This is a bit of a departure from my prior tales, it is not so funny but actually rather sad. Ted was my best friend for years and died way too young.
Ted Moran and I met in the mid 1980’s at one of my first RCMA Chicago Chapter (RCMA-CC) meetings. He was a Chicago boy, born and bred and we had a lot of similar interests. Soon he and I became best friends, and we spent a lot of time together. When we each were married a few years later (No, not to each other…) our wives became best friends too.
He had joined the RCMA-CC a few months before I did. He eventually became the Illinois Editor and also helped with the CARMA newsletter later on. It was his work with RCMA that caused him to start exchanging letters with a girl from the Springfield (IL) area, they arranged to meet soon thereafter and soon were married.
I always called him “Tedly” for some reason, so he started calling me “Richly”. Our buddy Fred naturally became “Fredly”. Occasionally we would call him “Teddy Lamar” and he would muster up his best Harvey Korman impression and exclaim “It’s Tedly!”
When we met Ted worked at an insurance company’s office campus as the director of security. While he worked at the insurance company, he usually worked the night shift, this seemed to carry on to his later career as a dispatcher. This allowed him plenty of time and access to the many industrial copy machines there. He would get large radio-related documents and make copies for the RCMA-CC and later CARMA members, and hand them out at meetings. He and I would have “Collating Parties in his living room. We would pull the dining room table and a couple folding tables together and layout the stacks of pages in order, then walk around the table and grab a page off each stack to collate some 100 page copy of the latest ARINC guide, CARMA PL List, newsletter or some other treasured resource. While the copy machines at his work were industrial grade, the did not collate well and this was easier. It also took a lot less time to copy, meaning less chance at being caught.
For one project I was able to get a copy of the entire ARINC locations and frequency guide. This was several hundred pages, and when collated ended up to just about fill a 4-inch binder. He made the copies over a two-week span, 100 copies of 500 pages. This filled about a dozen or so copier paper boxes, he would do about 20-40 pages a night for that two-week period, stash the boxes in his trunk and bring them home when he got off shift. When he was done, we realized that they did not have holes to go in the binders. We then went to Office Max and bought a pair of heavy-duty hole punches.
We then pooled our resources and found a sale on binders at one of the local surplus stores, buying out the entire stock of 150 or so for about a dollar a piece. This filled the trunk, back seat and front passenger seat of his beat-up old Crown Vic, so I took a bus back to his house.
We then laid out 25 pages at a time and walked around the tables grabbing a page off each stack and after the last page in that section, punched the binder holes. We then set those aside and did it again and again and again… Starting about 3 PM, we stopped for pizza after a couple hours and then finished sometime after midnight. We destroyed one of the hole punches so were really glad we bought 2.
The next afternoon we stuffed these pages into the binders, this time we had help from a couple other friends. It was now that I wish we bought hole punches that drilled larger holes. The properly sized holes were fine for most uses, but you really had to line the pages up perfectly to get them into the binders. We discovered that we were a bit lax on lining things up before stomping on the hole punch.
We filled his car with the binders as well as my mini-van and brought them to that weekends CARMA Meeting and handed them out. We had just enough as at the time we were averaging 80-90 people in attendance. Those in attendance were overwhelmed, first by the information they received and then when they realized we were giving it away for free.
Eventually the insurance company closed its office campus and Ted got laid off. He and his wife opened a scanner store, as that was always a lifetime dream of his. The Command Post on the far north edge of Chicago sold scanners, accessories and frequency books. As a dyed-in-the-wool Mac guy at the time (more on that too later) he created his own Point of Sale system using FileMaker Pro. It worked great and he probably could have sold it to other small retailers if he was so inclined.
The Command Post only lasted a year or two. As with most small businesses it just didn’t have enough volume to make it work. While it was open he and his wife had fun running it and it was a great place for the scanner crowd to hang out. There was a great Chicago style hot dog and gyro joint a block away and we were some of their best customers.
After the Command Post closed Ted applied for dispatch jobs, including the town I worked in. He ended up being hired by the neighboring town, they were on the same radio network as us, so I was able to hear him on the radio while working. We both worked 3-11’s most of the time then so after work we would occasionally run down to the Kankakee area as that was where the closest Steak & Shake was at the time. We loved them burgers! Sure, it was almost a 200-mile round trip but it was worth it. Of course we had scanners going the whole time.
Ted, like many of us in the 70’s and 80’s, used a Commodore 64 for the few radio-related computer tasks of the day. He was into some shortwave data and fax stuff and there were decent programs for the C64 available. Eventually however he turned into a Mac guy. So there is a little back story on that: I bought a used Mac 512 from another RCMA member and used it for a couple years, upgrading it to a Mac Plus along the way. I had been turned on to Macs by my buddy Bob whom I have mentioned in prior stories. Eventually I upgraded to a new Mac PowerBook 140 so gave the Mac512/Plus to Ted. He ran this as his daily driver for a couple more years and passed it on to Fred, then Joel. Each of the 4 of us then moved on to newer Macs down the road. That little Mac was the first for 5 CARMA members over almost a decade.
While Ted remained a Mac guy for a long time he eventually went over to the Dark Side and used Windows. He was doing a lot more data and radio control stuff, and getting into SDR’s so I can understand the reasoning. During the early PowerBook and Performa days there was always something new and interesting as well as relatively affordable. He bought one of those pizza-box Performa 400’s for the Command Post and had a Mac Iivi at home that I was insanely jealous of. He tended to keep his computers, radios and cars longer than I but when he bought something it was a good one.
His scanner collection was mostly Radio Shack and Yaesu stuff. He was a big fan of the PRO2005 and 6 as well as the PRO43. Since he really loved to listen to MilAir, and especially Air Force refueling, these were his bread-and-butter radios. He also had an FRG9600 as well as an 8800 for HF. When he and his wife bought their house, he strung up a long-wire antenna in his yard, from the front tree, across the roof and to a tree in the back corner. That thing worked great on HF. He had a discone on the roof for the scanners.
Ted was pretty much fearless when it came to checking out closed military bases and federal infrastructure. He was fascinated by Cold War era communications facilities like the Norway, IL tower that hosted one of the ground stations for the old 415.700 MHz. AF-1 phone link. We visited that tower often and always hoped to be able to see the radios used on that system. He also explored the old Joliet Army Arsenal facility that was later transformed to a national cemetery. This place had many “igloos”, basically cement bunkers used to store the bombs and ammo they made there. If one blew up it would prevent others from joining the party. After the base closed, he would take me around and explore these whenever we were in the area.
One weekend we found out that we both had the same days off, so we took off with the wives in my mini-van. Evening found us in Carbondale, IL a couple hundred miles south of Chicago so we started looking for a hotel. Everything seemed booked up all over town, we asked the guy at the 4th or 5th place we stopped why, and he said, “You know it is Memorial Day weekend, don’t you?”. The look on our faces told him we surely didn’t have a clue.
Eventually we found a flea-bag motel in town, and they had a room. Not the two we asked for but just one room. We took it as he said that there would be plenty of room for us as it was “the railroad room”. When we opened the door, we discovered that it was more like a barracks than a hotel, it had a half-dozen beds lined up barracks style, a single bathroom and a kitchenette. We were tired, road-dirty and resigned to the fact that we would not find another room anywhere else, so we took it.
The shower had 2 positions, off and fire-hose. My wife was the first to take a shower, when she screamed, I ran in and she was shaking, saying that she almost got knocked over by the force of the water. Later Ted came out after finishing his shower and showed me the soap wrapper, it was called “First Date” soap. It felt like a Brillo pad, sort of like a poor imitation of Lava Soap.
The next morning Ted and I went out in search of coffee and found a donut shop. We made our purchases and wandered around the small downtown area of Carbondale. The donut shop was next to the phone company exchange, and they had a tall tower there. We eventually figured out it was still used for the low-band pagers still fairly common then.
Later that day we took off for some other place and were driving along some back road when Ted spotted a railroad crossing ahead. Knowing that these rural crossings were usually a hump he looked back, and the wives weren’t paying any attention to us, they were chatting away about whatever bored wives talk about when the husbands are playing radios at 60 MPH. He told me not to slow down for the crossing. I hit that thing at full speed and the wives flew all over the back of the van as they were not wearing their seatbelts. To say they were pissed would be an understatement.
After Ted started to work at my agency, he quickly took a leadership role in the 9-1-1 Center, and we worked together on projects like the flooring job in my last story. He took care of a lot of the maintenance and ongoing upkeep of the systems and created various databases for the department in Access. These included our Parking Permissions, House-Watch and Traffic Stop/tickets databases. He made them easy to use by the dispatchers and easy to retrieve the data as needed.
Each year he and I would go to the annual 9-1-1 Conference in Springfield. We would leave a day early and meander our way down there, finding some new things along the way. We would check out the aviation museum at the old Chanute Air Force Base, checking out the old base buildings at the same time on one trip, chase marine radio operations along the river on another. Once we discovered a neat telephone museum in Gridley or an abandoned railroad yard in Hennepin.
One year I nominated him for Officer of the Year for our agency and he was honored at the annual Village Banquet. Sometime after that I was promoted, and instead of being co-workers, I was now his supervisor. We drifted apart and our off-duty adventures became fewer and further between and pretty much ended a year or so later. We still got along at work, but it just wasn’t the same.
A couple years after I retired and moved away Ted had a battle with cancer. While he seemed to bounce back and went back to work it suddenly got worse and he passed away in June of 2018. I flew back for his memorial service but got sick myself and ended up in ICU for several days, missing his service. I still think about him and all the fun we had together.
Rest in peace my friend.
Ted Moran and I met in the mid 1980’s at one of my first RCMA Chicago Chapter (RCMA-CC) meetings. He was a Chicago boy, born and bred and we had a lot of similar interests. Soon he and I became best friends, and we spent a lot of time together. When we each were married a few years later (No, not to each other…) our wives became best friends too.
He had joined the RCMA-CC a few months before I did. He eventually became the Illinois Editor and also helped with the CARMA newsletter later on. It was his work with RCMA that caused him to start exchanging letters with a girl from the Springfield (IL) area, they arranged to meet soon thereafter and soon were married.
I always called him “Tedly” for some reason, so he started calling me “Richly”. Our buddy Fred naturally became “Fredly”. Occasionally we would call him “Teddy Lamar” and he would muster up his best Harvey Korman impression and exclaim “It’s Tedly!”
When we met Ted worked at an insurance company’s office campus as the director of security. While he worked at the insurance company, he usually worked the night shift, this seemed to carry on to his later career as a dispatcher. This allowed him plenty of time and access to the many industrial copy machines there. He would get large radio-related documents and make copies for the RCMA-CC and later CARMA members, and hand them out at meetings. He and I would have “Collating Parties in his living room. We would pull the dining room table and a couple folding tables together and layout the stacks of pages in order, then walk around the table and grab a page off each stack to collate some 100 page copy of the latest ARINC guide, CARMA PL List, newsletter or some other treasured resource. While the copy machines at his work were industrial grade, the did not collate well and this was easier. It also took a lot less time to copy, meaning less chance at being caught.
For one project I was able to get a copy of the entire ARINC locations and frequency guide. This was several hundred pages, and when collated ended up to just about fill a 4-inch binder. He made the copies over a two-week span, 100 copies of 500 pages. This filled about a dozen or so copier paper boxes, he would do about 20-40 pages a night for that two-week period, stash the boxes in his trunk and bring them home when he got off shift. When he was done, we realized that they did not have holes to go in the binders. We then went to Office Max and bought a pair of heavy-duty hole punches.
We then pooled our resources and found a sale on binders at one of the local surplus stores, buying out the entire stock of 150 or so for about a dollar a piece. This filled the trunk, back seat and front passenger seat of his beat-up old Crown Vic, so I took a bus back to his house.
We then laid out 25 pages at a time and walked around the tables grabbing a page off each stack and after the last page in that section, punched the binder holes. We then set those aside and did it again and again and again… Starting about 3 PM, we stopped for pizza after a couple hours and then finished sometime after midnight. We destroyed one of the hole punches so were really glad we bought 2.
The next afternoon we stuffed these pages into the binders, this time we had help from a couple other friends. It was now that I wish we bought hole punches that drilled larger holes. The properly sized holes were fine for most uses, but you really had to line the pages up perfectly to get them into the binders. We discovered that we were a bit lax on lining things up before stomping on the hole punch.
We filled his car with the binders as well as my mini-van and brought them to that weekends CARMA Meeting and handed them out. We had just enough as at the time we were averaging 80-90 people in attendance. Those in attendance were overwhelmed, first by the information they received and then when they realized we were giving it away for free.
Eventually the insurance company closed its office campus and Ted got laid off. He and his wife opened a scanner store, as that was always a lifetime dream of his. The Command Post on the far north edge of Chicago sold scanners, accessories and frequency books. As a dyed-in-the-wool Mac guy at the time (more on that too later) he created his own Point of Sale system using FileMaker Pro. It worked great and he probably could have sold it to other small retailers if he was so inclined.
The Command Post only lasted a year or two. As with most small businesses it just didn’t have enough volume to make it work. While it was open he and his wife had fun running it and it was a great place for the scanner crowd to hang out. There was a great Chicago style hot dog and gyro joint a block away and we were some of their best customers.
After the Command Post closed Ted applied for dispatch jobs, including the town I worked in. He ended up being hired by the neighboring town, they were on the same radio network as us, so I was able to hear him on the radio while working. We both worked 3-11’s most of the time then so after work we would occasionally run down to the Kankakee area as that was where the closest Steak & Shake was at the time. We loved them burgers! Sure, it was almost a 200-mile round trip but it was worth it. Of course we had scanners going the whole time.
Ted, like many of us in the 70’s and 80’s, used a Commodore 64 for the few radio-related computer tasks of the day. He was into some shortwave data and fax stuff and there were decent programs for the C64 available. Eventually however he turned into a Mac guy. So there is a little back story on that: I bought a used Mac 512 from another RCMA member and used it for a couple years, upgrading it to a Mac Plus along the way. I had been turned on to Macs by my buddy Bob whom I have mentioned in prior stories. Eventually I upgraded to a new Mac PowerBook 140 so gave the Mac512/Plus to Ted. He ran this as his daily driver for a couple more years and passed it on to Fred, then Joel. Each of the 4 of us then moved on to newer Macs down the road. That little Mac was the first for 5 CARMA members over almost a decade.
While Ted remained a Mac guy for a long time he eventually went over to the Dark Side and used Windows. He was doing a lot more data and radio control stuff, and getting into SDR’s so I can understand the reasoning. During the early PowerBook and Performa days there was always something new and interesting as well as relatively affordable. He bought one of those pizza-box Performa 400’s for the Command Post and had a Mac Iivi at home that I was insanely jealous of. He tended to keep his computers, radios and cars longer than I but when he bought something it was a good one.
His scanner collection was mostly Radio Shack and Yaesu stuff. He was a big fan of the PRO2005 and 6 as well as the PRO43. Since he really loved to listen to MilAir, and especially Air Force refueling, these were his bread-and-butter radios. He also had an FRG9600 as well as an 8800 for HF. When he and his wife bought their house, he strung up a long-wire antenna in his yard, from the front tree, across the roof and to a tree in the back corner. That thing worked great on HF. He had a discone on the roof for the scanners.
Ted was pretty much fearless when it came to checking out closed military bases and federal infrastructure. He was fascinated by Cold War era communications facilities like the Norway, IL tower that hosted one of the ground stations for the old 415.700 MHz. AF-1 phone link. We visited that tower often and always hoped to be able to see the radios used on that system. He also explored the old Joliet Army Arsenal facility that was later transformed to a national cemetery. This place had many “igloos”, basically cement bunkers used to store the bombs and ammo they made there. If one blew up it would prevent others from joining the party. After the base closed, he would take me around and explore these whenever we were in the area.
One weekend we found out that we both had the same days off, so we took off with the wives in my mini-van. Evening found us in Carbondale, IL a couple hundred miles south of Chicago so we started looking for a hotel. Everything seemed booked up all over town, we asked the guy at the 4th or 5th place we stopped why, and he said, “You know it is Memorial Day weekend, don’t you?”. The look on our faces told him we surely didn’t have a clue.
Eventually we found a flea-bag motel in town, and they had a room. Not the two we asked for but just one room. We took it as he said that there would be plenty of room for us as it was “the railroad room”. When we opened the door, we discovered that it was more like a barracks than a hotel, it had a half-dozen beds lined up barracks style, a single bathroom and a kitchenette. We were tired, road-dirty and resigned to the fact that we would not find another room anywhere else, so we took it.
The shower had 2 positions, off and fire-hose. My wife was the first to take a shower, when she screamed, I ran in and she was shaking, saying that she almost got knocked over by the force of the water. Later Ted came out after finishing his shower and showed me the soap wrapper, it was called “First Date” soap. It felt like a Brillo pad, sort of like a poor imitation of Lava Soap.
The next morning Ted and I went out in search of coffee and found a donut shop. We made our purchases and wandered around the small downtown area of Carbondale. The donut shop was next to the phone company exchange, and they had a tall tower there. We eventually figured out it was still used for the low-band pagers still fairly common then.
Later that day we took off for some other place and were driving along some back road when Ted spotted a railroad crossing ahead. Knowing that these rural crossings were usually a hump he looked back, and the wives weren’t paying any attention to us, they were chatting away about whatever bored wives talk about when the husbands are playing radios at 60 MPH. He told me not to slow down for the crossing. I hit that thing at full speed and the wives flew all over the back of the van as they were not wearing their seatbelts. To say they were pissed would be an understatement.
After Ted started to work at my agency, he quickly took a leadership role in the 9-1-1 Center, and we worked together on projects like the flooring job in my last story. He took care of a lot of the maintenance and ongoing upkeep of the systems and created various databases for the department in Access. These included our Parking Permissions, House-Watch and Traffic Stop/tickets databases. He made them easy to use by the dispatchers and easy to retrieve the data as needed.
Each year he and I would go to the annual 9-1-1 Conference in Springfield. We would leave a day early and meander our way down there, finding some new things along the way. We would check out the aviation museum at the old Chanute Air Force Base, checking out the old base buildings at the same time on one trip, chase marine radio operations along the river on another. Once we discovered a neat telephone museum in Gridley or an abandoned railroad yard in Hennepin.
One year I nominated him for Officer of the Year for our agency and he was honored at the annual Village Banquet. Sometime after that I was promoted, and instead of being co-workers, I was now his supervisor. We drifted apart and our off-duty adventures became fewer and further between and pretty much ended a year or so later. We still got along at work, but it just wasn’t the same.
A couple years after I retired and moved away Ted had a battle with cancer. While he seemed to bounce back and went back to work it suddenly got worse and he passed away in June of 2018. I flew back for his memorial service but got sick myself and ended up in ICU for several days, missing his service. I still think about him and all the fun we had together.
Rest in peace my friend.
