Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio » (First Edition)

Danny Gregory lives in New York City.

Paul Sahre is principal of his own design firm. He lives in New York City.

In the 1970s, Henry Horenstein was a young photographer who shot album covers for Rounder Records. In his off-hours, he immersed himself in country music at the show venues, music parks, and the rural saloons that coursed with the music and its rough-and-tumble lifestyle, otherwise known as honky tonks. With over 100 incomparable duotone photographs, Honky Tonk captures the heart of the country music experience during a period of transition, as the friendly familiarity of the scene -- from the huge hall of the Grand Ole Opry to the family vacation camps -- took on a more commercial polish. Disarming portraits of legends such as Bill Monroe, Dolly Parton, and Waylon Jennings brush up against shots of the workaday fans who kept the scene alive. Offering an intimate glimpse into country music as it was performed and enjoyed, these photographs capture a true slice of American life where artists and fans converged to enjoy music and strut their stuff.

The New Yorker

"CQ, CQ, CQ, this is W2OJW, calling CQ. Whiskey Two Oscar Juliet Whiskey in Hackensack, New Jersey, standing by for a call.” For seventy-four years, before his “key went silent,” in 2001, this was the nightly appeal of Jerry Powell, an aeronautical engineer, amateur trombonist, and avid ham-radio operator. Powell’s devotion to vacuum tubes, multiband yagis, parallel RLC circuits, and midnight conversations with fellow-hams from Moscow to Montevideo is celebrated by Danny Gregory and Paul Sahre in the colorful Hello World: A Life in Ham. Hams, as Gregory and Sahre discovered, "come in all shapes and sizes and live all over the world." Although ham radio is generally considered an arcane pastime reserved for microhenry-obsessed nerds, recent estimates put the number of worldwide hams at more than two million, including such devoted practitioners as Marlon Brando (ham call sign FO5GJ), Donny Osmond (WD4SKT), George Pataki (K2ZCZ), and King Juan Carlos of Spain (EA0JC).

The first hams, or narrowcasters, pop up in Edward D. Miller's Emergency Broadcasting, a rumination on the nature and meaning of early radio. Miller, who likens radio in the nineteen-thirties to the Internet in its first decade, gives us the untamed era of Herbert Morrison's broadcast of the Hindenburg disaster and Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds." In those days, voices in the ether inspired utopian visions, prompting Collier's to assert that radio would create a "strong and well-knit people" It"s a notion that today's hams -- ensconced in the purple glow of their transmitters -- continue to broadcast.