M. L. Shannon

When we had our first telephone installed (back when not everyone had one), naturally the first thing I did was what was absolutely verboten by law: I took it apart. I figured out what was inside it, and from there I was able to make my own phone using an earphone and carbon microphone from a surplus electronics store. Set it up in my basement workshop. I didn't have a dial but learned that I could use a modified Morse Code key to open and close the line to "dial"numbers. I was the only kid in the neighborhood with my own extension phone.

Soon after, I wondered if I could connect my homemade phone to other lines. So I started tapping phones through a clever wire disguised as a ham radio antenna leading to the telephone pole in the alley. I didn't have any "ulterior" motives; I just wanted to see if I could. I mean, I didn't try to do anything with the conversations, the information I intercepted. After a while, I had tapped just about every phone on the block. I finally got caught but the cops and General Tel. decided not to prosecute me (as a juvenile, which would have been in closed court) after I threatened to take the story to the newspapers. I guess they didn't much like the idea of people knowing a kid my age was capable of such a thing.

I had this friend who lived down the street, but his mother wouldn't let him associate with me. I was considered a bit weird in the neighborhood, always up on the roof stringing antennas and wiping out TV reception with a spark gap transmitter and setting up one of the first pirate broadcasting stations (which the FCC came out and shut down), and stuff like that.

Well, as we weren't allowed to talk on the phone, I went out and strung a wire -- from old power transformers I took apart -- down the alley, and we had our own private telephone system. How well I remember that -- in the dead of winter, snow blowing around me as I climbed up those poles, screwing in the stand-off insulators.

I was totally hooked on communications, and one day a kindly old TV repairman named Fred Freeman gave me a military surplus BC-342-M shortwave receiver. A dream come true! I set it up in my basement workshop. I was listening to stations in Bulgaria and Ecuador and of course Radio Moscow. You couldn't tear me away from it. Until the Dreaded Truant Officer came to visit my parents…

Then we decided to make two-way radios. But we needed transistors, the kind that oscillated on VHF frequencies, and they cost a lot of money -- more than we kids had. Well, we learned that the phone company was junking all sorts of stuff that contained the solid-state goodies we wanted, but the people at Superior Scrap Metals refused to let us have any of it. So we used to sneak into the yard at at night and leave with boxes of fascinating things. With the transistors, we were able to build small two-way radios -- this was before the cops even had them -- and word got around. Soon we were contacted by people who wanted to buy them "for their kids who had a ham radio license." We weren't so stupid that we didn't know better, but we took their money. Little doubt that these people were using them for surveillance.

While Lysias is alive and well in spirit, I am no longer self-publishing. I learned, over several years, that it is a lot of work dealing with printers and binderies, the cost of paper that keeps going up, marketing, advertising, shipping and invoicing, and keeping records. And sometimes working with resellers can be a real pain in the ass. This is why I sold the rights to Paladin. Now, all I do is collect the royalty checks twice a year, and I have more time to write.

Steve Uhrig has written some of the best articles -- surveillance stuff, tech stuff -- published in various trade magazines and law enforcement pubs.