“Make Radio Your Hobby”

My father survived the Great Depression by working with his father, selling and repairing radios. By 1940, he had lost most of his vision to Retinitis Pigmentosa and spent a lot of time at the sheltered workshop for the blind, facing the dismal prospect of making brooms or tuning pianos for the rest of his life – the only jobs it was believed blind people could handle. He had been the Valedictorian of his high school in 1923, but going to college just was “not done” – neither did his parents want to send him away to “blind school” to be a cripple the rest of his life.

My father sat down and wrote a book called “Make Radio Your Hobby”. It was published by the Library of Congress and distributed in Braile and print, mostly to blind schools and the Reading Service for the Blind. The book had a unique feature that it contained raised line diagrams so a blind person could feel a schematic diagram.

Other young blind people in a similar situation were immediately drawn to the book, and the prospect that they could actually DO something. Many took up radio as a hobby, then graduated on to work in Radio. I just listened to a blog of a man who is about my age who lives in Des Plaines, IL. He begins his interview by crediting my father with changing his life.

My cousin has a physical copy of the book, and we are considering putting it online. The book was written in 1940, so the information on building a radio is not all that useful in 2015 – but you never know when there might be an EMP blast and you need a crystal radio set.