Reminiscing, the first indoor plumbing we ever had was after we were married and moved to Sapulpa.  The place we rented at Sapulpa had indoor plumbing of sorts.  I guess all of the fuel that we had after we moved to town was gas.  To continue about firsts, the first appliance we had was an electric iron and next was an electric washer.  We got those at Enid.  That was really something.  Somewhere we have the old contract on that so I could put a date on that but it was probably 1921.  This was a Maytag with ringer.  That was really something. 

 

Shortly after we were married, it could have been late in 1920, I built my first radio.  I had the first radio in the whole northeast quadrant of Enid except that there was a radio amateur who had an amateur radio about a mile east of us.  The first radio I built was on a" breadboard", just a piece of board and no panel.  It was just laid out on a board.  It used a UV200 tube that cost about $8.50 and a pair of Brandies 2000 ohm headphones that cost about $8.50 and a 5 cell section of the battery that came out of the old electric truck that I first drove for the OG&E.  Other components were a filament rheostat and tuning coils that I wound on different size sections of Quaker Oats boxes.  I strung an antenna about 100 Ft long over to a big cotton wood tree with a door spring on it to take up the slack when the wind worked the branches.

 

Later, I found out about regeneration from one of the radio amateurs in Enid and wound another coil and made a regenerative circuit out of it.  Then I mounted a red fiber panel on the board on which I mounted a rheostat.  The rheostat controlled volume and regeneration.  I later controlled regeneration with a tickler coil.  There were binding screws mounted on the panel for connections with the 22.5 volt B battery and the A battery which consisted of 5 cells out of the old electric truck, a nickel steel Edison battery.  Later, I added another stage of audio amplification with a UV201 tube.  What I remember most about this is the amazement in the eyes of the people who listened to that radio.  Many, many people came to see it and none of them had ever listened to a radio before.  Their eyes just shone as they sat with those earphones clamped on their head in amazed wonderment.  We would listen way on into the night and early morning.  In those days the air wasn't cluttered with many radio stations making tuning easy.  I could get such places as WGY, Schenectady, KDKA, Pittsburg and KHJ, Los Angeles, PWX, Havana Cuba on the radio quite well.