Little-known museum 

focused on electronics 

reopens in new home

Howard Griffin, sitting by the lunar camera he helped develop.

A geek-friendly museum that seems to fly under the radar held its grand reopening over the weekend in Baltimore County, a year after moving from its former home in Linthicum.

It's been around for four decades, and radar itself has always been a key part of the attraction for the National Electronics Museum. The brainchild of two employees of the former Westinghouse Defense and Electronic Systems Center, the nonprofit museum was created and operated with substantial support from the company that continued under eventual buyer Northrop Grumman. Many of the high-tech electronic devices on display were developed at Westinghouse.

Radar gizmos galore

Personally, I'm not much of a geek. But there was plenty that I found fascinating -- some of it seeming like grist for Jeopardy buffs. Like what does radar mean? (Answer: Radio Detection and Ranging).

The museum shares space with the nonprofit System Source Computer Museum created by System Source IT services company owner Bob Roswell at its Hunt Valley headquarters. His collection runs the gamut of computing devices from times well before the days of microchips... or any kind of chips, for that matter... and includes one of the first computers put together in the garage where corporate giant Apple was born.

It's hard to separate one museum from the other, as electronics and computers seem so intertwined. (There's also a video game museum housed in the building.)

In a back room during the opening, members of the museum-based Amateur Radio Club were busy on the airwaves operating its ham radio station (K3NEM) chatting with radio buffs across the planet and spreading word of the museum's reopening. A long work table was lined with vintage broadcasting and modern computer equipment now part of the station's operations. 

Ham radio operators at work.

My personal favorite part of the opening party was chatting with its most senior guest -- 90-year-old Howard Griffin, a Baltimorean who helped develop the Apollo 11 camera that beamed home to earth live television images of the first steps on the moon. One of several backup lunar cameras produced for the mission is displayed at the museum in a case alongside the special Emmy statuette awarded to Westinghouse for the technical achievement that enabled people across our planet to witness history. (Another backup lunar camera is displayed at the National Air and Space Museum.)

Howard, a Johns Hopkins-educated electrical engineer, said his role was in devising the thermal coating protecting the camera that was mounted on the lunar lander.

I asked about his view during the project of the likelihood the 1969 moon landing would entirely succeed -- especially setting down on the lunar surface, and the crew returning safety to earth.

"Very slim," he said.

The museum at 338 Clubhouse Road is operated by an executive director and volunteers, and for now open to visitors by appointment most Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Group tours also are available for scheduling. Admission is $15 for adults and $10 for students. And not a bad deal as a two-fer, since you get to see the computer museum on the same visit.

 

Post-election mysteries

Kamala Harris in Reno, Nev., a few days before the election. (Photo by Brycia James)

Questions for America
 that I cannot answer

Four years ago, in the weeks leading up to Election Day, my wife Bonnie Schupp was deeply worried. "I don't want Trump to be the last president in my lifetime," she told me.

 Election night was tense, the result too close for comfort -- and the accelerant for Donald Trump's "Big Lie" alleging rigging.

 We had for weeks watched Bill Maher's HBO show, "Real Time," in which the comedian/social critic repeatedly warned that Trump would not leave office willingly. Then, like prophecy, came the January 6 insurrection -- a riot and invasion of the Capitol which Bonnie and I watched, transfixed and horrified. 

I assured her that the attack would not change the result, that Joe Biden would be inaugurated as scheduled two weeks hence. Days before the inauguration, Bonnie found out she had aggressive pancreatic cancer. 

We watched the inauguration together. Though she knew her own time remaining was limited, Bonnie was relieved for the future of others and the nation she loved that Biden was president. She died two months later. 

Four years down the road, it is my turn to worry. No, I'm not on the edge of death. But I'm anfew months older than Trump. His health status (both physical and mental) has always been a mystery couched in vague assurances, but I've had some challenges of late. Like a brush with mortality just two months ago. And I had hopes, as Bonnie did, that Trump would not be the last president in my lifetime.

 Now it seems he might be, assuming Trump has four years without an intervention of fate and I don't. And I fear for the future of the nation that I love, but now have a harder time understanding.

 I've read numerous stories and heard TV pundits in the election aftermath assessing reasons for the failed Kamala Harris campaign. 

The economy? She offered proposals to help families and vowed to take on companies for price-gouging. Trump blamed her for not fixing the economy during her four years as vice president. Not that she had the power to fix the inflation of higher consumer prices, mostly the result of initial shortages during the pandemic and the simply relationship of supply and demand.

 He harped on America as a failing nation, claimed only he could fix it, and tariffs were the answer -- despite the warnings of experts that tariffs amount to a tax on consumers through higher prices and would fuel a new inflationary spiral. All this nonsense when unemployment was at a record low, wages higher, interest rates finally dropping and the stock market at a record high. America is hardly failing economically.

 Illegal immigration as an invasion of criminals was a constant theme, and inevitably the few recent cases of undocumented aliens linked to murders -- including one if Maryland -- served Trump's purposes for political exploitation. And even when the House and Senate had reached a bipartisan agreement on legislation to deal with uncontrolled border crossings, Trump got his legislative sycophants to kill it. He needed the issue to remain as uncontrolled as the border. 

Trump as the problem-solver? How many times has he been asked for his promised plan to "fix healthcare" to replace the Affordable Care Act? In four years as president, there was none -- only a Republican attempt to scuttle the ACA that was foiled by the late Sen. John McCain.

 Or for many voters, was it simply the fact that Trump's opponent was a woman of color? They were just looking for excuses to vote for him? 

More than a dozen former key aides in his presidency urged Americans to vote for Harris, saying Trump was a danger to the nation. A fascist, even. Others in his administration or took part in schemes to subvert the Constitution were convicted of crimes, imprisoned, disbarred. But Trump himself, the crime boss, despite his New York state conviction on fraud charges, will not lose a day of his freedom and doubtless as president will scuttle all federal cases against him.

 How could more than half of the participating electorate vote for him? I cannot fathom it. President-elect yet again, four years after his defeat by Biden, despite his innumerable faults and failures as a human being and from 2017 to 2021 in office. What voters chose to ignore, forgive or forget is astonishing, but inevitably offers a clue to their psyche.

 I am left to ask how anyone who lost a family member to Covid could ignore, forgive or forget Trump's lies and ignorance in his public response to the pandemic and undermining of public health science. More than a million Americans died. He at one point voiced the idea of people injecting bleach as a cure, among other preposterous suggestions, as he undermined the work of experts studying the virus and their push for wide acceptance of the quickly-developed vaccines to help contain it.

 I am left to ask how any military veteran could ignore, forgive or forget President Trump deriding the courage and sacrifice of the nation's defenders. among other insults. "Suckers and losers," he said in minimizing visits to the American cemeteries in France where many lost in World War II are buried. Or his stated suggestion of using the nation's military to deal with Americans exercising their free speech right of protest. (All this from an obvious draft dodger in the Vietnam war era whose alleged bone spurs must have been miraculously cured.)

My neighbor's lawn

 I am left to ask how any police officer could ignore, forgive or forget President Trump inciting the crowd he summoned to Washington for the Jan. 6 rally and failing to intervene as a mob's ensuing attack on the Capitol injured 140 police officers and contributed to the deaths of several. Close to a thousand people eventually were convicted on criminal charges related to the attack. Trump has called them patriots and vowed to pardon the many who are now serving prison terms. (In my own neighborhood in Pasadena, Maryland, a police officer who brings home his county patrol car after work flies a Trump "no more bullshit" flag outside his house and has a line of lawn signs adjacent to his driveway declaring he was voting for law and order, and for "felon and hillbilly.")

 I am left to ask how any good union member could ignore, forgive or forget Trump's blatant contempt for organized labor (and forget, by comparison, the incumbent Democratic president joining auto workers on their picket line during their strike in battling for a fair contract).

 I am left to ask how so many American voters could ignore, forgive or forget the incessant lies of Trump, his obvious lack of empathy for anyone other than himself and his family, his personal greed, his theft from charity, his con-man frauds, his racism and xenophobia, his abuse of women, and his crimes -- indicted by grand juries in multiple states, convicted in New York, and proving through millions spent on lawyers to delay justice that laws and the Constitution at the bedrock of America for more than two centuries do not apply to all.

 And I am left to wonder how those voters will perceive the results of their choice four years hence. I might not last that long, but suspect they will find themselves paying the piper. To say nothing of the likely global damage that may never be undone.