User:Sbledsoe

User 'sbledsoe' is, by birth (13 December 1942) name, Lewis Jackson Bledsoe Jr. and was prenatally given the nickname 'Sam', which adhered familiarly to his person even to this day of his 65th year. The 'Jr.' suffix he has dropped since (at least) the past quarter-century. LJB was the name of both his father and paternal grandfather, so it, technically, should have been 'III', the third. His father once gave the reason that the grandfather was deceased before the fathers birth, so it was unnecessary to distinguish Sam from any but his father, hence the 'Junior'.

This birth event occurred in the city of Los Angeles at St. Vincents hospital to his mother, Edith H. Bledsoe, known familiarly as 'Ding', or, sometimes, even more familiarly, 'Dingbat', especially by her irreverent siblings. Ding lived with her husband, Jack, in the City of Angels where he was employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a radio operator. One of his tasks was to listen for and copy radio broadcasts of Japanese or clandestine origin in the Pacific ocean. The radio traffic which he monitored and/or participated in was usually in Morse code so he was skilled in copying and sending such messages, using ear phones, a typewriter and a Vibroplex key, known as a 'bug'.

Shortly after Sam's birth they were transferred to the San Diego suburb of La Jolla where the US government operated a short wave radio listening and transmission facility on the bluffs above the Pacific shore. This site is now occupied by various notable institutions such as the Salk Institute and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. One of Sam's earliest recollections is being put to sleep in a box on the floor of the radio shack on those bluffs, an enormous room in his memory, beside a gigantic wall of switches and meters. His father would sit nearby, wearing headphones, at a bench containing large, gray metal boxes which were the radio receivers, signal generators, power supplies and other accouterments of the radio operators trade. The wall panels contained controls for switching power from the electrical mains to standby generators by means of relays. When the main power would go out, these relays would switch with an enormous clang, waking the young Sam with an alarming start. Jack would console him with an explanation of what had happened and he would shortly fall back to sleep.

I have a number of mental pictures from this early time in my life, though they are sometimes indistinguishable from memories of photographs shown to me by my parents at a later date. These include the tennis courts behind the radio shack, the red clay soil and large, shrubby vegetation of the bluff, a grassy field with a tall antenna tower and many guy-wires extending to the ground, my father and friends pitching softball in this field, playing in the yard under a tree (a California pepper tree, my mother later told me-- we have one like it now in our south orchard). I remember the house with a high stair case on one side and a high foundation surrounded by a diagonal lattice-- I know they were very high because they were taller than my head (perhaps as high as 3 feet). When I played in the yard on Tourmaline street I could look out toward the ocean and would sometimes see a distant gray line where the ocean met the sky. If I looked again, later, the line would be thicker, and later, thicker still. Sometimes I would look up from my play and realize that I was enveloped in a gray, dense cloud which made it difficult to see even to the house. It was a revelation to me sometime later in my young life when I connected the gray line on the horizon with the fog which later enveloped me and realized that they were one and the same substance, the fog bank moving slowly in to the La Jolla shore. My first 'Aha' experience.

sam 12:33, 3 February 2007 (UTC)