Postcard from yesteryear

In 1956, George Hitz dropped a postcard into his Stetson Avenue mailbox, hoping a fellow HAM radio operator in Riverside, Calif., would soon get it. No one knows whether the postcard completed its cross-country journey, but it was returned to its starting place this week bearing a 1956 DeLand postmark and a "return to sender" stamp.

Hitz, 64, doesn't even remember mailing the 3-by-5 inch card emblazoned with his call sign. The cards are an integral part of HAM radio tradition, sent almost automatically to confirm radio contacts made around the world.

The postcard's reappearance, however, is something Mack McCormick, 59, won't soon forget. He now lives at the Stetson Avenue home where the card was sent in 1956. On Monday, he pulled it from his mailbox.

"The card apparently has been in the twilight zone for 50 years," said McCormick, who lives in the home where Hitz spent his teenage years. "It's not wrinkled or anything."

The moment he saw the postcard, McCormick stood utterly confused. His wife has only one way to describe it.

"I'd call it dumbstruck," Connie McCormick said. "Talk about snail mail -- 50 years' worth."

Mack McCormick quickly recovered and began an Internet hunt to track down the postcard's writer.

When they first spoke on the phone, Hitz said he thought McCormick must be a telemarketer. Who else would have his name and home phone number in Sudbury, Mass.?

"I had to keep asking questions and pull it out of Mack. It wasn't obvious to me that he lived in our house," said Hitz, who hasn't seen his old Stetson Avenue home since the 1970s.

It's unlikely the postcard has spent the last 50 years hiding in a DeLand post office, said Joseph Breckenridge, U.S. Postal Service spokesman for Central and North Florida. The local post office hasn't been in the same location that long, and maintenance workers would have found it long ago if it was trapped in a sorting machine.

However, it is possible the card went all the way to California and was rediscovered recently by someone who dropped it back in the mail, Breckenridge said.

The postcard, called a QSL card by HAM radio operators, tells part of the tale. It includes Hitz's age at the time he mailed it, along with information about the radio contact he made in February 1956 with someone called Chief Operator Dave. But with no street address for "Operator Dave," the card apparently wasn't delivered.

In the early days of HAM radio after World War I, operators were required by the Federal Communications Commission to log all their contacts. The confirmation cards helped track radio activity when scientists were still learning about radio wave behavior, said Hal Wallace, curator of electricity collections at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

Today, collecting cards is something of a hobby among HAM radio operators. Each card serves as a record of individuals in places as far away as Australia. There are about a dozen boxes full of them at the HAM radio station operated by volunteers at the National Museum, Wallace said.

Hitz isn't interested in getting his old postcard back. He's been a HAM operator since he was 12 years old and already owns thousands of such cards.

Instead, the card is staying with McCormick, who is eager to frame it and share the story of how a peculiar piece of history turned up in his DeLand mailbox.

BTW, when did ham start appearing as HAM? There are a lot of theories as to the origin of the term as used to describe an amateur radio operator, but it doesn't appear likely that the word is an acronym.

From http://chesterfield.k12.va.us/~wcevans/origin.htm (the best explanation I've seen)

Have you ever wondered why we radio amateurs are called "HAMS"? Well, according to the Northern Ohio Radio Society, it goes like this: the word ham was applied in 1908 and was the call letters of one of the first Amateur wireless stations operated by some members of the HARVARD RADIO CLUB. There were Albert S. Hyman, Bob Almy and Peggie Murray. At first, they called their station Hyman-Almy-Murry. Tapping out such a long name in code soon called for a revision and they changed it to HY-AL-MU, using the first two letters of each name. Early in 1909, some confusion resulted between signals from Amateur wireless HYALMU and a Mexican ship named HYALMO, so they decided to use only the first letter of each name and the call became HAM. In the dearly pioneer unregulated days of radio, Amateur operators picked their own frequency and call letters. Then, as now, some Amateurs had better signals than some commercial stations. The resulting interference finally came to the attention of congressional committees in Washington and they gave much time to proposed legislation designed to critically limit Amateur activity. In 1911, Albert Hyman chose the controversial Wireless Regulation Bill as the topic for his thesis at Harvard. His instructor insisted that a copy be sent to Senator David I. Walsh, a member of one of the committees hearing the bill. The Senator was so impressed, he sent for Hyman to appear before the committee. He was put on the stand and described how the little Amateur station was built. He almost cried when he told the crowded committee room that if the bill went through, they would have to close up the station because they could not afford the license fees and all the other requirements that were set up in the bill. The debate started and the little station HAM became a symbol of all the little Amateur stations in the country crying out to be saved from menace and greed of the big commercial stations who did not want them around. Finally, the bill got to the floor of Congress and every speaker talked about the poor little station "HAM". That's how it all started. You will find the whole story in the Congressional Record. Nationwide publicity associated station HAM with Amateurs from that day to this, and probably to the end time, in radio, and Amateur is a HAM.

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