I searched many shoe boxes up in the attic over the last week to find this card.  I knew I had it; just didn’t know exactly where.  Look closely at the comment about me having had my foot in a water bucket.  Sam was referring to the fact that I was actually loading my bedspring for this contact.  It was 1966 and this was one of my last contacts before I headed off to the Navy. I had a Knight-Kit T-60 transmitter that used a hardy 6DQ6B for the final.  I had no antenna at this time so I just connected the chassis of the T-60 to the dial stop on our old black rotary phone.  I knew from experience that the phone company had a good ground because my crystal radios always worked better when connected to the phone’s dial stop.  Then I attached a piece of wire to my bed’s spring and stuck the other end into the SO-239 on the transmitter.  God only knows what the SWR was.  I had 60 watts input and no idea of what the output was.  But as the card confirms, we had a nice long CW chat during which I got to tell Sam exactly what was sending my signal to him.

People often joke about “loading a bedspring”.  I actually did it!