creek behind our house, where we went swimming in a wide area in the creek that formed a pond. The water was usually muddy but it was cool and great to swim in. Growing up I didn’t have a vacation, but in the summer, my parents sent me off to one of my aunts’ or uncles’ houses for a week or two. They always put me to work around their houses and it never seemed like much of a vacation. I was never on an airplane or had a credit card until I graduated from college.

Until they were elderly, my parents never had a credit card. In their later years they had something called a revolving charge card. The card was good only at Sears, Roebuck & Company. There is no Roebuck anymore. My parents never drove me to soccer practice. This was mostly because we had never heard of soccer.

I had a bicycle that weighed probably fifty pounds, and had only one speed (slow). Dad got the frame of an English bike (the skinny wheel bikes that you see today) and wheels for the fat wheel bikes like the Schwinn’s from the junkyard. The wheels wouldn’t fit in the frame so we had to spread the frame apart by driving a 2 x 4 in. board between it once the wheels were mounted in the frame. If not centered carefully, the wheels would rub on the frame and make the bike hard to ride. The bike didn’t have a seat, the pedals were broken, and the rods of the pedals were sticking out. My foot would slip off and I hurt my ankle on the pedal rod.

Later in the fall I had a paper route and delivered 76 evening newspapers, seven days a week. After school I folded all of the papers and put them in my paper bag. I put the paper bag on my bicycle and delivered the papers, putting the paper in every customer’s mailbox. In the winter, it was terrible because the roads were covered with ice. My bike slipped and slid and fell over, and my papers blew all over. In winter, it got dark before I could finish delivering all of my papers. On Saturday, I had to collect the money for the paper subscription from my customers. My favorite customers were ones who paid on time. My least favorite customers were ones who seemed never to be home on collection day. Many people were not well off and didn’t have a lot of money; they would avoid me on collection day. I tried to do my collections around suppertime so that I would catch people at home. I always had to have the right amount of money in the envelope for the paper company, and if I didn’t collect it, I had to make it up from my own money and get the replacement money from the customers.

For entertainment, we listened to the radio. I still like to listen to old-time radio programs. Dad bought record albums of popular musicals;