Page 6 |
| Little memories come back vividly at such a time as this. Despite his technical attainments, it was human qualities that prevailed in Mr. Maxim's make-up, and these were such as to endear him to all who knew him. He was, for instance, a rare traveling companion. He and your reporter were together on many a trip, to a Washington hearing or to speak at conventions and club meetings. Barnstormers, he called us, when we would be hopping to several conventions in the same week. He was a most entertaining conversationalist and had a priceless store of anecdotes from his long engineering experience. Mornings in hotel rooms he would take setting-up exercises, in a manner that perpetually amazed us. Where the average person thinks he is accomplishing something when he bends from the waist and touches the rug, T.O.M. could put his entire palms on the floor. In memory we can still see him, in his pajamas, getting his morning exercise by galloping around a hotel room on all fours. Then he always took a cold tub bath. Tub half full of cold wter, he would perch on the back of the tub, get all set with a deep breath, and slide down the incline all-over-at-once, to a tremendous flailing of arms and legs and yelling bloody murder, while the bathroom floor got an inch of water to the subsequent dispair of chambermaids. Let no one think there is a note of disrespect in these anecdotes; they are born of the very fact that T.O.M. was a warm and vital person, rich in the human qualities that make a real companion. |
|
One of Mr. Maxim's major services to A.R.R.L. as his constant insistence, down through the years,
upon the highest ethics and standards in our organization. The organization must not be selfish; it must have orderly government in
terms of majority opinion, it must work for the greates good to the greatest number; it must not lend itself to personal axe-grinding.
These prindciples are epitomized in a little article her wrote for QST in September, 1927, which we reproduce at the end of the page,
commending it to the attention of all. Exponent of the charm and the spirit of adventure of amateur radio, champion of our rights and
wise leader, Hiram Percy Maxim lives on in the hearts of the world's amateurs! LEAGUE headquarters gratefully acknowledges the receipt of hundreds of expressions of sympathy upon the passing of our leaders from individual amateurs, radio clubs, foreign amateur societies, and other organizations in the vast radio world. We publish here just one, from the Federal Communications Commission at Washington: "The Commission has learned with a great deal of sorrow of the recent death of your president, Hiram Percy Maxim, and your vice-president, Charles Stewart. In their relations with the communication world generally and the government particularly, both of these leaders in amateur radio showed a breadth of vision and an understanding of the broader aspects of regulatory problems which went far in the achievemt of a position of leadership for amateur radio. Please present our deepest sympathy to your Board of Directors and to the families of Mr. Maxim and Mrs. Stewart. "Anning S. Prall, Chairman" The Old Chiefs have passed on. We shall QSO again in that land where signals never fade. No organization ever had leaders of which it could be more proud. Their names go down in our history as men who fought wholeheartedly, unselfishly and successfully for a cause that they saw grow from nothingness to an important force in behalf of science and civilization. They must be continuing models for us and inexhaustible springs of inspiration. We, the living, must carry on the work they have thus far so nobly advanced. Let us now highly resolve that the lessons we have learned at their feet shall never be forgotten, and that no act of ours shall ever impede the great march of amateur radio--"Of, by and for the amateur"! E.B.W. |
|
By Hiram Percy Maxim, President, A.R.R.L. (Reprinted from QST for September, 1927) SITTING back in the old armchair, with the last issue of QST read from cover to cover and with everybody else in the house asleep hours ago, I fell to thinking of amateur radio to-day and amateur radio of other days. As the blue smoke curls slowly upward from the old pipe, visions of early A.R.R.L. Directors' Meetings float before me. I see those old-timers grappling with problems of organization, with QRM, with trunk-line traffic and rival amateur leagues. I see sinister commercial and government interests at work seeking to exterminate amateur radio. They were dark days, those early ones. To-day I see Amateur Radio an institution, recognized by our American government and on the road to recognitions by the other governments of the world. I see a fine, loyal A.R.R.L. membership of 20,000 standing shoulder to shoulder and believing in each other and still blazing the way in radio brotherhood taking shape, in the form of our I.A.R.U. And as the last embers of the old pipe turn to grey ash, I ask how it all came about: that the A.R.R.L. shold have succeeded and all its opponents failed. The answer is clear. It is because with our opponents there was always some kind of a selfish motive to be served for someone, whereas in our A.R.R.L. we insisted from the beginning that no selfish motive for anybody or anything should ever prevail. Everything that A.R.R.L. undertakes must be 100% for the general good. That policy bred loyalty and confidence. With those two things an organization can prosper forever. |
|
|