Around 2nd grade I became really interested in codes and desperately wanted to be able to solve these cipher puzzles still found today in Games magazine.  So one morning I was pestering Dad to no end about I-don't-remember-what, and he finally said "Enough!  So you wanted to learn about these ciphers right?  Well it's all about knowing how often certain letters appear in the English language. So now go get your Hardy Boys book there and count up the number of times each letter of the alphabet appears in all of chapter one, and jot your numbers down on this piece of paper here.  And don't pester me till you're all done!"  So off I went into my room and started counting diligently, and by that night I'd made it up to the N's or something, and by the end of the next day I had it.  And I remember being really puzzled at Dad's surprised look when I came back to him with my sheet of numbers.  But after two days of peace and quiet he was happy to show me what to do with those numbers and I then was off and going on my cipher puzzles.

My bed which Dad had made for me had room underneath for a little hideout, and in this hideout I kept an array of different lightbulbs and batteries which I could hook together in different ways to get more and less light, and different cool effects by the varying amount of light from each bulb. Dad had bought various sizes of the bulbs and soldered wires to them, so I could twist the wires around the terminals of the lantern battery or D-cell battery holder, or whatever. That's how I learned about the difference between series and parallel electrical circuits. And then for Christmas around this time, I got my first electronic project set, one of those Radio-Shack boards with the springs on either side of the electronic components to hold the wires, and a book full of different ways to connect the electronic parts via the springs, to create radios, buzzers, and so on. I found the radios the most exciting of all, which would output a small signal into a single little earphone. Unfortunately I couldn’t seem to pick up any of the regular stations on the AM dial, I could only pick up these weird evangelical Christian stations with funny-sounding people. The reception wasn’t good enough to really make out what they were saying, but I was just excited to have a radio that I made that I could listen too under the covers late at night. That kit provided all sorts of important devices over the following five or six years – mostly variations on burglar alarm buzzers to keep my little sister out of my bedroom, and microphone amplifiers to spy on her in some way or another.

We had a black and white TV which worked great except for it didn’t receive channel 2; that one was broken. That was a real problem because it was that channel which had all the Hanna Barbara cartoons that all us kids loved (I had to watch them at friends’ houses). Many of the other channels didn’t come in great, but they came in, except for channel 4 which came in fine but showed the Today show instead of cartoons in the mornings, and boring old-people shows in the evenings. But after enough of my whining about the broken channel 2, Dad had a solution which would also “build some character in me” at the same time. It was very exciting at first; he set the TV up on the dining table and we opened it up. Inside I learned that the channel knob was connected to a sortof cylinder of sticks, each wound with wires, “inductor coils” they were called, and on looking closer we could see that the stick that lined up with the 2 on the channel dial was loose and it had a wire that was broken at one end. These wires were tiny and on a coil, so it’s not like you could just twist another on onto it. So the idea was to replace the channel 2 stick with one from one of the working channels we didn’t use (there was no channel 8 in town), but there was a catch. You couldn’t just plop in a different stick, because the number of turns of wire on each stick was different, corresponding to watch channel it was for. There was a fine-tuning dial for once the number of turns of wire got you close to the right channel, but the key was that you had to first have the correct number of turns of wire. So the plan was to remove the old channel 2 stick, and with my younger, sharper eyes I would carefully count the number of wire turns as I unraveled the channel 2 stick (a few hundred turns). Once I had that counted, then I would take the unused channel 8 stick, remove its wire, and carefully rewind the correct number of winds around it to use for a fixed channel 2. Well, it took a while, but I finished my new channel 2 stick and we put it back in the TV. I excitedly went and turned it on to see it any of my Hanna Barbara cartoons were on, but something was kindof funny. The cartoons weren’t on, it was some boring old-people show, and then during a commercial break I discovered this wasn’t channel 2 at all – I must’ve miscounted the turns of wire a bit, because I’d made a second channel 4! I couldn’t believe it, all that work and no cartoons. I ran up to my room to sulk for the rest of the evening about my newly built “character” from the day’s project.