SBE CHAPTER 40 NEWSLETTER
OCTOBER 1999
San Francisco
Roy Trumbull - Editor roy547@netcom.com
Bill Dempster - Artist
Advertisers for this month's newsletter are:
Zack Electronics - (800) 998-3947
Advanced Marketing - Frank A. Santucci - (650) 365-3944
Belden - Steve Lampen - (415) 440-8393
Orban - Rick Sawyer - (360) 715-1913
MARCOM - Martin Jackson - (408) 768-8668
William F. Ruck, Jr. Broadcast Engineer - (415) 995-6969
RF Specialties of California - Bill Newbrough - (888) 737-7321
Hammett & Edison, Inc. - Dane E. Ericksen, P.E. - (707) 996-5200
LeBLANC - David A. Hill - (650) 574-4600
Pacific Research & Engineering Corp. - William Hopkins - (760) 438-3911
Keith Davidson & Company - Keith Davidson, CSBE - (707) 648-0412
Improbable Missions Fource - Mike Schweizer - (888) 4-ISDN4U
Svetlana Electron Devices - George Badger - (800) 578-3852
TFT Inc. - Jesse J. Piatte, Jr. - (408) 727-7272 x504
Audio Accessories - Rosie Alexander - (510) 787-3335
Brill Electronics - Larry Shore / Inside Sales - (510) 834-5888
Scala - Michael Wm. Bach - (541) 779-6500
Scala - Everett E. Helm, CPBE - (541) 779-6500
Harris - John Briskie - (650) 593-1837
Anixter - Judy Conner - (510) 489-7430

BABES/SBE LUNCHEON ON WEDNESDAY Oct 27TH
Sierra Designs will be speaking about their line of audio routing equipment.

As usual, our luncheon will be at Sinbad's just south of the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero near the foot of Mission St.. Please RSVP to Carol Brahney at Zacks: 408-487-9302 (cbrahney@zackinc.com). We meet at 11:30 and are seated at 12:30.

Future Meetings
Huffman Dies
D.A. Huffman died in Santa Cruz at the age of 74. While a grad student at MIT in the 1950s he wrote a term paper suggesting that characters in a file be represented by codes whose length was dependant on the frequency with which the associated character appeared in the file. Thus was born Huffman coding, one of the most popular methods of data compression.

The local angle for us is that Huffman coding is used in high definition television.

Dr. Huffman earned his B.S. and M.S. from Ohio State and his Ph.D from M.I.T. He was the founding faculty member of the computer science department at UC Santa Cruz.

Job Open at KDTV Ch14
The chief engineers job is open at San Francisco's channel 14. Please contact Javier Gonzalez for details on the opening.

Gene Zastrow Wins The Parks Award
It only took us 9 years to have an annual banquet. But it was a good one at the Radisson in Berkeley and we had a good turnout.

Gene Zastrow is a man we all respect and admire so it was nice we could show him some small measure of our appreciation.

Thanks are due to Art Leberman for handling the banquet details.

Gene Shepherd Dies
I knew of Gene Shepherd mainly through records, interviews, and a syndicated version of his radio show. He was a fixture for 21 years on WOR in NYC.

He was a humorist who would develop a theme and then proceed to improvise on it, not unlike a jazz musician. One piece I recall from one of his records was about being a deprived child in a non Ovaltine drinking household who desperately wanted a secret inner-seal from an Ovaltine jar so he could get his Little Orphan Annie decoder badge.

Another extended piece had to do with a state of boyhood as realized through the desire for and eventual possession of a Daisy air rifle.

The man could conjure up a half hour of mental theater starting with a phrase like "skate key". He wrote several books. One was based upon a sign he saw behind the counter in a deli, "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash".

In the movie "Network" the bit where the Peter Finch character urges his listeners to yell out the window was borrowed from Shepherd. It was a regular feature of his known as "hurling the invective". He'd have his listeners open their windows and turn up the volume of their radios at which point he would say something provocative.

In 1975 he ended a broadcast by saying: "Can you imagine 4000 years passing, and you're not even a memory? Think about it friends. It's not just a possibility. It is a certainty."

EMAIL ADDRESS
If you have an email address, please contact Warren Reese at radions@neteze.com. Warren is in charge of our email list, which we use when we need to notify members when something has happened between newsletters.

WEB PAGE
Webmeister Tim Pozar has the current newsletter plus newsletters all the way back to 1996 at: http://www.lns.com/sbe