The Isle of Enchantment
In the 50’s Puerto Rico as a teaching assignment was tantamount to exile, but that’s what
Mike got. It was assumed that dealing with the inhabitants would be difficult and that
they would be relatively rustic types. One never considered that there might be any
beauty of landscape or enjoyable activities. Perhaps a typical un-traveled American still
thinks of foreign lands that way, but how wrong and how uninformed. Excitement and
numerous opportunities for accomplishments lay on all sides.
Recall that Mike Stimac was actually from Cleveland, training with a missionary group, the Marianists.
Having joined the Society of Mary to teach, he was now being shipped off to a little school
on the south side of the Caribbean island.
Mike arrived
via a flight that left Miami and stopped in Havana and Santa Domingo for refueling.
Keeping clear of clouds and staying in the sunlight, the flight wove around towering
cumulous, some of which were pouring rain. Over Santa Domingo, looking down, the
teacher saw the rare sight of a complete round rainbow in one of the downpours, and with the
intuition of a scientist, immediately appreciated that such a thing could
only be seen from above the level of a wall of rain!
The flight ended with the landing in San Juan on the north side of Puerto Rico and the
trip continued with a 60 mile journey over gravel roads, ending at Colegio Ponceno, the
elite school on the southern side of Puerto Rico. One-story rooms with thin walls, roofs
of corrugated iron that sounded like drums under the frequent tropical down pours, with
banana trees growing around the compound, made up the scene.
There was a little lab,
not much used in this elementary school where the grade only went up to the eighth, but to Mike
it held a jewel – a little old Hallicrafters SkyBuddy amateur radio all-band receiver!
It held the promise of a ham radio station just
waiting for a transmitter to be cobbled together, and Mike knew he could build one.
But a license would be needed.
He soon learned Morse code, and the answers to the FCC questions. Coincidentally, licensing
procedures were just being put back in place in the years following World War II. A long journey to
the capital, San Juan, to the Government building for the FCC examination not only resulted in his
first ham radio license, but the first license issued in Puerto
Rico after the war, --with the coveted letters KP4AA!
Back in Ponce, from power supplies scrounged out of old radios and with the help of a
dog-eared ARRL Handbook, he got an oscillator going. Using an old record player
amplifier and a filament power transformer run backward for a modulator hookup,
KP4AA got on the air!
Foretelling the future, the antenna was a 3-element YAGI beam. Aluminum was not easy to
come by, so it drooped from the
weight of the ½ and ¾ inch iron water pipe used in construction. But tuned exactly, it made up
for the smallness of the 15 watts transmitter power.
And nonetheless, Mike was began working one rare location after another, contacts soon followed
with Venezuela, Brazil, Columbia, Panama, with pile-ups resulting when a CQ USA
would be called.
The Marianists ran two boarding schools, one on the north shore in Rio Piedras, and the
other in Ponce on the southern side. The Rio Piedras School, San Jose, was a solid block
structure of classrooms and faculty residence towering two or three stories high. Collegio
Ponceno, in the south was more of sheetrock walls and corrugated sheet iron roofs, but
solidly built. It had to be, since Puerto Rico is in the path of the annual hurricanes.
When the torrential rains of hurricanes would arrive, one could hear the drumming on the
town’s iron roofs from a mile distant, heralding its quick arrival to the school.
In those days before global warming, hurricanes in that area were an infrequent event.
Sparkling blue sky, glistening
white clouds floating in warm golden sunshine – this was everyday in Ponce.
Outside of classrooms and physics lab, the compound held a basket ball court, and Mike
spent many hours in games with the boarders. Alternately the rich parents, with great
delight, hosted the Brothers at their “fincas” or sugar plantations. There horses would be
saddled and Mike often rode through the several square miles that sugar plantations
cover. It was always interesting to see the adjacent factory setups for crushing sugar cane
and the subsequent production of sugar, molasses, and rum. One quickly learned that
Puerto Rico had a lot of industrial activity going.
With the coast at hand, boats were plentiful. One night Don Pedro whose two sons were
boarders, took the faculty out on his boat after dark. He wanted the Brothers to witness a
wonderful phenomenon in the bay. As the boat churned through the placid water, the
wake burst into bright green light. Mike was awed by the sea of phosphorescence from
the disturbed plankton and algae on such a grand scale compared to the lab demos of
phosphorescence in a beaker.
One family had a 17 foot sail boat which, like all toys, was used for a while and then
mostly forgotten. When Mike expressed an interest, the father was overjoyed to see his
son’s teacher make use of it.
Many afternoons of sailing followed. One could ride a bike the mile or two to the bay
where the club house of the yacht club stood on stilts just off shore with the members’
boats moored around it. One of the skiffs tied up on shore was used for a brief row
to the sail boat. Pulling sails out of their locker, a jib and mainsail took no time to raise.
On most days the soft wind blowing on-shore provided an easy passage over the bay, but
sometimes quite gusty conditions prevailed. With hindsight, in such conditions a person was
not wise to go alone on the 5 mile wide bay, (which water was so deep the battleship
Missouri would often be anchored there,) with no thought of life jacket, while tacking with the
boat, jibbing, and circling. The Coast Guard would hardly approve now. In those days,
people relied on stamina and skill to pull through whatever survival demanded. They just
faced nature and coped, with their own muscle and mental acuity, without relying on the
protection of service organizations or devices.
So Mike raced along the coast or floated
lazily during the lulls, and experienced in miniature the joy of a sailor on the high seas.
The warm water, the hot sun and the sound of the waves breaking against the hull
brought back the atmosphere of Captain Cook and the Pacific island paradises of
literature.
But another adventure beaconed. Something was being done in the Pacific which
inspired imagination. Thor Hyerdahl had built a reed boat, the Kontiki, and was going to
float across the Pacific. Mike thought “why couldn’t I do a miniature Kontiki expedition
by sailing the couple hundred miles around the coast of Puerto Rico?” Rocky coasts, the
crashing waves of the Atlantic side on the north of the island, and dependence only on the
sails tempered imagination, --but a substitute was found. After much speculation
with fellow teacher Joe
Gaudet as to how it might be achieved, and then not too much discussion about whether they dare,
Mike and Joe set off on a bicycle tour of the 100-plus miles around the whole of the Island.
It wasn’t
Kontiki but it did come to be that just one more “first” had taken place!
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The teaching brotherhood juggled personnel wherever and whenever they were needed.
Mike was needed in San Jose. So long before the original five-year assignment was
finished, orders came to leave the Ponce setup and report to Colegio San Jose in
Rio Piedras, near San Juan.
The pain of leaving such a wonderful place was soon forgotten when new panorama of
opportunity revealed itself in San Jose. Again there seemed to be nothing,
but there was opportunity.
Army surplus stores with radio parts, high
school youngsters eager for doing great things and some roomy lab space were enough. A
60 watt transmitter and a piece of army radio receiver equipment became a center of
activity not only for boys, but for parents. Aided by the usual 3 element beam on a
rooftop, regular Sunday morning contacts were held with graduates who were in stateside
schools like the University of Dayton and Virginia Polytech.
In those days phone patching was not allowed, but students and parents gathered by the
amateur radio stations on the Island and the conversations lasted into the hours At one
point someone calculated how much long distance telephone time would have equaled all
the radio conversations and concluded that it would have cost $60,000! Parents were
awed by the experience at their school and students became heroes as they gained
licenses and got to run the station!
Among these students, many years later, two would stick in his mind.
Maldonado, later a doctor, and Roldan from Santa Domingo whose
family ran the pharmacies for the country.
Besides his fellow students and a Ham radio station and a gang of students at the school, there was
adventure outside. A playground was being prepared and many days of scraping away
topsoil were holding up the project. Someplace Mike had learned the rudiments of running a
bulldozer, so promptly he had the keys to the machine on the field. As soon as the regular
crew finished, Mike would take over and in a few weeks the playground had taken shape.
The fun of piloting around the big Diesel was finished.
A few blocks distant loomed buildings of the University of Puerto Rico, and it soon
became the scene for some most unusual adventures.
Mike met the head of the physics department and asked to use the vacuum pumping equipment to
construct Geiger counter tubes for some radiation measurements. The professor and his
Physics department were very little in demand and he welcomed Mike’s company. While
the work on the Geiger counters went on, the Professor chatted and discovered Mike’s
acquaintance with electronics. He asked a favor. The professor had received a Carnegie
Foundation grant of a Cosmic Ray sensing device and he could not get it to work. He
was too embarrassed to tell the Foundation who might have sent out an expert. Externally
the apparatus was a ball about 5 feet in diameter and internally it held a ball-like high
pressure container of Argon gas with some electronics. The function of the apparatus
was to have a cosmic ray shoot through the Argon “bomb” causing ionization. The
external electronics would sense the formation of a charge, and with amplification send a
pulse to an ink pen marking pips on charting paper. This would give a count of the
number of the mysterious cosmic rays hitting the equatorial region of the earth. But, to
Dr. Covas’s embarrassment, the Carnegie Cosmic Ray meter refused to function. Did
Mike have any ideas?
Just then, to compound the embarrassment for Dr. Covas, he had to attend a Cosmic Ray
Symposium in the states at Colorado where everybody would report their individual
progress. His last request to Mike was that any good news should be forwarded as fast as
possible.
Like any ham radio experimenter, Mike disconnected the “Bomb” and attached a tiny
battery directly to the input terminals of the electronic amplifier. To his satisfaction,
the needle on the charts jumped
energetically. This suggested that the pulse from the “Bomb” was getting lost – if it was
being generated at all. Yet, checking things over, everything about the setup appeared to be in order.
With the humidity on the Island being high, things always felt
clammy ---and suddenly it was that very fact which inspired Mike--- damp circuit boards suffering surface
leakage of tiny signal currents! Dragging over an extension cord he put a lighted 100
Watt bulb inside the electronics housing and went home.
The next morning, casually glancing at the tape, there were 4 sharply defined peaks,
stamped for date and time! The hot electric light bulb had dried the thing out, and eliminated
surface leakage. Cosmic ray detection was taking place! Immediately the long paper tape was
bundled up and shipped to Dr. Covas. It arrived before he had to make any presentation
and quite understandably, it made his day. His gratitude would soon be made evident.
Dr. Covas returned in the following week and promptly addressed a proposal to Mike.
“Enroll in the University for your master’s degree in Physics and the tuition will be taken
care of.” It was a nice sequel to his triumph with the Carnegie equipment. One can only wonder
why Mike declined the rare opportunity and generous offer, but he did.
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The island has much variety. On the north side one finds an extinct volcano, El Yunque,
which rears up a thousand feet and catches a lot of rain. Giant ferns and trailing mosses
hang from old trees so that it is a small tropical forest. Needing activity for the boarding
students, Mike frequently took his students for weekend hikes up El Yunque.
In the other direction one found Luquillo, its beach of white sand miles long facing the
Atlantic Ocean. The beach was a great escape for the young boarders, despite one booby
trap. Seasonally the winds would blow jelly fish in from the open ocean. Jelly fish have
a sticky substance on the surface which gives a vicious sting. Since they are large, one
can easily see a jelly fish and avoid being bumped by it. However, there is a hidden
danger --- the jelly fish trails strands as long as 8 or 10 feet, which are covered with the
sticky, stinging material. While wading at a safe distance from the jelly fish every now
and then, someone would walk into a strand, leaving a burning stripe across their midriff.
There was little that could be done --- rub vigorously with sand—but the biting material
seemed to penetrate the skin immediately so one simply endured the next hour so pain.
Perhaps it was the seductiveness of beautiful Puerto Rico that seemed a danger. Staying
too long caused a person to “go native” and then life got frozen in time.
In any case a problem with a new school was brewing in Cleveland, Ohio and for his
superiors the choice of trouble shooters was limited. Without being told why, Mike was
called back from Puerto Rico just after 5 years on the Island.
The ten years in Cleveland that followed would see a teaching effort that went from
obscurity to a scene of national prominence.