Radiomen Read Online Free PDF

Maybe Jack Shepherd wanted to suggest that it was a screen memory—a term I had never heard before—but I wasn’t even going to waste a minute considering that as a possibility. I’d simply had a strange dream, and I couldn’t remember a time when I thought it was anything else. Still, that didn’t stop me from staying up for another hour or two, trying to remember everything I could about that night. Most of my childhood only came back to me in bits and pieces—it was not a happy time and I don’t seem to have much of it tucked away in memory—but the night I met the radioman was an exception. I remembered almost everything about it.
    When I was young, there were four adults who formed the core of my family: my mother and father, my Uncle Avi, and my grandmother, the mother of my father and uncle. My grandmother, who lived with my parents, was an immigrant from Ukraine. My father was a factory worker and my mother a housewife. Avi, the college boy-turned-professor was the only one who had not only pursued an education but also had an avocation—his fascination with radios and satellites—that seemed both highly technical and beyond comprehension to his relatives. Because of these things, he was considered to be an eccentric and something of a genius. Perhaps he was both or neither; I have no real idea.
    One important thing I do know about Avi was that his teaching salary, small as it may have been, made an important contribution to maintaining the one annual tradition that everyone in my family valued: spending our summer vacation in Rockaway. Once a year, Avi drove our belongings out to the beach in his car, where the adults shared the cost of renting a few rooms in a boarding house called the Sunlite Apartments. It was an old, run-down brick building with white fretwork around the outside balconies, an effect that made me think of a collapsing wedding cake. Inside, there was a warren of tiny apartments with shared bathrooms at the end of each hallway. Even pooling their resources, being able to afford a few weeks at the beach was a stretch for my family, but Avi contributed to the cost of the rent by doing repairs. Among a building full of factory workers on vacation, most of them in the garment trade, and most refugees or the children of refugees from Eastern Europe, my uncle Avi—Professor Perzin, as our neighbors called him—was the only one who knew how to repair the boiler or patch the ancient wiring in the building that was always causing someone’s hot plate to overheat or make the dim hall lights sound like they were sizzling. There were a few tenants who lived in the building all year, and the landlord would sometimes pay Avi to drive out to Rockaway in the winter when it was necessary to have something fixed.
    Avi was the only person in the family who could drive, or who had ever owned a car. He was fond of Impalas, long-nosed cars with bench seats in the front. One unseasonably cold March night when I was six, he stuck me in the front seat of the latest Impala, a gold-colored vehicle that, to me, looked as big as a boat, then loaded a homemade radio receiver in the back and drove us out to Rockaway. On the way, he said he had two purposes: first, to fix a blown fuse that had knocked out the electricity for the winter residents of the Sunlite Apartments; but once he got that done, he promised me that he and I were going to be able to use the radio to listen to Sputnik 10, the newest entry in the Sputnik series. This one had just launched and would be passing over the east coast of the United States that night. The space race between the USSR and the USA was in full swing, and though we were catching up—the United States had actually sent a satellite named Explorer I into orbit just a few months after the first Sputnik was launched in 1957—the Soviets kept sending up more Sputniks, like a relentless, endlessly replenishable army of night fliers. Each time one returned to Earth, another was