Oct 13, 2011

American TV: antenna and lightning don't mix

Just after getting married Marie and I moved into her father’s home in Mapleton. I then began looking for work and interviewed with several places in Orem and Provo. Carl Haupt of American TV hired me in the summer of 1975 and began training me on various parts of the television repair industry. He once told me he had hired me not because of my electronics training as much as the fact that I had been raised on a farm and probably knew how to work.

He trained me specifically to be able to install antenna’s for TV’s. I learned how to install them in attics even though they lost a lot of reception inside an attic. I learned how to install them using large poles on top of a roof.  I learned how to attach them to chimneys and other things that would be found on the top or near the top of a building and then how to get the most gain from the antenna by directing it toward the nearest TV tower.

I had installed them on a number of building and inside many attics before actually experiencing the following two events.

The first was about a time I had gone to install an antenna on a roof near Park City, Utah. I was by myself on TV calls that day up in Heber and Park City. I had a call to go to a home near Park City that should have had good reception but didn’t. Usually that meant nothing was wrong with the TV but that there would be something wrong with the antenna. It was as I had usually discovered up in that area of Utah in that the antenna which the owner had installed was designed for low band reception known as VHS but the transmitting towers in that area only transmitted UHS signals. I then had to remove from a trailer home the antenna was designed for VHS reception and replace it with a UHS antenna. The only catch to this otherwise routine job was that as I started to do it and had placed my ladder against the metal exterior of the trailer home I noticed an electrical storm approaching from across the valley. I figured that I had plenty of time since it seemed to be several miles away. I worked quickly but soon found that it was a very fast approaching electrical storm. I barely completed the job and got the ladder back onto the truck before lightening was sticking on a few seconds away from the home. I felt somewhat (but not totally) better when I was able to get into the truck as the storm moved quickly past me and further up the valley. From that time forth when I was putting up antennas I always made sure it was a good day or I rescheduled it for another time.

The second incident with antenna installation that I will write about here concerned an installation inside an attic. I had several interesting experiences that I believe I have written about before but this one was one where I learned a valuable lesson about myself and how I truly feel about close walls and heat. Carl and I were working on a motel in Heber that was only one story tall but built on a piece of property that required that the rooms be built on a different level of ground every couple of rooms. So the attic had about a foot and a half of clearance until I would get to where the new level of room and been started and then I had basically nine or so inches of room to squeeze through into the next section of attic. I was a lot smaller than Carl so was elected to be the one in the attic to pull the cable from room to room until we were able to repair the room that had lost reception. As I recall it was about 11 or 12 rooms from the end of the building where I had to go in to gain access to the attic. It was also an early summer day and the weather was very clear making the area in the attic somewhat hot by the time I was able to complete the job. We had started early but after driving to Heber from Orem a good share of the cool part of the day was fleeting quickly.  I went into the attic which was full of itchy insulation made from fiberglass that had been blown into the attic. This required that I also wear a respirator to protect my lungs which only made the process a lot hotter since I was re-breathing my own hot air most of the time. I made it with relative ease to the room where I had to drill a hole in the header of the wall and  lower the cable down into the wall. It took Carl a few minutes to fish the cable from the wall and each passing minute I found myself getting more and more anxious to retreat from that very hot attic. I was finally able to turn around and start to go out and by then was almost to the point of just knocking a hole in the ceiling of one of the rooms to allow me to get out. I also seemed to be getting stuck a lot more as I pushed myself, my tools belt and the drill between the narrow opening at the end of each of the rooms where the attic level was shifted. That 9 inch hole felt little larger than 3 inches as I would look at them before trying to pass through. There was only one thing that kept me going though and that was the knowledge that I had been through that spot once already and knew I could at least fit through it again. I was nearly totally exhausted as I climbed into the cool fresh outside air and didn’t go back in the attic again. I wasn’t sure I could have even forced myself into the situation again since I knew what it was now like.  I found myself however facing some of those same fears years later as I took my children into a cave called the Nutty Putty cave west of Utah Lake. I was scared again and knew that even though I had my children with me there was a limit to just how small the opening around me would be able to get before I would halt the activity and return to safety of the fresh air outside. I don’t think my children ever realized my dilemma but they will probably recall upon reading this story that I never took them a second time to that cave.