Newspaper Museum With Radio Club

If I suggest ‘Flower Power’ is at work here, many will gag, and I will never get the core of Spingfield’s citizen to back ‘This Vision’. However, if I say it was my dream to build a crystal set so I can pick up radio signals, like the more privileged children, did, then I got the proverbial ears of almost everyone in my corner. I see children in my apartment complex with cellphones. They huddle in the grass sharing one, instead of playing. If you threw a crystal set in their circle and told them they could build a radio in an hour, they will drop their phones, and begin a project that will show them how this magic – works!

There is a lot of talk about making America great again, but, who knows how? What is missing? How about the pennies the Newspaper Boys used to earn in America’s Great Capitalist Radios and newspapers are tools of communication that made America great. Freedom of the Press, was backed up the broadcast news. My grandfather operated a newspaper stand after his auto accident. There was no welfare.

Then there is the Bad Rap our youth is getting for having their heads down and their noses glued to their cellphones. I rode the subway in New York where everyone hid behind a newspaper – and men still wore hats! So, lay off the kids.

What I envision for Springfield is a Newspaper and Radio Museum. One can go read ‘The Vintage Paper of the Day’ have a cup of coffee, and chat with your neighbors about the good old days, while your grandchild is off in anther room making a crystal set, even setting type – while surrounded by vintage presses. Talk to the owners of the Register Guard who has George Miller’s history at their disposal.

Joaquin Miller belonged to the Bohemian Club in San Francisco that was founded by Newspapermen. I see a new Bohemian Club in Springfield that has gone back to its roots. I see the rebuilding of the Log Cabin Inn in Blue River with a fishing retreat for poets nearby. Work with the Oddfellows about opening up ‘The Gateway to the McKenzie’. Springfield can have its own shuttle service that makes round trips more frequently. Reach out to Foreign Artists and Writers. Bid them to come live in Americas Newest Bohemia, complete with hikes in our forests. Let us make the link into Glenwood, and the dream of Fairmount.  From Blue River to Old Fairmoont is the new City Limits of our collective dream. This is not the Winnamucca to the Sea vision of George Miller, but, it comes close. How about THE MILLER SCENIC HIGHWAY?

Jon Presco

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperboy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio

A crystal radio receiver, also called a crystal set or cat’s whisker receiver, is a very simple radio receiver, popular in the early days of radio. It needs no other power source but that received solely from the power of radio waves received by a wireantenna. It gets its name from its most important component, known as a crystal detector, originally made from a piece of crystalline mineral such as galena.[1] This component is now called a diode.