<Begin Segment 7>

TI: Well, how did the Japanese afford this? I mean I would think that after the war, their economy would be such that salmon eggs would be a luxury?

HM: Yes, it was. It was a luxury. This is -- now we're talking about, this is 1949 and '50 when they started exporting it in, in quantity. And by that time Japanese economy started to roll up a little bit and so dollar and fif -- well right now if you buy a small jar of salmon eggs, it's like what $3.95 for maybe 2 ounces or something of this nature? So $1.50 a pound was relatively inexpensive if you sort it out to levels where you have it in a sushi shop. So anyway, the demand structure was there. And, well as time went on my brother and I were involved in some of the flight situations, and they were trying to determine where they should put the new international airport in Anchorage. And so unfortunately in Anchorage we have a lot of antenna farms and transmitter farms. I mean these are big facilities. They're, just for FAA purposes, our antenna farm used to run about seven miles one dimension, and maybe four miles in the another dimension. And the air force had their own communication systems. Then the Alaskan communication systems, which is the telecommunication system for all of Alaska, run by RCA. They used to have huge antenna farms also. And the FAA had some very low frequency stuff. We're talking 190 kilohertz frequency. And when the Northern Lights used to come on, the Aurora Borealis used to be nice and bright, all your radio communications are just whacked out. Everything, they're whacked out. And, you could see the, the site from the line of sight-type microwave and VHF, UHF links and we couldn't even communicate. Even line of sight, we couldn't communicate because Aurora Borealis would just wipe us out. So they had to resort to going down to the low frequency stuff, down to 190 kilohertz. I never heard of this kinda junk before. And these antenna rays used to, just the Rhombic antenna that we used to use, one of them was eight miles long, just to transmit this 190 kilohertz stuff. And then we used to use brute force and they used to go all the way down to Seattle. That's the only way we could communicate.

TI: That's interesting.

HM: Because the Northern Lights were bad. And then the other phenomenon we used to get was the fact that we used to run UHF, VHF stuff and it would run a multiplex of teletype, voice communication, high speed Morse code, all this kind of stuff on all these links.

TI: So you had to try to figure out where an airport would go given all these antenna farms?

HM: Yeah.

TI: Because all the instruments would, would --

HM: Be disturbed. Like a landing system, if you're coming in on landing and somebody's gonna transmit on harmonic of that frequency --

TI: All your instruments would flip out.

HM: Yeah, you'd get all flipped out. I mean this might be -- I shouldn't really say this, but this might be part of the 737 rudder problem. They're getting some un -- disturbed type interference.

TI: Because all those are -- those are not wire controlled? They're radio controlled? We're actually getting off the topic. We shouldn't get into this.

HM: But anyway, the problem we used to get into was we used to get the Los Angeles Police Department. And they used to burst into our, our communication system.

TI: This was up in Anchorage?

HM: Yeah. This would happen in October and November. And that's when we used to have these funny phenomenon. The girl would be directing the police cars to go to different locations. And she'd come in five by five and it would burst right straight through our stuff. And we're trying to figure out what, what can we do to alleviate this problem. Well, it's just that we have a skip type phenomena. And once that that frequency is entrapped within certain ionosphere levels, they used to bounce up and down and used to come right in to Anchorage, and we used to get the darn thing like it was next door.

TI: Yeah.

HM: And we couldn't raise stations that were down, forty miles downstream, but we could LA five by five. And so we were all constantly trying to do optimum propagation studies and we used to get forecasts from the -- at that time it was the Bureau of Standards from Washington, DC. We used to get those forecasts and we used to try to switch the frequencies. And we were worried about what it's gonna happen on our microwave landing system. That was when they were first starting investigation of the stuff. So, they were really uptight about what interference functions would limit us to the location of this airport. So they used to make what's called electromagnetic surveys. And they used to fly this old C-47 back and forth, back and forth through the Anchorage area and the Spenard International area and try to figure out where do we get the least disturbance on these flights. So my brother and I, between the flight assignments that we had, we were flying this kind of regimen with Jack Gifford, the, the pilot. And we'd say to Jack, well how do they determine this survey? And he said, well when you get the least amount of disturbance for all the, the spectrum of the radiation function for the electromagnetics. And so we started getting involved in the, the survey information. And my brother and I, we decided well they can only put the airport here. [Laughs] 'Cause that's the least amount of radiation signals that we're getting from all this junk around all this whole area. So we decided well, in that case, let's buy the property that's going towards that airport. So we speculated on this piece of property. Seventeen acres which (was the) key corner of this area. It had to pass through this corner. [Laughs] Anyway, that's what we did. We speculated all our forward earnings and said, "Okay, we'll buy that piece of property." And we did, we did buy it. The only problem was that I was in the reserves.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.