Originally posted in the November 1988 issue of the Collector & Emitter.
Some of the boys and girls were sitting around the Red Cross one recent Saturday morning, eating donuts and listening to W5MCJ talk in CW, when the front door whanged open and in walked the great man himself, dean of the world’s DXers, worker of all stations on all bands, inventor, genius, raconteur, inventor of radar and the plastic milk carton, all-American in five sports, only holder of a 1×1 callsign, and premiere foosball champion of the western world, himself, A5A, Q. R. Zedd.
WU5W fainted. N5ALG wept. W5MCN lowered his voice.
“As you were,” said Zedd, reducing the gain on his velcro chest-mounted transceiver and clomping over to help himself to a cup of coffee and seven donuts. “Don’t mind me. I’ll just sit here in the corner like I do sometimes when I attend meetings in disguise. Being a master of disguise, of course I always fool you, but today I got a headache from working all Europe last night on 75, and I’m low on plastic facial alteration goop.”
Naturally, all conversation ceased and no one was able to go on as if A5A were not in the room.
After a while it got real quiet.
“Mr. Zedd,” someone said, “please tell us one of your exploits.”
“Well,” quoth the great man, “I hardly know where to begin, there have been so many.”
On the floor, WU5W sort of moaned and burbled, beginning to revive.
“That reminds me of one right there,” Zedd said, brightening. And he told us this story:
“Back quite a few years ago, when I was just a little, bittie boy, I went with my momma, whom all of you know by her given name of Momma, to a small republic in South America where there hadn’t been any radio activity for a very long time.
“Reason there hadn’t been any radio activity, the country is real small and it’s all vertical. Nothing is on the flat. Planes have got to dive straight down to land at the only airfield. It’s hard for the pilots to get the bigger jets braked before the end of the runway after a vertical approach; even to this day there ain’t no regular service. Also, it’s confusing when you try to figure out the radiation pattern of an antenna when you mount it at a ninety degree angle to the earth’s surface, and that makes it radiate straight into space and into the earth’s core.
“There is also the matter of the crocodiles.
“Anyway.
“We got the homebuilt plane in there all right, and after a welcoming parade by the dictator in power — and a delay the next day for another welcoming parade by the new dictator that took power during the night — we went off into the jungle.
“Boys and girls, that jungle was so dense we would have never got through it to our camp site if we hadn’t harnessed some of the smaller local mosquitoes and used ’em to drag our equipment.° And hot? It was so hot — maybe I shouldn’t tell you how hot it was, there being ladies present.”
“Tell us! Tell us!” everyone chorused.
“Okay. It was so hot, some of the solder joints melted in the rig. It was so hot, boiling water felt cool. It was so hot, we didn’t even have to heat the filaments in the tubes, we just set the rig out in the direct sun and used enough power to amplify and modulate.
“Well, boys and girls, we got on the air just fine, and with Momma doing CW and me on phone, we were going along just real splendid when the big crocodile showed up.”
“Crocodile?” someone in the clubhouse screamed. “You got attacked by a crocodile?”
“Restrain yourself, son,” Zedd advised calmly. “– Yes, sir, that is exactly correct. This crocodile came slithering and slomping up out of the steaming mudhole nearby, and I should have heard him. I mean, he had an alarm clock or something ticking in his belly, I’ve never heard anything like it since that day. But I was busy and so was Momma, and the next thing I know, there is this horrendous ROAR and sort of a sharp pain in my foot, which traveled fast up my leg and over my entire body, and a real big glomping sound — and the lights go out sort of instantaneously.”
“Oh no!” everyone moaned in horror.
Zedd nodded solemnly. “I had been swallowed. Entire.”
The room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. I think it was WB5RZX who dropped it.
“What,” someone asked Zedd in the hush, “did you do?”
“It was touch and go,” the great man told us. “He touched me and swallowed me and then about all I could do at first was waller around down there and feel that he had decided to go.
“He was headed back to the swamp to digest me, I reckon.
“Luckily I had hung onto my mike, and it had a long cord. So I was still in contact with the outside world. I sent out a quick Mayday on several bands. About the time old Mr. Crocodile slurped back into the deep water, the Peruvian air force did a strike, blasting the pond with six thousand pounds of ice cubes. The ice dropped the temperature so fast, the crocodile went into shock and spit me right out, along with a few fortunate carp and an old army blanket.
“Boys and girls, you may find this hard to believe, but we stayed on after that and worked 86K in three days, and of course a lot of people wanted to hear more about my adventure. The local guide who seen it all wrote it up, and he won not only the Yodar Kritch for his literary excellence in the way he done it, but also the Nobel Prize. His name was Peter Pan.
“Momma, as you know, went on to greater things, and so of course did I. About the only daily reminder you get any more about this weird exploit of mine is when you hear somebody use the warning my momma tried to shout at me just as that swamp beast grabbed my leg. She yelled, as I recall, ‘That’s a crock!’
“You hear that quite a bit on the bands, especially when somebody starts tuning up on top of the DX station, or when the DX station announces he is going QRT. I have also heard it used when they talk about doing away with the CW requirement.
“Well, boys and girls, that’s all the time I have today, and you have probably had all the excitement you can handle anyway for one day, and I see you are also out of donuts.”
Zedd rose to his feet and started for the door. Then he turned back with a gallant wave.
“Take care!” he told us. “73! Happy Turkey, and if you see any crocodiles near your hamshack, make sure you got a good tight grip on your microphone. Thank the good lord for hf! If I’d been on packet, with one of them short-cord keyboards, I would be a dead man, and there might still be a digipeater out there in that mudhole somewhere!”
And with that he was gone again.
— KU5B