CQ CLASSICS
Fifty years ago this month, King Hussein of Jordan was in the midst of a civil war that had cut off the usual means of communication with the rest of the world. So when he began having regular conversations over amateur radio with a young ham in England, the world listened in. That ham was Laurie Margolis, G3UML. We start our reminiscence this month with a January 1971 article by Laurie’s mom, Sylvia, who was a regular CQ contributor at the time, followed by a look back over the past half century by Laurie himself. – W2VU
It hit the world headlines—newspapers, radio and TV—and held them for 10 days. It made Time magazine. It united three families in a way three families had never before been united. Two were ordinary families, in Pennsylvania and London. The third was an extraordinary family in a war-torn, agonised city. The extraordinary family were accustomed to publicity. It was part of their heritage, indivisible from their status and it will be theirs as long as they survive. The other two families were rocketed, overnight, from suburban nonentity to world-wide fame. None of the families can ever be quite the same again.
It has been praised as the biggest public relations thing that ever happened to amateur radio. It’s been criticised as tasteless sensationalism. It’s been lauded as a demonstration of how amateur radio crosses all barriers of race, creed and class. It’s been condemned as the most un-amateur radio in 50 years. It’s been acclaimed as an example of man’s determination to communicate. It’s been dismissed as a deplorable bid for personal publicity.
Now, weeks after, in the repetitive discussions on how it happened and whether it should have happened at all, I could admit that what happened was entirely my fault and my responsibility.
Ours may be an ordinary family but by no stretch of the imagination could it be called “normal.” The qualifying factors are that my husband in G3NMR: our elder son is G3-UML; I am a journalist whose whole being is conditioned by one reflex, which may be expressed
