After finding a place to park Phoenix (my pickup truck - don't you name *your* vehicles?) which was no easy feat - most of the primo spots were already taken, and my truck is fifteen feet long - I parked, and headed up the steps into the "flea market".My first impression was, "where is everybody?" Durham's never been known to be a big hamfest, although years ago, when it was held at the old South Square Mall parking lot, it *felt* bigger. On this day there were maybe 15 people tailgating. I have to admit that I arrived half an hour later than my intention due to some unforseen difficulties at the office, but I had expected more.
Regardless, I knew that the real treasures were to be found inside, so I headed for the main entrance to the Little River Community Center Gymnasium. Naturally, it took me ten minutes to get beyond this obstacle, between filling out my name on 16 prize tickets, and doing some initial "catching-up" with an old BBS buddy, Lenore Ramm, who was assisting at the ticket booth.
Lenore was a frequent denizen of the computer BBS's that we ran and logged into back in the late 80's and early 90's. You remember - before the interweb. Her father was a bigwig in the CS department at Duke, and her older brother Karl kept threatening to write his own BBS to outshine all the others, but as far as I know, this never happened. Last I heard, he was teaching up at MIT.
In those days we had a weekly gathering at a local breakfast place on Saturday mornings. The joke was that wherever we decided to meet would go out of business within 6 months. This held true except for the couple of places that either had the common sense to chase us out and tell us to never return, or those for which we weren't their biggest client base. We'd all get together, talk about computer software and hardware, order multiple breakfast and drink items, and waste most of the otherwise productive part of our Saturday mornings and early afternoons. Lenore came most frequently when we were at Time Out Chicken and Biscuits on the Durham/Chapel Hill Boulevard, which by the way went out of business during the time we met there.
So having the opportunity to "catch up" if you will with miss Lenore was a pleasant diversion for awhile, but I had marvelous treasures to seek, so once my onslaught of writer's cramp was complete (remember, I had to fill out 16 prize stubs) I bid her adieu and entered the hallowed ground of the "exposition hall".
It took only a few minutes to go around the inside of the gymnasium to see all the exhibitors. It was gratifying to see that a couple of vendors that I recognized from other shows were there. In particular, Cedar City Sales from Lebanon Tennessee, and DBJ electronics from down east were there. I'm sure there a couple of others, but those were the two that caught my attention, simply because I had seen them either at Charlotte or Raleigh, or both.
I was on the lookout for a new magnet mount for my 2 meter mobile antenna. My current mount is too easily knocked over any time I go through a low clearance area, like the parking deck at the Durham Bulls games. I wanted to find a five inch diameter magnet, and a small spring. Cedar City had the spring, but they only had three inch magnets, so I kept looking. I wasn't going to buy the spring if I couldn't find the magnets. First time through the gym, I didn't find one single thing to buy.
One thing that happens to me when I go to hamfest is that I meet people there that I know, sometimes people I never expected to see there, but there they are notwithstanding. I had already met Lenore, and on my way over to the exit to take a closer look at the tailgaters' goods, I ran into my co-worker, Big Red, WA4OPI. Red's been a ham for awhile, has radios and everything, but doesn't get on the air. He just listens. He introduced me to another ham whose name and call I don't remember. We should all really bring QSL cards to hamfests to exchange like business cards. It might help the remembering part. Anyway, we spoke for a few minutes about not much of anything, and I excused myself, and went outside.
There really wasn't anything of interest to me outside, although there were bits and pieces of things that I used to be interested in, or already have the same bits and pieces at home. A quick five minutes through the tailgaters brought me to the food booth.
Wilson, W4BOH, was cooking up some tasty-smelling hot dogs and hamburgers, and the ones I saw leaving the booth certainly looked appetizing, but all I wanted was a Diet Dr. Pepper, which of course they didn't have, so I settled for a Diet Coke. Why that particular bit of trivia is important is because I was nursing a hangover, and was ever-so-slightly dehydrated.
That was truly the pause that refreshed. I deposited my empty into the nearest recycling bin, and headed back inside. My brain being rehydrated, I now found lots of things I wanted. At DBJ, they had the five inch magnet mounts with the NMO connectors. Yippee! The next table yielded a nifty flush-cut wire-cutter. I've been wanting one, so I bought one. The next table had teflon dogbone insulators for antennas. You never know when you might need to throw together an antenna, so I bought six. Now having my magnet mount, I could go ahead and buy that spring so I headed back over to Cedar City and picked it up. I told the lady I would have bought everything there if she had it in stock. She called me honey and apologized, and said she wished she had it too.
Treasures in hand, I headed back out the door, stopping to talk again with the lovely miss Lenore for a few more moments. After a quick trip around the tailgaters for a last time, I headed down the steps to my truck, but I never made it that far. At the bottom of the steps was a Mercedes sedan with a license plate that immediately caught my eye, "N4GOP".
"Wow," I thought. "This guy must really wear his politics on his sleeve!" There were some bumper stickers on the car as well, and it quickly became apparent that this was the car of yet another of my old-time BBS buddies, Eric Weaver. Eric's had a number of interesting jobs over the years, but the one thing that has been constant throughout the years has been his conservative Republican political beliefs. Of course, this didn't keep us from being friends when I thought I was a liberal, and it doesn't keep us from being friends now that I'm a Libertarian, although I don't see Eric much any more. He lives in Cary, and I live in BFE. He'll tell you that he doesn't really live *in* Cary, but instead is surrounded by it. I dunno, if you have to drive through a place to get anywhere, in any direction, you might as well be from there, but he sees it differently. In any case, I immediately turned around and headed back into the gymnasium to look for Eric.
There he was, in the middle aisle with his young son, Eric Junior. We caught up on stuff from the last year or so that we haven't talked, which took quite awhile. So, I was impressed that his son didn't seem to get bored or start fidgeting or anything. He was very well-behaved. Good for you, Mr. Weaver.
As I headed out again to my truck it occurred to me that the real treasures I had found at the hamfest had nothing at all to do with the electronics parts that I had purchased. Rather it was the re-kindling of friendships, the memories those meetings had stirred, and the fellowship I shared with people who share my passion, amateur radio.
73, de N4QM
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