The year is 1998: Ed Miller, K8EHA, St Joe's class of 1960, and Engineering Manager over at WEWS TV-5, is serving one of his two terms as President of the Society of Broadcast Engineers. Ed is wondering where future broadcast engineers are going to come from. He remembers how the St Joe's Radio Club inspired many of his classmates to go into broadcasting, and gets the idea of starting the SBE "youth membership" program.

Ed gets talking about this with SBE member Bob Leskovec, K8DTS, also St Joe's Class of 1960, who is Sr Staff Physicist over at Case Western Reserve and moderator of the Case Amateur Radio Club, W8EDU.

Meanwhile, Bob has been working with Ken Kane, KG8DN, the Science Teacher at Gilmour Academy, who had been steadily building an amateur radio club at that school. It turns out, Ken was a student at St Edward High School back in 1957 when Sputnik was launched!

Bob, and another SBE member, Lab Manager for the CWRU Med School, Tracey Liston, (now W8TWL) had been organizing hamfest activities as fund raisers for the Case Radio Club for several years.

Bob gets the idea of putting all these factors and people together and reserves several tables for the Cleveland Hamfest.

Why not capitalize on the opportunity to also have a W8KTZ "re-union"? --and why limit it to that school? Why not make it a general "high school radio clubs" re-union and encourage anyone and everyone who remembers the school radio clubs from years ago that might have kick-started their careers?

The event is publicized in various of the local ham club newsletters, and with the hamfest organizers.

They are joined by Ted Alexander, K8VPL, St Joe's Class of 1964, who is both a broadcast engineer, and local "on-air" personality, and who just happens to also do announcing at the Cleveland Hamfest.

Mike Szabo, at that time, Asst. Chief Engineer at WKYC-TV3, and Chairman of SBE local Chapter #70, volunteers to help Ed Miller with the SBE table. CWRU Biomedical Engineer, Stephen Trier KG8IH comes out to help Tracey Liston at the W8EDU table.

Bob Kozar, K8NXF, St Joe's Class of 1962, and long time Staff Physicist and an Operations Manager from NASA Plum Brook comes in for the occasion, and Mike Stimac, now N8EXI, long time moderator of the old SJHRC is able to come up from southern Ohio to join in.

Bob contacted over 30 hobby-electronics companies who each sent a pile of catalogs and a "door prize" to give out. The W8EDU table conducts a free "raffle" to hand out the door prizes. Ted makes periodic announcements over the P.A. to tell people about all the free goodies, and what all else is happening over at those tables to get people to come over.

The line of four tables is a continuous overlap of the simultaneous activity, from Tracey Liston and Stephen Trier selling surplus at the W8EDU table on one end, to Mike Szabo handing out SBE literature at the other. In between, Bob Leskovec, takes care of giving out the free catalogs at the second table. Ken Kane and Bob Leskovec show old scrap books and answer questions about the school radio clubs. Ed Miller moves between the SBE table and school-radio-clubs table, and demonstrates the model "sputnik" he built back in 1958. Bob Kozar and Mike Stimac greet the visitors and try to match up memories and facts from the "old days."

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Mike Stimac was moderator of the St Joe's Radio club from its beginning around 1951 and encouraged the students to not only get their ham licenses, but commercial radio operator licenses as well.

What happened to Ed Miller's fellow classmates at that club, who all shared in the enthusiasm in science and radio communications generated by the Sputnik experience, is what he would have liked to see happen again by getting youth members to come and experience the meetings and facilities tours associated with their local SBE chapter meetings across the country.

As a result of Stimac's encouragement to get these licenses, Miller, Leskovec, Kozar, and others got jobs at WCLV, Cleveland's Classical Music Station. Ed Miller went on to John Carroll University and a long career with WEWS-TV-5 as Engineering Manager, and later with Pro Video Systems. Bob Leskovec served as Chief Engineer for a number of years while getting an MS in Physics from JCU and moving on to a long career at Case Western Reserve University, including tending to WRUW-FM, the university station. Bob Kozar went on to work at WJW, both Radio and TV, got an MS in Physics from the University of Dayton and moved on to a long career as Program Director at NASA, and Lecturer at the University of Toledo.

A few years behind them, Ted Alexander started out in broadcasting at WELW, and became Chief Engineer. He moved on to become an on-air personality or Chief Engineer, and sometimes both, at various northeast Ohio stations, including WDOK and carried out a major rebuild of WRMR-AM-850. He has worked as a consutltant and contractor at many other stations, while also attending JCU. Over the years his voice has been heard in commercials on every radio and TV station in Northeast Ohio.

Ted's Classmate, Tony Bacevice, WA8FYW, also started at WCLV, worked at TV-8, got a BSEE and MS in Biomedical Engineering from CWRU, where he also did Engineering for WRUW, and then moved on to studying internal medicine at the CWRU Medical school. Today he is a practicing OB-GYN.





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