Our neighbor, Charlie was a HAM Radio operator and had an antenna in his back yard big enough to reach Mars. It went at least a mile straight up into the sky with an elaborate spiky structure on top. Kind of a cross between a huge aluminum snowflake and the letter “H” on the HOLLYWOOD sign.
Charlie was a mild-mannered nice guy; eccentric and quiet. He reminded me of TV’s Mr. Wizard, the archetype of Popular Mechanics. He was brilliant and always tinkering. Charlie’s wife, Ruth, was the family alpha and also our Sunday school teacher. He and his wife were active in local liberal politics. The only time I ever really interacted with Charlie was when I was on my paper route.
Winters were long and sidewalks were icy for weeks at a time. Ruth always made Charlie keep the sidewalks clear. Charlie once had an idea, and broke up the perfectly good sidewalks in the front of his house. The new walks were designed with pipes running through them. His plan was to run the water from the household hot water heater through the cement, and back into the house. He would never again have to chip ice, or shovel snow.
Like all projects, it took a lot longer than planned. In Sunday school, Ruth was enthusiastic and told us about it. The cold weather finally came. Ice was everywhere but Charlie’s sidewalk. We marveled. Ruth told us that it worked well but they had to turn up the heat on their electric water heater.
After a month or so, the ice was back on Charlie’s sidewalk. Ruth avoided our questions in Sunday school. We were all curious. Late that spring, I had a chance to talk to Charlie. I grilled him about the sidewalk.
I was about 12, and my social barometer was not well developed. Charlie was avoiding the subject. He was flustered by my questions. Later, I heard it took Charlie a long time to pay off his electric bill for the month his sidewalk was operating.
Danny, my brother David’s friend, lived next door to Charlie. David once mentioned that Danny had a cool “Tarzan” swing on the hill next to his house. That got my attention.
A steep, high hillside meandered for about three quarters of a mile through our neighborhood and was our playground. My Dad said it was actually a small earthquake fault. Halfway up the hill an irrigation ditch bisected the hill. The half of the hill, above the ditch, was steeper than the lower.
Most of the hill was covered with brush that was about eight feet deep. The ground under the brush was a warren of tall grass “tunnels” where we had forts and played army. Scattered along the ditch were several big pine trees that were about 100 feet tall and about 350 yards apart.
Charlie and Danny lived at the base of the hill on the west end. Charlie’s property was the only one in the neighborhood that included the part of the hill that adjoined his home.
Located in the center of Charlie’s part of the hill was his HAM antenna. The first big pine along the ditch was next to Danny’s house. The “Tarzan” swing hung from high in the pine to a strategic location above the ditch where, presumably, it was out of the reach of kids.
The swing was kinda weird. It consisted of about six feet of railroad rail hanging lengthwise from a cable that descended from the nether heights of the pine tree. A three foot piece of galvanized 2” pipe, the perfect grip for our hands, rested above the rail with the cable running through it. Very heavy, expensive, and industrial for a kids swing.
The swing was easily reached with a long stick and pulled to the uphill slope, where we could mount it. When launched, we flew high over the ditch, above Danny’s apple tree and the roof of his house. The reverse brought you gently into the upper hillside. It was perfect; the lethal fall from the far half of the arc added just the right flavor to the experience.
We discovered an unusual feature. The more kids on the swing at one time, the better. The extra weight of more kids added a bouncy roller coaster quality to the ride. With four kids, you bounced ten to fifteen feet up and down as you rode the swing out and back. That bounce really made you to concentrate on your grip in the death zone. Whoever designed the swing did a hell of a job. Over the course of the summer the swing started to hang lower over the ditch and was easier to reach.
One day, when delivering papers, I saw Charlie up high working on his antenna. I stopped and visited as he worked. I had never seen anyone working that high off the ground. Much higher than the power poles in our neighborhood. Charlie said that the wind was pushing his antenna around so much lately that it was driving him crazy. His guy wires needed constant tuning “to keep the damn thing from falling on my house.” I started paying more attention to the antenna, particularly in the wind. It never seemed to move very much.
My last ride on the swing was a couple of days later. I launched off the hill and the cable parted where it went through the rail. The hole in the rail had been cut with a torch and was rough. It eroded the cable with every ride. I fell to the ground above, and slid down into, the ditch. I was incredibly lucky that the fall happened there. At the far end of the swing, I could have fallen 30 feet or more. I was also fortunate to have landed on the rail rather than the rail on me. It was so heavy it would have broken a lot of bones.
Later, Charlie was working on his antenna. The top was leaning way off to one side. I asked him what happened. He was in the house and heard the antenna “whooshing” from side to side. As he came out of the house it drooped over and stopped. He was afraid it might fall over. He was still working when I delivered his paper that afternoon; by then he had it figured out. The cable on his ‘custom designed anti-sway damper’ had broken. I asked him what was a damper and he pointed to the remnants of our Tarzan swing that he had fished out of the ditch. He speculated that the limbs of the pine tree had grown, and while swaying in the wind, they pushed on the damper cable so much it made the antenna sway excessively.
The swing was so far from the antenna that I had never made an association between the two. My blood ran cold as everything came into perspective. Each ride on the Tarzan swing whipped his antenna back and forth like the tachometer on a teenager’s car. It never occurred to Charlie that anyone might have been responsible for the events that had transpired. A few days later I noticed that the new counterweight was hung so high that it was truly beyond our considerable reach. There were also a lot more, and bigger, guy wires supporting the antenna.
Charlie being Charlie, never said anything. As I write I am not certain that he didn’t know the truth.