Hank Kress, K8KBW
BY JOEL THURTELL
One of the last articles I wrote before I retired November 30, 2007 from the Detroit Free Press featured my ham radio operator friend Hank Kress, whose FCC-issued callsign is K8KBW. We were neighbors — he lived in Canton Township, and I live in next door Plymouth Township. We also shared an interest in antique radios, though I don’t think either of us thought of radios from the 1940s through 1960s as antiques. If they’re antiques, what does that make us?
Well, in Hank’s case, it will make him 97 years old on May 11. I will have turned 75 a few days earlier on the Cinco de Maio.
I used to visit Hank and his ham radio station and workshop in the basement of his house. He was a meticulous builder of radio transmitters. When the Free Press assigned me to write features about people from the western suburbs of Detroit, I thought of Hank. It would be a different kind of feature. I’m one of the few newspaper reporters who has a ham radio license. I’ve been licensed since June 29, 1959, which means I’ve been doing this hobby for more than 60 years.
I lost track of Hank. I wondered whether he was still hamming in the basement of his Canton house. I got the answer yesterday when I read an email from a ham radio friend in northwest Arkansas. Ron Evans, K5XK, wrote that Hank has moved to Arkansas and is a member of the Bella Vista Area Radio Club. Hank is the oldest member of the club, which plans a special birthday salute to him.
With permission of the Detroit Free Press, here is my October 14, 2007 article about Hank Kress.
WHAT’S CANTON HAM BREWING?
By Joel Thurtell, Free Press Staff Writer
They don’t make them like my friend Hank makes them.
Hank Kress of Canton Township is an old-time ham radio operator who’s never been pleased with factory-made transmitters. He’s a practitioner of the slowly disappearing art of creating his own radios. There was a time, back in the early to mid-20th Century, when this would not have been unusual, when most hams built their own radios.
Now, however, state-of-the-art circuits call for manufacturing skills, techniques and parts that few amateurs have. But in the basement “factory” at his Canton house, Hank has designed and is now building his latest creation. It’s a linear amplifier – a kind of transmitter that boosts a low-level radio signal into one that can be measured in hundreds of watts of electromagnetic energy that may travel literally around the world.
Hank called me a few weeks ago urging that I write about a friend of his who’s an artist. The last time I visited Hank’s basement workshop, he was building a compact linear amplifier, and I was amazed at how thoroughly he’d planned this thing.
Hank and I are both hams. Hank was licensed by the Federal Communications Commission as a radio amateur in 1959. Me too. His call sign is K8KBW. Mine is K8PSV. Phonetically, he’s “Kilowatt Eight Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey.” I’m “Kilowatt Eight Pure Smirnoff Vodka.”
We both admire old radio technology. Furthermore, like Hank, I learned as a kid the basics of how to home-brew radios. I have just enough experience to know when I’m in the company of somebody with real talent.
“Yes, Hank,” I said, “I’ll do a story about an artist: You.”
“Don’t put my age in there,” Hank told me. “A lot of people around here don’t know how old I am.” Then he said with a laugh, “They can figure it out anyway; they can do the arithmetic.”
The way he bounds up and down his basement staircase you’d think he was a 30-year-old.
“I built my first one-tube radio when I was 12,” he told me. “A friend of my mom was a ham and he helped me. That was in 1935. When I was 18 years old, I was doing radio service work for Universal Radio in Detroit. That was in 1941. I was going to high school and after school I was doing radio work, fixing household radios.”
Hank graduated from Hamtramck High School that year. He was turned down for military service in World War II because he’s color-blind. Instead of the Army, he joined a band.
“I started taking piano lessons when I was 10, then I took organ. My teacher took advantage of me.” His instructor was the organist at St. Florian Catholic church in Hamtramck. “He taught me organ, then he said, ëWhy don’t you play for the service at 7 in the morning?’ So I played and he slept. I loved it.”
The phone rings in his basement workshop. It’s from St. Hyacinth in Detroit. They’ve got him booked to play the organ for two weddings on the weekend and may need him to play for a funeral.
They like to use him, he said, because: “I’m always available.” He was at one time the organist at St. Francis Cabrini church in Allen Park.
In the 1940s, Hank traveled weekends with a band, fixing radios during the week. In 1948, he opened a radio repair shop in Detroit at Michigan Ave. and Springwells. “TV came in and Motorola allocated me one TV with a 7-inch screen and rabbit ears. I would take that set home and we would sit on a sofa and watch a test pattern – that’s all that was on.”
By the 1950s, he was competing against a shop that advertised $5 fixes for bum TVs. “I couldn’t compete with that.”
He closed Kress Radio and opened a store at Michigan Ave. and Junction selling surplus clothing. He carried fishing gear. “They said, ëHow come you don’t have outboard motors?’ I got outboard motors. Then they said, ëHow come you don’t have boats?’ I got boats.”
When he started fixing motors, city inspectors said he was too close to homes.
So he moved to Allen Park and ran Kress Marine on Southfield at Allen Road in the ’50s and ’60s. He lived in Allen Park from 1955 until 1980. He closed the boat shop in the 1960s, about the time he got a private pilot’s license. He still collects rent from Boston Market, which built a restaurant on the old Kress Marine lot in Allen Park.
From 1980 until 1990, he managed the avionics repair shop for Chrysler Pentastar, Chrysler’s corporate airline then based at Willow Run Airport. He moved to Canton in 1980 to be closer to Willow Run.
He had to retire from Chrysler in 1990 when he turned 65. He sold his airplane that year, too.
He kept his radios, and now, more than ever, he’s busy with them. “This is a great hobby for a retiree,” he said. “You talk to people all over instead of sitting upstairs watching TV.”
He builds, exclusively, devices called linear amplifiers – a fancy way of saying that the equipment translates low-power signals from a transmitter to high-wattage signals he broadcasts through his antenna.
Hank builds his amplifiers from combinations of plans he finds in manuals and magazines. He uses parts he gleans from other radios, including military radios from World War II. They are as good as and probably better than anything he could buy ready-made.
On his desk, fully operational, is the compact amplifier I saw in the building stages several years ago. Not far away is an amplifier so big it’s housed in a tall cabinet that reaches nearly to waist level.
His current project is a compressed version of that big amp. He’s building it in modules, assembling it a piece at a time. It’s a work of art, from a craftsman whose first work was that one-tube receiver he built 72 years ago.
“After that, I added a tube to it and made it a two-tube set,” Hanks says. “Little by little, you learn by building. In the early days, building was almost a necessity. Now they buy it in a box, take it out and put it on the air.
“You tell them you built it and they get interested. Why don’t people home-brew? Parts are difficult to get. And when I get done with that thing, it will cost me more than I could buy it on eBay.”
If it’s not a money-saver, why do it?
“When I work contacts, I can say the amplifier is home brew, and that makes me feel good.”
