William (“Bill”) Call (all right, I was known as “Billie”
while a kid) was born east of Hickman,
Kentucky, near Cayce, in the same
house in which his mother was born, in 1947.
Our family moved off the farm and into the eastern suburbs of Hickman
when I was six. My dad operated the
Western Auto Store in Hickman for many years, and as a youngster I spent many
hours doing various jobs in that business—clerk, delivery boy, janitor, bicycle
assembler, and appliance repairman. I
didn’t find the retail sales life to my liking, though. To his great credit, Dad encouraged me (and
my brothers) to follow our own interests.
From an early age, fascination with electronics provided my direction in
professional life. That began with the
discovery of a pile of old radios in Dad’s store, and was later nurtured by a
local ham radio operator, Hickman Mayor (at the time) Charles King Davis, W4GZ.
After graduating from Fulton County H.S., I enrolled at
nearby Murray State College (now University), finishing with a B.A. in Physics
in 1969. I also found a wife while at
MSU! Brenda was a year younger, and we
didn't want to split up for me to go to graduate school, so MSU offered me a
job in the Physics & Chemistry Departments as an electronics technician for
a year while she finished (she was also a Physics major, headed for a high
school teaching career). After that year
they offered me a raise to stay on and take on more, and as they say, the rest
is history. I took graduate work
part-time and finished a M.S. in Physics at MSU in 1977. My title was promoted to Electronics
Engineer, and I did electronics maintenance, design and fabrication in MSU's College of Science until 1984, when I was offered a
faculty position. I taught electronics
in the Engineering Technology program until retiring in 2002. Yes, I'm one of that increasingly rare breed,
a guy who spent his primary working life for one employer, 33 years at
MSU. The last three years I also served
as President of the Faculty Senate, a somewhat difficult honor. My web page at MSU is still up, giving more
details of academic life, if anyone is interested.
After enjoying the retired life for 5 years, I accepted a
“part-time” job in September 2007: Director of the Office of Emergency
Management for Calloway
County. That somewhat surprising change in employment
direction came about through my involvement in ham radio, which had included
emergency communications activities and severe storms weather-spotting for many
years. This has been very interesting,
significant work. I’ll write more about
it when I know better what I’m doing, and get caught up!
Brenda taught Physics and Math at Calloway County
High School, until
retiring. She’s had several part-time
academic or teaching positions since, and is presently fully retired again. She is a native of Hayti, Missouri.
In addition to the MSU work and EM job, for many years I've
worked in my own part-time business of electronics repair, which still includes
some radio antenna tower climbing, an activity I enjoy (except in cold
weather). We have a large vegetable
garden in the summertime. There's time
for quite a bit of community volunteer work, too. We are active in church, Kiwanis Club, and
ham radio club. We helped start the
Murray Christian Fellowship campus ministry while we were college students, and
continue to support it in several ways. We
have an old speedboat and I learned to water-ski at age 40, and we have enjoyed
that aspect of living not far from Kentucky
Lake. More truthfully, the kids and I enjoy it, and
Brenda tolerates it. But we don’t get on
the Lake much since the kids have grown, and
debate each spring whether it’s time to sell the boat.
Brenda and I have two children--Jeff is an electrical
designer in St. Louis,
and Beth works for MSU where she writes an internal web site and trains faculty
on Internet use in education. Jeff is
single but has a serious girlfriend; Beth married in June ’06, and is expecting
our first grandchild this coming November.
My brother Larry lives in Brookport IL, and my brother Jim lives in Dickson, TN.
May God bless you today,
Bill Call
Murray, KY
May 7, 2008
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