Could you define what reading art means? Like what it's about?
Well, that newspaper article is about the best description I've ever seen.
I want that.
Well, I mean, in your own words.
No, well, it started out as a telegraph operator sent, they were on duty on Christmas Eve,
over the holiday. They had nothing to do. Nobody was sent on a telegram, particularly.
So they made up these pictures to send to each other, from one telegraph operator to another,
around the country or around the world. And that's where a lot of these original,
all the stuff in that newspaper, most of that was done way back then by fellows like that.
And they sent them to each other. And that was teletype in those days.
And eventually the radio amateurs were authorized to use teletype on the air.
See, in the beginning we weren't allowed to send teletype over the radio.
And finally, I forget what year, around 1950, the FCC authorized us to use a teletype mode on the air.
And so we started typing to each other. And of course, that meant we got a teletype machine to begin with,
which meant that we probably had a thing that would punch tape and read tape.
And so we found out that these telegraph guys, who had been sending pictures for years
before we ever got into it, had tapes around in their lockers. And God, they were buried.
I had them dig them out. You know, I went around and found guys that had them and they would give them to me.
I would get the tapes, the originals, and sometimes they were beat up. I had to edit them and clean them up and all.
But it was that kind of stuff. We inherited it from the telegraph operators.
And once we got it, we could send it to any other radio amateur anywhere in the world.
And this caught on. Of course, you had to have a teletype setup. It was not simple.
You had to know what you were doing to get a teletype machine hooked to your radio.
And so it was a kind of an exclusive group, really. It wasn't the average CB operator or anything like that.
Because we had to hook up a machine and figure out how to hook it up to our radio
and build the circuits to convert the radio signal to the machine signal and vice versa.
And of course, we exchanged information about it. We told each other,
I've got a circuit here that will do this and that. And so it kind of spread among the hams and became popular.
And then once we got a hold of these tapes from the telegraph offices, we said, hey, this is neat. We can send this.
We don't have to sit here and type and figure out what to say while we're typing.
We can put a tape on and say, here, I'm going to send you a picture.
And we would run the thing and send the tape. It made it a lot easier.
And it would keep going because sitting there typing is a lot of work after an hour or two.
So we'd send it. And of course, we'd send them to somebody.
And the person who got them would right away, he'd be on the next day talking to his buddies who were somewhere else.
And he would relay the pictures. And the fellows, everybody that was getting them would be punching a tape of it.
So these tapes were multiplying like rabbits, you see.
Every time you sent one, there were 20 guys out there all punching tapes of it as they received it.
And they would then go on the air the next day and talk to their other friends and send them to them.
And it just, it went on and on. So it just grew like topsy.
And that's how we got thousands of tapes. And if you look at them, you can see they're from all over the world.
And so that's where it began. And then, well, it went that way for years.
And then when the computers came along, why we were kind of stuck with that, you know, what do you do with them?
We still haven't figured that out because you can't over print. That's the big trouble.
You can't send a carriage return without a line feed to any normal printer today.
I bought a Hewlett Packard printer that said you could print pictures or banners. They call them banners, you know.
Merry Christmas and great big letters made out of type.
And to this day, I have not figured out how to put a roll of paper in there.
Every time the machine sees 11 inches of paper, it spits and starts to feed it out.
And of course, if you put four feet of paper in, it keeps going until it fed all four feet out.
You can't print one after another or continuously on endless paper on any printer that I know of.
So that's a real bugaboo with it.
So unless you have an old machine, there are a lot of fellows that are still running old teletype machines.
They can handle them. But that's not computers. That's on the air and so on.
So it's a problem.
Now, as you said to me before, typewriter art precedes teletype art.
Yeah, well, this is teletype. Typewriter, I don't think there ever was typewriter art.
I mean, that's an awful job. I mean, you can't reproduce it, you see. That's the trouble.
You can type out a picture and like spend hours. I know it tells how many hours they spent doing that picture of Roosevelt.
You can't give it to anybody and, you know, you can't reproduce it. You can take a photograph of it, but that wasn't the idea.
But with the teletype, like I say, you could punch a tape of every key you hit.
And so it was real easy to say, oh, here, I'll send it again or you send it or I'll relay it.
And so you could go on and on.
And the idea of having it encoded into Baudot code, we use almost all these originated in Baudot,
which is a five level code, five bits to a character ASCII, which computers use as eight bit.
And that became a big headache when people got ASCII teletype.
There are ASCII teletype machines also, printers.
And so I got into trying to convert all of my five level tapes to eight level tapes.
A lot of them I have, both the tape is wider. I got boxes of them downstairs.
But anyway, that was another headache that was always something that the technology was advancing.
And it's like with your CDs or your VCRs or whatever, whatever you got, it's going to be obsolete in six months, you know?
So it's tough for people that are trying to do stuff with it.
You've spent a very long time collecting and keeping track of this.
What interest does it hold for you? What drives you to keep on top of it?
Well, I don't know. It intrigued me in the beginning, of course, the original thing.
It impressed me that you could sit there with a machine and send a picture, you know, doing it like that.
And I'm an engineer and anything technical like that intrigues me.
How do you do this and what kind of circuit do you use and how can you speed it up and how can you compress it?
We have compression schemes that we used to cut down the size of tape we made.
If you've got a picture with 20 Xs and then four Zs and two Ys, Y type X 20 times.
See, we rigged up a code that said this is going to repeat X 20 times.
And that just took three characters to tell you to print 20 Xs then.
And so that would cut way down on the tape. Of course, with a computer, who cares?
Bill Gates hopes to use a million gigabytes for everything.
And so nobody worries about two extra characters now or a hundred or a thousand.
So that was different. But things like that were done.
But I don't know. It's just, well, I just thought it was unique.
When I saw the first picture, you know, I thought that's pretty slick that you can make a picture with a typewriter.
I'd never seen that done before.
And then, well, I've made pictures myself.
I've done portraits of people that I know and gave them to them as presents, you know, friends.
And that's a job.
I mean, I start with a photograph of a person and I look at it and I start typing Xs on the paper.
And boy, the first time through, it doesn't look anything like the picture.
If you know what it's supposed to be and you show somebody the picture and they say, yeah, I can see that that's it.
But it takes at least six to maybe ten cycles through it.
What I do is each time I start out and I type one up, but I'm punching a tape of what I'm doing.
Then I print that out.
And I look at the printout and I take a pencil and I mark up, but these Xs shouldn't be here.
I should put something else here.
I edit the picture.
Then I sit down and I run the tape through, which just recorded what I did.
And as I go step by step, I stop the tape at any character I want and put a correction in.
I can insert a new character or delete one or put spaces, change it.
And each time I'm re-editing a tape and making a new tape at the same time.
Each tape is a new generation of the one before.
They keep getting better and better as you go along.
Each time you get done and you look at it, well, I don't like the way his eyebrows are.
And you go back and you change four letters in it.
And this and that.
And if you work on it long enough, you get it pretty good.
How long would a decent one take, would you say?
A decent portrait.
To what?
How long would it take you to...
Oh, do one portrait?
Oh, in hours?
Oh man, I haven't any idea.
Well, it's done over a stretch of time.
It's never done in one stretch.
Like I said, if I did six generations, each one would probably take a couple hours.
Probably 10, 20, I couldn't guess how many hours it would take.
A long time.
Did people appreciate the hours you put in them, do you think?
Oh, I think so, yeah.
I've given them to friends of very few.
I've made a few like that.
Of course, you'll find pictures of John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt and that kind of stuff.
Right away, everybody's making pictures of them.
And they would just take a picture out of the newspaper and work from that.
Well, I always worked from a photograph.
I had to have a photograph.
I never tried to work live.
I couldn't have you sit there and we'll all type, oh yeah, you know, that would be impossible.
But the first thing is to get a good original of whatever you hope to do and then work from that.
And there's a lot of tricks to that.
Now, one of my buddies who's dead, we call him a silent key when they die.
He was a real artist.
He's made a lot of these pictures.
He was in California.
And he would take a picture, a gatefold out of Playboy magazine and put it right in the teletype machine.
Feed it through like a typewriter, roll a paper, have the picture come up in front of him.
He sees it and he decides, he's looking at a spot on the picture and he, what should I type there?
And he would hit a key.
He would type right on top of the picture.
You know, he'd ruin the picture, of course.
But he would type on top of it and go down, go through.
And while he's doing this, of course, he's punching a paper tape, always getting a record of it.
Then he would take the whole thing out, run the tape through and print it on plain white paper and see how good it looked.
Then he'd do like I had been doing, you know, go back, well, this is wrong here and this needs a little fixing.
Gradually find, because you run the tape through and you just stop it where you want to make a correction.
It's easy to make changes.
Were there any favorite subjects people liked to do that you noticed?
Well, there's all these categories that obviously the gatefolds was a subject.
Where is my index?
They're broken down inside there.
They're listed in groups that way so you can see.
I think I had one type where I counted how many there were.
I don't know what.
Well, I see that you also, when you tell people how long it's going to take.
Oh, yeah, that's critical.
Yeah, because if you're on the radio, if you're on the air, in the first place, the darn FCC has a law that you have to identify yourself.
You have to give your call letters at least once every 10 minutes.
That causes a problem.
If you're sending a picture, you have to stop the thing and the guy receiving it has to turn off his teletype machine momentarily while you talk
or send your call letters in Morse code, which will screw up the teletype machine.
And then he's got to restart it and you've got to restart and you've got to stay in sync.
His machine's got to be right where it was when he shut it off and you've got to start right on the letter that you were on.
So you stop the tape and you make a voice announcement.
It was a big mess.
But then they allowed us to identify in what we call narrow shift.
And our normal, originally the teletype signals used two tones, two frequencies.
There were 850 cycles apart, 2125 cycles or hertz these days, and 2975 hertz.
That's 850.
Then they decided to use, it was interference on the band.
That takes a lot of bandwidth.
So they wanted to use less bandwidth.
So they dropped from 850 to 170.
Now these are all standard frequencies that have been used by the Bell system for years.
We had standard on landland circuits.
So we dropped down to 170 shift.
We stayed with 2125 for the mark frequency.
Mark is what you sit on steadily when you're not doing anything.
It's a steady tone, 2125.
Then instead of going to 2975, we went to 2295, which was 170 higher than 2125.
And so we used that.
And then we figured out another trick that, I don't know what you would call it,
but it was to meet the FCC rules but not give us trouble.
So we said, okay, I can hear less than 170 shift.
So all I'm trying to send my identification for is for the other guy to hear who I am
or for the FCC to hear who we are.
So we dropped it down and we sent our call letters in maybe a 60, 70 cycle shift,
way narrower than the teletype took.
So the teletype sat there and said, well, he's still on 2125 all the time.
We were going from 2125 to 2165 or something, a very little tweedle tweedle, very tiny.
And so that didn't disturb the picture or anything.
It didn't disturb anything.
And that was accepted.
So that's what we used to do all the time with this stuff when we were sending on the air
because it'd be a mess, especially when one guy is sending.
When Don Royer was sending out in California, he would send on Sunday afternoons.
There were 25 people copying him all the time.
If he's got to stop and identify, they've all got to be in sync with him.
Somebody's going to get screwed up for sure.
So the narrow shift ID solved that problem.
Now, when did you personally, I mean, you've obviously gotten more information since then,
but when did you first personally find out about this art form?
Do you remember when you first heard about it?
Oh, well, sure.
I was in the telephone company.
I'm an electrical engineer, and I started with the Ohio Bell Telephone Company in Cleveland.
Well, when I was still in school is when I got my first teletype machine.
I found it in the junk heap outside the electrical engineering building.
Stuff was being donated to the school like it always is.
Companies give their surplus junk to them, and they pile it up out there.
I was really part of one.
It was about three-fourths of one.
I had this thing.
So when I got in the telephone company, of course, I met the hams, the radio operators, right away.
They always tend to get together, wherever they are.
Up at Bell Labs here, we had a club, the amateur radio club,
and I was in the telephone company, we had a radio club.
So you always find out anywhere you are who the other guys are that are hams.
So in the telephone company, I found out who the teletype repair guys were and which ones of them were hams.
I mean, I knew some that were hams, and they happened to be teletype repairmen.
They were handy people to know.
So if I needed a part or something, oh, yeah, I'll get you the part.
You know, they could get anything they needed.
So we started with them, and our original, well, the original,
that newspaper article gives you the best beginning of how it all started, you know,
that these telegraph operators sent this stuff.
And we were simply taking over or adopting the telegraph technology.
Teletype is what they were using.
And those fellows, the Western Union fellows, had been doing this
before it was ever allowed on amateur radio or anything.
And of course, who had a teletype machine?
That was another big problem in the beginning, how to get a teletype machine,
because the telephone, the Bell system, the minute they quit, it's like your telephone,
when they quit using it, they smash it.
And that's it.
Nobody is going to get to reuse it because they don't want any competition.
And so it was, we made special arrangements with a lot of the telephone companies
that we signed a release that said we agree and guarantee that we'll never use this
for commercial service and we'll only use it for amateur radio and that kind of stuff.
So when we would sign something like that, we had contracts with them
where they would give us a discarded machine.
That's how we got our original ones.
And so we picked it up and once we had them, we found out about the pictures.
And this was a kind of a sideline, really.
I mean, when we started on teletype, I don't think anybody knew that
the idea of sending pictures existed.
It was to talk to each other.
Heck, we could type and read out the message and type back to the fellow
and have a copy of the whole thing.
I got miles and miles of paper with conversations on it with people.
And so that's how it started.
And then, like I say, we heard about the pictures and thought,
well, that's pretty neat, you know, I'll see if I can get some.
And like I say, I went around to the telegraph offices
and found that the guys had tapes in their drawer,
their desk drawer that they used at Christmas time, like it says in there.
And we picked them up.
That was the beginning from the Christmas pictures that the telegraph offices sent.
That, again, that newspaper article is very accurate.
And once we got that, then of course we said,
well, you know, I'm going to try to make a picture of X, X, X,
and all the first ones were really kindergarten-like, you know.
And so it grew from there.
And it went all over the world.
And I don't know, it just, that's where it went.
And of course it got hit by computers, and that was another story,
which kind of was the end of my story.
So, yeah, I mean, for you it seems, I mean, in our conversations,
it really seems like you that once computers get in on it,
it's not as much fun or of interest to you.
No, well, it didn't involve any skill at all.
You know, what the hell?
Anybody can take a picture of something with a camera.
Does that mean you're really skilled and smart and knowledgeable about everything?
You know, I mean, trying to make one of those is not trivial.
The contest you co-ran for a number of years.
The what?
There seemed to be a contest.
Oh, well, there were, yeah, we had the contest.
We wanted to, guys like me that had collections of pictures,
we wanted more pictures.
We wanted to stimulate people to make pictures.
And we thought, boy, the trick is to have a contest and give a prize.
And you can enter.
It doesn't cost you anything to enter.
You send your picture in and we'll grade it.
And so we put out our address and name and said,
if you want to enter the contest, send us a picture and a tape so we can print it,
so we have a copy.
And we sent that.
That went out worldwide.
I mean, by amateur radio, you get on the air and start doing something.
It'll get around the world in no time at all.
It's just as bad as the Internet now.
And you get on the Internet.
Well, the Internet has busted this thing wide open.
I mean, I talked to guys over in Seoul, you know,
and buy stuff off eBay from, God, somebody I'd never heard of.
Same thing.
So we ran contests and they would send us these tapes, guys would sit down
and try to make a nice tape, you know, a new one.
And they came in and then we would publish them and send them out on the air
and that kind of thing and offer a prize.
Of course, we had prize.
We had plaques and certificates and God knows what all.
And so this buddy of mine, Don Royer, in California,
he and I basically ran the contests for several years.
And so that built up our collections, you see,
because we got everything that everybody that entered the contests
has a picture, so that was our scheme to stimulate people to make pictures.
And we would help and we'd say, you know, he wrote articles.
There's an article in that booklet, one of the booklets there,
that Don wrote about how to do them yourself.
He tells a beginner how to make a picture, you know, in simple terms.
And so people would try it out.
I guess it's like any art.
I mean, if you tell somebody how to make an oil painting
and you tell 25 people you're going to find one or two
that probably do a pretty good job.
So it's just, I don't know what kind of a skill it is,
but I'm not an artist and I do everything mechanically or technically.
I figure out a way to do it,
but that artist is just a skill that I've never understood.
Well, one could argue your portraits are artistic.
I mean, you have to make a choice.
You have to make a choice what to put it together to make it look like it should.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, there's a debate in the 90s
because a lot of kids take their inspiration from comic book art.
Oh, yeah.
They look at them and then they draw.
They don't copy, you know, they look at them and they duplicate them.
Sure.
And there's some debate over, you know,
whether or not that counts because you're duplicating something.
Well, we got in trouble speaking of the comic books with Schultz,
the Snoopy characters.
That was a very popular thing to make a Snoopy, you see.
And what happened was that the McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Corporation
had a Christmas party for their employees.
Don Royer, my buddy, was a lawyer for McDonnell Douglas.
And so they got the brilliant idea of making up a Christmas calendar
and giving them to everybody that attended the Christmas party.
And for each month, he put a teletype picture above the calendar.
He had the numbers and stuff.
And several of them were Schultz characters, Snoopys and whatnot.
And to this day, I don't know how they found out about it,
but Schultz found out about it or his copyright holders and the lawyers.
And boy, when they said McDonnell Douglas is violating our copyright,
they had a big fish on the hook, see.
And they went after McDonnell Douglas.
Oh, my God, I've got copies of the letters that they wrote.
You wouldn't believe what they told them.
Oh, boy, you know, shut down the factory.
You know, we're going to stop everything.
And everybody's guilty until proven innocent and that kind of stuff.
So we got in a big mess with that, so you have to be careful.
We've never gotten in trouble with Playboy magazine.
In fact, Don Royer sent one of his pictures in.
He always did it. It was doing the centerfold.
And he did one.
And he sent it in to Playboy and said,
Would you like to see your Miss July on the teletype?
And they published it in the magazine in a later issue, you know,
with a letter from him and all.
They took it as good publicity, you see.
Hell, what have they got to lose?
They're not losing anything by some guy typing out a picture of a playmate.
So he did fine with that.
But the Schultz characters, we got a little cautious about that.
We warned some people about what to, you know,
be careful who you give this to or where you don't publish it
or don't print it somewhere out where it can be picked up as being distributed.
If we just sent them from one person to another over the air,
it's pretty hard to think that that got into the public domain.
Right.
Okay, the contests that I saw happened in the mid-70s.
Is that about right or is it before or after?
Oh, the contests?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, they were in the early 70s.
Yeah.
Most of the real activity in all of this, of course, occurred BC before computers,
before what, 65?
Yeah, probably about around that.
I don't know.
I forget when the first PC came out, the IBM PC.
But anyway, it must have been around there.
And so, yeah, that was where most of the activity went.
Well, the dates, I've got dates on a lot of these pictures,
but it died off pretty when we got into computers.
That distracted everybody, you see.
And so it kind of tapered off.
It wasn't done near as much on the air.
It wasn't as big a deal.
When we were doing it in the beginning, nobody else had teletype machines.
It was an unusual thing, you know.
A neat, unique activity.
So that's where it went.
Now, the group that was trading and giving pictures to each other,
did you ever give yourselves an informal name or a group name or a team name?
No, not as any group.
It's almost always been individual to individual.
Yeah.
Were there any people who were particularly renowned for their talent,
like you waited for the next one to come out from that person?
Well, where we had nets on the air on the radio,
where we scheduled, like, Don Roy used to be on Saturday afternoon, let's say.
At one o'clock, he'd come on.
And you'd hear him keying up, and guys all around the country would be answering,
checking in.
I'm here.
After he had ten or twenty people there,
he would say, okay, I'm going to send a picture.
And he would send it, and they'd get it.
And if any of them had done them, then they would come back and say,
okay, I've got one, now I'll send it.
And somebody else would go on and send it, and everybody would get his picture.
So they were swapping back and forth that way over the air.
And it was mostly just word of mouth, so to speak,
or word of radio to pass the word along.
How long would it take to send one of these pictures?
Well, in that booklet, it gives you the running time.
So it would have to be that amount?
Oh, yeah, that's what it would take.
Okay, so fourteen minutes?
That's why you needed that, to know how long it was going to be.
Four minutes or eleven minutes?
Yeah, because it was all sixty words a minute, you know.
I take it that you don't pay attention when the colored text comes around,
when they can send a, on the computer they can send a character string
that means make this blue.
Oh, no, we never got into color.
There were a few attempts.
I've got a couple of pictures that fellows did.
You see, on a typewriter, you have a red and black, normally.
And some people managed to take a picture and do it.
Well, they really made two pictures.
They made a red picture and a black picture.
And you put the paper back in, and hopefully it was in the same position.
No way.
And print the red first, and then you run through again, print the black.
Because the teletype machine cannot change colors.
A normal one can't.
So, no, we never got into color.
To me, that kept the thing being a skill or an art.
In other words, you had to do the best job you could do with what you had.
And color would have just complicated it more.
But we managed to do quite a good job with just the characters that were available.
Now, that's the other thing that happened with ASCII.
On ASCII, you've got all kinds of little quotation marks and symbols,
Xs and slashes and bars and vertical lines and horizontal lines and all other junk.
And so they started using those.
Well, a lot of the ASCII pictures were done by an optical scanner.
They had, like, a camera that scanned a photograph.
And they had a computer program that said, okay, that's gray level seven,
and that'll be a semicolon with a hyphen in the middle of it.
They assigned codes to give them every density of white to black that they could get.
And it made a very complicated picture.
But it was all done by a machine with no human skill, no artistic.
You know, what's the difference between an oil painting and a camera photograph?
Here, a camera photograph is exactly real and right.
You know, what do you want?
So why do people pay money for an oil painting?
Christ, they could get a photograph easily, cheap.
So it's a very similar situation.
It's art. It's really art.
That's a standard term that's used for it.
So there it is right there.
Typewriter art.
I don't know where that book came from. I just found it.
I didn't know I had it.
They got a bunch of stuff in there.
But it's been written up and published in numerous places.
Is there something about gritty art that you think people should really know about,
you know, in terms of historically?
Well, just knowing that it existed.
And then after that, having some comprehension of how it was done
and how it came about, I think, is the real thing.
With computers today, this is no turn-on for a young kid.
I mean, to us, it was amazing when we did it.
You know, gee whiz, I can send a picture by typing?
We didn't have a way to send a picture on the radio.
How would you send a picture?
We discussed this a couple times, but I just want to get it clearly on tape
and send it to you.
Do you have some of the tricks used as time went on,
like attaching paper to each other or over-striking and so on?
I guess I'm just looking for you to describe where you would have to print out three
and put them together.
You know, three sheets and put them side by side.
What are you trying to get at?
Basically, I'm trying to make sure that I have on camera you talking about things
because we've talked about some things, but the camera wasn't on.
And we talked a little bit about the arduous process
of having to take three multiple rolls.
Oh, yeah, that's sort of secondary.
I mean, pasting them together to get a big picture,
you know, that's advanced.
That's not your average.
You can see the stacks of pictures I got there.
Most of them are...
We figured out how to get them in a single strip.
They were quick.
We knew it was going to be complicated.
If somebody gets this and they got to paste it together,
it would be one out of ten, we'll ever get it right.
Oh, and they'd get on the air, well, I got part one, but I need part three.
Send it again.
My machine loused up, you know.
It complicated it a lot.
They were...
I don't know what you might say the main use form was.
They were just an end result to an end technique
to show that you were able to make a great big thing
with a lot of stuff in it.
Don Royer, my buddy in California, I don't have a...
I looked for his.
I don't have a print of it.
But he did one of Dana by Rembrandt, which is a big, wide thing.
It's four panels wide, I think, at least four, maybe five or six.
Dana is a nude lying on a couch.
It's a very famous painting.
I don't know how...
He must have spent many, many hours making this thing,
and it was several panels wide.
He finally took it.
I couldn't find my postcard.
He took the picture and photographed it
and had it printed as a postcard,
or a QSL card for a ham for radio.
And it looked almost like a photograph of the painting, you know,
and it was a picture of his teletype printout,
which is really, really good.
But there are very few people who are willing to spend that much time.
I mean, when you look at a lot of those pictures, they're pathetic.
They're kindergarten kind of stuff.
There were very few people in it that were good at it.
A lot of them were just one after another of junk, you know.
You can flip through those pictures and see
the ones that are really interesting or impressive are few and far between.
How many people do you think were in the whole scene?
How do what?
How many people do you think were involved in it?
Oh, God. Oh, man.
It's worldwide, you see. I don't know.
I mean, it'd be thousands in the United States.
There were hundreds.
I have no idea.
I don't think anybody ever tried to count or figure out.
Then you'd have to figure out, well, who, you know, how do you define them?
How do you identify them? Who?
The simplest thing you could do is go through my index there, my book,
and find how many different names or call letter guys you could find in there.
You'll see. I mean, you'll find W-A-6-P-I-R in there time after time, you see.
Give him one. He's one guy.
Okay, I'm K-2-A-G-I. You find me in there and you find each one.
If you could find how many different names or calls there were,
you'd have some idea, but I don't know what it would tell you.
Right.
Well, this listing you have here goes to 1981,
so you're definitely going to get up into the 80s.
Yeah, that was my last, that's the last printout of my listing.
What's the highest number in there in the backpail, last page?
964.
Yeah. Now you see, all those with no time after them,
if you back up a few pages, you'll see that I show the time after some of them.
Right.
That's about where I quit editing the tapes.
In other words, those after that, people sent me tapes
or I got them by over the air, whatever, one way or another, for a long time.
And it's a hell of a job to clean them up, to take out the errors and the mistakes,
because I insisted on all my tapes being perfect.
And I spent hours and hours and hours running the tapes through
and redoing them and manually making corrections and updating.
So if they have not been edited, then of course they're not timed,
because I timed them when I edited them.
And so there's a lot that were never cleaned up, so to speak.
Right.
And God knows it would take, it takes a lot of time.
You know, you'd have to sit down and spend hours and hours doing it
and how much interest there is.
Now, if we had a way to get them into the computer
so that you could edit the way you do on a computer,
that would be something, but nobody's ever figured that out.
So, yeah, shit.
How many pictures have you seen going by, would you say?
How many what?
Pictures, how many different pictures have happened?
I mean, is that number 964?
Oh, yeah, that's what I've got.
Okay.
Yeah, that's, yeah, that'd be the last.
You see, with that many sitting there waiting to be edited,
I was worn out, I quit, and so that's as far as I got,
but that's about it.
Now, they're still going on, I'm sure, today.
I have not been on the air with that kind of stuff in several years,
but I know it's going on,
but I don't think it's anything like it used to be.
I mean, I don't know what they're sending,
but well, it gives them something to do.
You see, it's saved having to type.
You get ahold of a guy on the air, and you say,
yeah, I got a picture here, and you put it on,
you can walk away and let it run, and he's busy,
he's enjoying it coming in, looking to see what's happening.
It's nowhere near the amount of work as it is to sit there
and keep answering the guy and reading what he's typing to you.
It's laborious.
We have a net every Sunday night locally here,
and we run for an hour from 8 o'clock to 9 o'clock at night,
and that's enough.
There'll be maybe four or five of us on.
We each take a turn typing,
so we each type maybe five minutes or so,
and then it goes around again.
So that's enough, and you pass it on to the next one,
and he picks up and types.
Of course, we see it all on the darn computer screen now.
It doesn't print it out on paper anymore.
It used to be on paper, and you could pull the paper out
and look back at what he said,
and you'd answer him down what he was talking about,
but those days are gone, so that's where it is.
Were there any high points over the time
that you've dealt with reading art?
Anything where somebody did something or something happened?
I mean, you mentioned the Playboy printing,
but are there any other things like that that you remember?
Well, that British thing that 3T's agency,
when they had their contest, that was a pretty well-run,
you know, that was a big advertising deal.
That spread the word.
I don't know how many people heard about it,
but well, we never really tried to advertise,
and I'm not sure how new people got into it.
I guess, you know, they'd be,
you tell somebody you knew that you thought might be interested in it,
but well, we didn't promote it.
I don't know whether there's a real reason,
but most of amateur radio is kind of a crowded thing,
and there's groups that are on the air that use the radio,
and they talk to each other,
and you try to get on, and they'll throw you out.
You know, they'll tell you, get the hell off of here.
This is our net.
That kind of stuff, see?
And you got the weirdos, you know,
that got all foul language and everything else,
and well, we had them in the ready pictures, too.
We had pornographic pictures that they were sickening,
and they thought it was big stuff.
But you know, you're always going to have somebody like that.
God, look at the Internet.
Oh, Jesus.
That's the biggest thing on it, I guess.
That's what they say.
So that's what turns them on.
But yeah, well, the other thing was, of course, for many years,
like I've said before, you had to know what you were doing.
You had to know something to even begin to do this.
Even if somebody gave you a teletype machine,
you had a long way to go before you were sending teletype pictures.
You know, what do I do now?
I've got this machine.
I've helped a lot of people get the machines going.
And of course, that as a sideline, that got me into another business.
You know, I don't know whether you know the deaf community,
the deaf people, use teletype.
And that started.
That put a crimp in the amateur access to the teletypes
because the deaf people went to the phone companies and said,
we would like to have the old teletype machines that you're throwing out
to give to deaf people.
We will sign a release, and they had a contract with them and everything.
Well, that put a dent in our access, you know, in the availability.
There are only so many being thrown out every so often.
So we had competition.
But the minute I heard that the deaf were using them,
I was at Bell Labs up here.
And I right away ran into a deaf fellow up there that was a scientist.
And he was in his lab.
And at that time, a fellow in California who was a radio amateur, and he was deaf,
he had realized that this would be a real thing for the deaf people
if they could use teletypes to talk to you.
Deaf people can't talk to each other over the phone.
So he designed, he was a sharp guy,
he designed a whole circuit and a thing in a box with an acoustic coupler
that you take an ordinary telephone and just stick it in it, you know,
and sit there and type.
And so it was an arrangement where if you bought a coupler from him
or from a company that he had, and you got a teletype machine
from the local phone company who most of the companies sort of went along with,
they set up arrangements for deaf people to get machines.
But the deaf people still didn't know how the hell to hook them up.
So a few people around that worked on teletypes and so on
began to help the deaf do it, and that's what happened to me.
I said, oh, jeez, this is neat, these guys can use.
So I went to this fellow at the labs and I said,
I can set up a teletype machine for you in your house and get it working.
He could get one easily.
He got one and I went over and I set him up.
Then the word spread and I got calls from other people, deaf people that had,
or sometimes there were families that had a deaf child
or one person in the house was deaf and wanted to be able to use the telephone.
So I went around, quite a bit around, within reason,
I mean up in New England and around New Jersey and all,
helping deaf people get set up with teletypes.
I had my name and number put in the deaf telephone directory,
if you can believe it.
So I was listed in there and I could answer them
because I had a compatible coupler so I could type to the deaf people
and I could talk to them.
I would get calls from them to help them out, you know, get this or that,
or make a phone call.
That was another one.
That was a big deal.
They'd call and say, I've got to make an appointment with my dentist.
Will you give them a call?
I'd get the dentist on the phone and I'm sitting there with the deaf guy.
Okay, he can have you at 9 o'clock Saturday.
Will that be okay?
Yeah.
Okay, that'll be okay.
He can be there at 9 o'clock Saturday.
He says, okay.
And, you know, I'm relaying.
Today they have live relay services.
You see, what's getting better than that?
I just saw, I was down at his house the other day and of all things,
they've got a little video camera on their computer monitor that looks at them
and they sit there and they sign language to each other.
We couldn't believe that.
Right.
But it works.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
So it's a lot of history to it.
That's where it is.
Of course, the teletype corporation is gone.
Right.
You know, there isn't any.
So it's a case of make and do with what's left,
which you can salvage and refurbish and parts.
Well, there's a lot.
On the Internet, there's a whole group that that's nothing but, you know,
the ready reflector and they get on there and you can find anything.
You can ask a guy, I'm looking for a, you know, a 60-speed gear for a motor and whatnot.
Anybody got one?
And right away you get an answer back.
And there's fellows that have tons of stuff.
So it's been handy that way.
But that's where the teletype has gotten by today.
I think we've covered, you know, a look at it.
I can't think of much else.
I don't want to.
Well, you'll think of something later and I can always talk to you.
Well, I mean, a lot of what I know is, you know,
the history of what these kids did in the 90s and the 80s.
Oh, yeah.
And they, you know, I mean, they got very big on it.
The only socially, the only thing that's a major difference, it appears,
is the kids like to call themselves groups or teams and give themselves a name.
Oh, yeah.
And that team would produce.
Oh.
They wouldn't work together always, but they would.
Oh, I've never heard of that.
Yeah.
But as far as I know, no such thing existed among the hams before.
Well, it sounds like the hams were just naturally less territorial, per se,
or maybe territorial in a different way.
You know, there they could say, you know, oh, we're part of, like,
one group might call themselves,
one of the famous ones was called Insane Creators Enterprises,
and the name was ICE.
And there was another one called ANSI Creators In Demand,
and they were called ACID.
And so a person would say, oh, I'm this person of ACID.
Oh, yeah.
Here's my new artwork.
Yeah, I guess that's, you know, that's the current generation.
That's what turns them on.
Our generation doesn't even understand it.
So, I mean, I don't understand my grandchildren.
Right.
Do you, I mean, I don't know how often your work with Ritty Art comes up.
I mean, do you ever find people finding out about it
and wanting to know more about it from you?
I mean, do you run into that?
Not recently.
The computers have basically wiped it out, you might say.
I mean, there's other things.
Well, for myself, I mean, I haven't been on the teletype machine
other than on the air with my buddies here,
and that's mostly just from what would you call it, a memory sake, you know.
Nostalgia.
Nostalgia operation.
Yeah, that's what it is.
And so it's no big turn on for a young kid today.
A young kid, I don't know how they would get interested in it.
You know, they'd say, so what?
You know, hell, I can do blah, blah, blah with a computer.
So that time is gone.
Well, you know, the technology and stuff changes so much.
I often talk about the automobiles.
You know, we used to all work and fix our own cars and whatnot.
Don't even bother to open a hood today.
You can't tell a damn thing in there, and you couldn't do anything with it anyway.
You know, you can't even find the spark plugs.
I mean, I don't know.
So it's a different form of life.
That's all.
That era is gone.
But there's the diehards, you know, that say, I'm going to keep this,
keep telling them about it till forever,
and collect the information and spread it.
Well, so it's what a museum does.
What does anybody go to a museum for?
They're going to see something new?
They want to see how they used to do it.
Now, at the time that you were doing all this,
you must have felt that you were on the cutting edge of technology.
Oh, yeah, yeah, we were trying to figure out better ways to do it.
But I think we still appreciated the artistic skill in the picture business.
I mean, versus using a camera or doing a scanner or something like that, you see.
We didn't, that was cheating.
That was, I don't know what it was, but it wasn't, it wasn't part of the game.
I mean, hell, suppose you take these sailboat races that they have over in Australia
or whatever, you know, you've seen them.
They go like crazy.
They're nuts.
What do you need to sail for?
I can beat any of those boats in a damn motorboat like crazy.
So should I have a motorboat?
No, they want to sail.
It's the same idea.
They want to do it the old-fashioned way, if you want to call it that.
Of course, it's old-fashioned when they got the super fiberglass
and whatever the hell they are, sail.
Everything is ultra-modern materials and technology,
and they got computers controlling everything on the boat.
But, you know, they're still out there getting wet.
They're doing it.
It turns them on.
So that's where it's gone.
Yeah, it was an era.
And I guess about all we can do is look back at it, you know,
and say, well, that was, we had a lot of fun when we did it.
Right.
And today, well, you know, the kids are turned on by other stuff today,
and that doesn't get me at all.
I mean, I can't understand how it's so exciting.
I mean, I look at these, some of the music that comes out, you know,
the songs, I can't even figure out how they're songs.
But they're ranting and raving about them.
And I used to think Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman and Jimmy Dorsey were great stuff,
but these kids today, what the hell's that?
And your counterpart in California.
Don Royer?
Don Royer.
Oh.
His part of things.
Yeah, yeah.
You can read about him on the Internet website on the Green Key.
I forget which site it is.
But anyway, there's a memorial to Don Royer on there.
He died several years ago.
And yeah, he was a big pusher behind it.
And well, he had quite a setup, my God.
He had a big, he had a powerful transmitter and everything
and a couple of Mercedes that he drove around.
And well, he was a, he was the legal counsel for McDonnell Douglas.
Hell, he wasn't, you know, hard up.
And, but he was, he was interesting.
He was good at this stuff.
I mean, you know, he, he would just laugh at most of the other pictures that came out.
Oh, God, you know, they should have wasted their time on doing that.
And that kind of stuff.
But he, he knew, he, he just happened to be, there were some other guys.
There was another guy in Pennsylvania, some 3W3ILC.
I can remember the call it better than their names.
And he did some really nice, really good stuff.
He did cartoon characters, but they were really, really excellent jobs.
They weren't big things or anything.
But they, they looked very good.
And, but, but I, in that whole book full of stuff,
I couldn't pick out more than maybe three or four people that were,
that I would consider any good.
The rest of them were all playing the game, you know.
But it was, well, they loved to just get a tape and relay it, you know,
receive it and send it.
That was their exercise.
They, very few of them.
Well, some of them tried, they tried to make pictures.
And I got a lot of them here.
You can, you can spot them.
I mean, after all, there's one of a rifle now.
Why bother with that?
I don't know.
I guess that doesn't really excite me, but maybe somebody thought it was great.
And whatever their interest was, we had, we had,
I had a couple of buddies that were anti-car nuts.
And they made pictures of anti-cars.
They were pretty good.
So if, I guess if somebody had a, a reason to, to want to do it,
he would do it.
But, I don't know.
It's a, it's a strange kind, kind of a hobby, I guess.
My wife always thought it was.
But she, but she let you do it, so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
It just turned me on.
That's all.
You know, I thought, gee, this is great.
You know, how, well, it was something that everybody can't do, you know.
I mean, so if you find you're, you're able to do anything that's,
that's artistic or unusual or shows some kind of talent or whatever, I guess,
you know, that, that may be a part of it.
I mean, some people may be good at painting or knitting or doing something or other.
You know, they'll do a lot of that and show it, show it off.
So that's, that's where it went.
That's all I ask.
Yeah.
Okay.
Thank you for this.
This is very appreciated.
So long.
Okay.