The Tower We Raised for Dad’s Sunday Net

Finding a Tower

I did not know the first thing about radio towers. I knew they were tall and gray and my father loved his.

I called the one person I knew who might help, which was Dad’s old friend from the radio club, a retired mail carrier who lives out past the lake. I asked him not to say anything to Dad. He promised.

“Used towers come up when an old ham passes,” he said. “Families don’t know what to do with them. Let me make some calls.”

He called back at seven the next morning, before I left for work.

“There’s a fellow over by Holton,” he said. “Name of Alois. His dad passed in February. He’s got four ten-foot sections, a top plate, a small three-band beam antenna and the rotor, all of it down and stacked in the barn. He wants it gone.”

I took a personal day. I had not taken one since my mother died. Holton is about forty minutes west. Alois met me at the end of his gravel drive in a pair of muddy boots, a big quiet man about my age with his father’s reading glasses still in his shirt pocket.

He walked me back to the barn. The tower sections were stacked on two old pallets, galvanized steel, the triangle kind with the zigzag braces. The antenna lay beside them with a feed sack over the rotor.

“Dad put this up in 1994,” Alois said. “Took it down himself in 2019 when he couldn’t climb anymore. He kept saying he’d sell it to somebody who would use it.”

I told him about my father. About the Navy and the Sunday net and Tyler and the saw. I did not mean to tell him all of it, but it came out.

Alois listened with his hands in his back pockets. When I finished, he looked at the stack of steel for a while.

“What’s it worth to you?” he asked.

“My husband said not to haggle,” I said. “He said to ask what you wanted and pay it.”

Alois rubbed his chin. “I was asking fifteen hundred for all of it. You give me eleven-fifty and promise me one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Tell your dad whose it was. My father would’ve liked that it went to a Navy man. He was Army, but he’d have liked it anyway.”

I wrote him a check for $1,150. He and his son loaded every section into the bed of Reinhold’s pickup, and he threw in the rotor cable and a box of hardware for free.