In the early 1940's, after graduating from Hershey High School in Pennsylvania, my father went to Chicago to work for Link-Belt, who engaged him on radar projects for the war effort. He then joined Hallicrafters, along with a number of other students who'd been recruited from Hershey H.S. and the Milton Hershey Boys School. Most of the students left Hallicrafters after a short while, but my father stayed on, working in the Engineering department at the Chicago Plant No. 1.

Although it represented only a small portion of the work he did for Hallicrafters, dad and a few of the senior engineers were given the job in 1945 of designing and building the S-38 series receivers, which were meant to be the first line of ham receivers to be produced inexpensively, for mass marketing to consumers.

Milton Hershey Eshelman

Dad was the junior man, so he got to build the cheapest unit – the S-38, doing the design, electronics, etc. His good friend, Dick Weaver got to build the SX-42, which was the topline model of the original line, and there were a few other mid-range models built.

Hallicrafters brought in the famous designer, Raymond Lowey, who was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of industrial design at the time. (He designed the Coke bottle and the Studebaker) Dad got to work personally with Lowey to design the box for the S-38.

The majority of my father's work for Hallicrafters was on the ARQ-8 radio set, a radar jamming unit meant to interfere with Japanese planes. Transmitting equipment of the day was difficult to tune for selective or "spot" jamming, because most was designed for barrage jamming. What distinguished the ARQ-8 was that it featured a selective tuner within the barrage band of 5 megacycles.

Dad eventually left Hallicrafters to return to Hershey, PA (my hometown) and start his own audio engineering business, the Milton H. Eshelman Company in Harrisburg, which he ran for over 50 years until retiring recently. They did mostly large commercial sound/TV distribution systems installed in schools, hospitals, etc., as longtime dealers for Dukane, and later Rauland-Borg. I grew up working in the office, where many of the things I learned are now resurfacing as I get involved with Ham radio. This time it'll be hands-on, playing with the gear rather than just typing the words into specification documents… much more fun!

Speaking of fun, here's a great Hallicrafters story, that illustrates what the engineering staff were really focused on back in the day. The Engineering department was situated on the sixth floor of Hallicrafters Plant No. 1, at 2611 Indiana Avenue. Summers in Chicago were hot and there was no air conditioning in the building, so they had to open all the windows.

One summer, there was an old organ grinder who used to stand on the corner of Indiana Ave. with his monkey. The organ music was a real din, and annoyed everyone in the building who was trying to concentrate on work. So the guys on the 6th floor would take their copper pennies, heat them up with a soldering iron, and throw them out the window. The monkey would run to pick them up, but they'd still be too hot to handle, so the monkey would throw them away. The organ grinder would then stop playing and chase the monkey, yelling at him for throwing all his pennies away.

So if you ever find an old penny inside your S-38, and it looks a little melted, you'll know where it came from...