My family history of radio

Earlier this month Matt Pryor, who shares the name if not the spelling of the eighteenth-century British poet Matthew Prior, posted an amusing three-minute piece about his failed career as a forester.

Pryor's second drop-in is as amusing as his Opus 1 -- and more resonant for me.

Nowadays when SCYPE and iPhones have linked New York with New Delhi and smothered the planet in small talk, as well as earth-shattering news, who cares about amateur radio operators?

The answer: the Pryor family has long cared about amateur radio known as HAM, supposedly the acronym for three preeminent radio scientists, Hertz, Armstrong and Marconi. Pryor never discusses the reasons for his father and granddad's obsession with Ham radios. But I have heard at least one diehard Ham discuss an apocalyptic scenario wherein modes of communication like NPR, commercial radio and TV networks, Internet and telephone lines are compromised and crash, leaving room for old-fashioned Ham operators to do what they've been doing for lo these many years.

One example of Ham operators' activity involved Pryor's grandpa during WWII, intercepting the clear-air transmission from an aircraft carrying Japanese Admiral Yokohama, the architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Thanks to Granddad Pryor's Ham expertise, Admiral Yokohama's plane was shot down.

The sweetest, most offbeat and "poetic" side of Pryor's piece involves its final minute during which grandson Matt describes his father and granddad speaking to one another on their separate dusty basement Ham radios. Amid static and batteries failing, Matt's dad and his dad's dad continued to talk to one another for two years before Grandpa died.

Given the priciest cell phones, how many fathers and sons nowadays engage in such talk fests?

Pryor's personal history of Ham radios would be perfect for Father's Day.