Otis is gone. K5SWK

[WA3VJB]

Hearing from the Southeastern Amateur Radio Club about the passing of Otis, K5SWK.


http://amwindow.org/audio/htm/k5swk.htm


Died last night, says Geoff, W5OMR in an email relayed to the group.

[W4EWH]

Hearing from the Southeastern Amateur Radio Club about the passing of Otis, K5SWK.
http://amwindow.org/audio/htm/k5swk.htm

Sad to hear it. It seems like a lot of the pioneers of radio are being gathered up lately.

Bill, W1AC
P.S. If you have a copy of the quicktime file, please post it here: I get an error when I try to play it. TIA.

[Steve - K4HX]

Sorry to hear this. He was a fixture on 75 meters in the past. Condolences to his family and friends.

[AF5J]

I was fortunate enough to be on with Otis in the mornings a few years back. Most times after about 9:00am when everybody went about their daily task. I will miss his personality greatly.

[W2VW]

R.I.P. Sito.

I hope they have a coffee pot up there.

[k7yoo]

W6PSS and I were just talking about Otis (Sito) the other day. I always enjoyed the Kobe & Otis radio program.
I would break in to let them know they were being heard on the left coast and was always welcomed to join the QSO, but listening was more fun. They had waaaay better stories than me!!
Skip
K7YOO

[w5omr]

Hey, Skip, Dave, Paul and others...
yeah.. I had the sad duty, John/WA5BXO and I have, actually, of reporting that our ol' buddy Otis Nonken/K5SWK had SK'ed on us.  :-(

I was informed about a thread that was started on AM Forever, and I had to clear up some 'mis-quotes'... it tuned into a journey down memory lane, for me...

Here it is:

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Well, first off, hello everyone.

Let me set some things straight here...

Otis' rig had a single 833, modulated by a pair.  His antenna was a full size dipole, stretched high and tight at ~90'.

Otis got off the air at night, because he was tired of the bickering from the 3.878 crowd.  Band conditions were noisy at night and frankly, his hearing has been declining for decades.  Less noise was better.   Otis probably did quit operating at night after K5MHZ/Koby went SK partly, but mostly it was because of the night time noise on 75m, that and the kibbitzing from 3.878.

Otis was on in the morning hours -and- evening hours, and 2 decades or so ago, there was a morning group that consisted of the 'old gang', inclusive of W5FAO/Noel in Waco, Ken Smith/W5FLV in Bellaire, TX, Paul/K5DKM in San Antonio, Mil/K5LKM in Columbus, Alton/W5FAP in San Antonio and a few others that would drift in/out, including KA5THB (my old call), K5WLT and some others.  All of those other guys now are SK'ed.  Ronnie/WLT is still around.

The night-time crew was a lot larger with K5FZ, WA5VGO, K5KZQ, WA5BXO, K5LLK, WD5JKO, Sulphur John/WD5EHS, WD5CFJ, W5MEU, N5SJL (now K5SPE), K4KYV, WA1HLR, W4CJL, WE5L, and just about any AM'er at the time that was able to generate a few watts of modulated RF would get in there.  If Bob/PYT was on, Otis would do his best to be there with him, but there was lots and lots of work to be done.  Otis and his family were busy working on the house they were living in.  It's 90% complete, but the family seemed to 'stop' in the late 90's when his daughter, Lorrie, was killed in a senseless automobile accident.

In later years, the morning crew evolved to K5LTK/Steve, K5WLT/Ronnie, N5ECP/Jeff, WA5YBQC/Elray, KC5MIP/Yogie, W5OMR/Me, KA5RHK/Ken, K5SPE/Scotty, W5KGZ/Perry, W5DWP/Wayne, AD5HR/Jon, K5SEE/John and WA5RNL/Roger.  I'm sure there were more that drifted in/out, but Otis was the main-stay.

John/WA5BXO's rig ran a pair of 250TH's modulated by (4) 813's in push-pull parallel.  Currently, it's at Perry/W5KGZ's place.  Typically, in the half-dozen or so times that Otis would get on the air from John's operating position, it was me that went from San Antonio to Grangerland to pick him up and go get on the air.

For about 5 or 6 years in a row, on the Saturday closest to 7 Feb, we'd get about a dozen or so guys together to go celebrate Otis' b'day at the Golden Corral in Humble, Tx.  The last time we did that was 2 years go, come Feb.

Otis didn't want to get on the air from his shack, because he was afraid of the floor caving in.  It hasn't, yet...    Otis' shack was a home-brewed building built on a skid, so it could be considered portable and therefore not a property 'improvement'', to avoid additional property taxes.  Otis' son, Joe, has requested that John and I go out there and put that rig on the air.  We want to do that, but would like to announce a time/date when it'll be on and of course, the frequency will be 3.880Mc.  Otis' rig never crapped out, totally.. I did haul the final to John's place, and he put the low voltage to it and found a bad bias regulator (OD3 that had probably been in there 40+ years) and we took it back out there, fired it up and did some testing.  I told Otis 'put out a call'.  He said 'Why do that?  We might actually work someone!' 
:-)  Always the character.

You know, in that picture, the two pieces of rack stuff were (left to right) the modulator and power supply (note: one of the 833's had a loose filament connection - it was off in this picture, but you couldn't tell it on the air) and the Final, running a single 833. 

http://www.qsl.net/wa5bxo/otis.jpg

In front of Otis, below the microphone, was the speech-amp/mixer console.  Also included in the console are the transmitter switches for spotting, and keying the B+ and killing the RX.

To the right of the Console was the home-brewed exciter.  Originally, the exciter was to run a single 4-65, but when it came down to it, the 4-65 he had was bad, so he lashed up a socket that plugged in the 4-65 socket, and fed the 833 the RF from a pair of 6146's (since they were plentiful)

To the right of that, was the hearing aid.  Several different receivers have passed through there... an HQ-One-Forty-Five was the main receiver for the longest time, but later years, Otis had used an ol' HQ-129x.  And, of course, the cassette deck recorder/deceiver. ;-)  Many was the time that Otis would put a tape of something on, a story from Koby about his dog Duke and the 'Cuban Cigar' (dog poop, but to hear Koby tell it..hehehe..) or some other recording of maybe a Telephone where he'd say "hey, I've got to go... be right back" and use that excuse to go pee or get coffee or something...

What a guy.  What a talent.  What an entertainer in the Ham World.  What a loss for all of us.

73 ol' friend.
-Geoff/W5OMR

[w5omr]

The last time I saw Otis, I took him and his Son to a restaurant there in Conroe, TX.  That would be about 2 years ago, come February.  Otis had problems with hammer-toes on both feet.  He was barely able to shuffle along, but he was still walking.

[W3GMS]

Geoff,

Thanks for posting the wonderful story about Otis.  Unfortunately, I never had the pleasure of working him. 

It obvious that he will be missed big time. 

73,
Joe, W3GMS   

[W4AAB]

I am talking with some guys in Arkansas and Oklahoma and they are asking about the arrangements for Otis.
                                            Joe W4AAB

[W4AAB]

Otis was buried yesterday, according to an online site showing obits from the Houston, TX area. I worked him in the eighties and got a card from him. I hoe that Geoff and John get the old transmitter on again. I will await that like the W9BSP operation.
                                           Joe W4AAB

[W5COA]

Here are some of my thoughts and recollections that I sent to some of my ham friends:

Otis, K5SWK, passed away last week.
 
Otis had the "Big Signal" on 80 and 40 AM back in the 60's and later. He had a huge following both with amateurs and SWL's. When our roundtable frequency would get crowded by ssb'ers, we would just turn it back to Otis and he would clear a hole in the ether.
 
His transmitter was an 833 modulated by a pair, running a KW. It was definitely legal, as the FCC will attest. I visited at his home in Houston, and found that his antenna was stretched between two trees, one on either side of his house. I think that Gene, WA5ATH climbed the trees to put them up. Gene was an iron worker who helped build the Astrodome and was not afraid of heights.
 
Otis was always cooking up something to keep things interesting. The incident that I remember the most was when Otis received a package in the mail. It was wrapped in brown paper, no sender's name or address, and you could hear it tick-tock when he held it up to the microphone. He milked that for about a week, then announced that he would open the package the next Saturday night on the air.
 
Well, you can imagine that when he opened the package, there was an explosion, and his transmitter went off the air for the evening. Some hams in the roundtable announced that Otis' corpus delecti was spotted in orbit around the earth. Others reported that it had passed by their house on the way. We all mourned for his passing.
 
As I recall, this caused such a commotion, that the FCC requested that this kind of funning not be repeated. Apparently some SWL'ers got quite upset.
 
His standard dinner was hummingbird legs, and he would regularly pour an "807" on the air.
 
There will never be another Otis.
 
73,
 
Jim W5COA
 

[W4AAB]

That answers the question I had for a long time about "The Box". When the late Floyd Dunlap, WA5TWF was president of SPAM, before his death in 1987. He mentioned having some tapes of several of Otis' QSO's, including "The Box". I wonder if anyone has a copy of that.Like you said, there will never be another Otis, or Ozona Bob, or W8VYZ. Unique individuals all.

[w5omr]

John,, WA5BXO, says he's got a digital version of 'The Box' "somewhere".  When I get a copy of it, I'll let y'all know.

I posted this, earlier this evening on AM Forever...

Well, the funeral was attended this past Friday. Visitation was at Earthman Resthaven Cemetery in North Houston. The attendance was just a handful of us.

Personally, I don't 'do' funerals. Haven't since my Dad passed in '88. Exceptions have been rare.
Otis was a rare one.

The end of an era has passed.

-Geoff/W5OMR

[w5omr]

His standard dinner was hummingbird legs, and he would regularly pour an "807" on the air.

Ya gotta get it right, Jim...

Those humming bird wings were dipped in Heavy Batter.  ;-)

The 807... was a recording.  Otis had 'several' bits pre-recorded, including the perfect '3-microphone flush'.

Otis was a master of timing.  He sat on that 'flush' recording for months, until the perfect time... which was when Koby/K5MZH(sk) told a long, elaborate tale of something he had done of merit as a San Antonio Police Officer in the past, and Otis (in his comical way) said 'Here's what I think of THAT! (~insert the pre-recorded, aforementioned, 'perfect 3-microphone flush'~)

Ah, the memories! :-)

The only time I knew Otis was ever 'up-staged' was when Ed Bolton/WA3PUN came to visit Otis.