How Orrin Winton got started on a lifelong fascination with Amateur Radio

From Facebook:

Orrin C. Winton WN1Z: Yay Randy! ... I started TV DXing (getting up at 5 or 6am to try to pick up distant TV stations) at about age 8. I would often get stations 120-175 miles away (on VHF!) and a couple times got one 300 miles away. Then about age 9 or 10 started SWLing. And yes i listened to Radio Moscow, that was so exotic. My dad thought that was merely amusing. ... Well it was. Didn't get my first amateur radio license till age 29 in 1981. That transceiver was a brand-new Yaesu FT-101ZD. In 1991/92 for a while i had a Hallicrafters SR-150 all-tube set. That was a cool radio. But i sold all my tube gear to get a used Kenwood TS-430S, all-solid-state, and now i have two of those plus a more modern Yaesu FT-817 that only puts out 5 watts. ... Tube gear would require the use of my generator, and the generator RF noise would be intolerable. Radio Habana played interminable discussions of Fidel's "History Will Absolve Me" address. And around 1982, with the civil wars in Central America going on, it was doing really well on its outreach. I'm sure you can imagine.

I never got into TV DXing, but I was very much into AM radio DXing in the mid-1970s. My grandfather was in and out of the hospital, and nursing homes, and my parents would go and visit him for one or two hours a night, and I would have to sit in the car and wait for my parents, since children weren't allowed in the Jewish hospital, or in most of the nursing homes. Even in winter. So I would sit in the car and listen to my 9-volt battery powered AM radio, and watch my breath condense on the car window into ice crystals.

I had a list of over 100 stations I had picked up from Cincinnati, including KLRA which was in Little Rock Arkansas. I think that was the farthest away.

I hated it when I was trying to find the call sign of a station playing a baseball game because it seemed like the usual ID every 15 minutes rule didn't apply to them. I could end up listening forever to something I didn't care about, just to hear it was a callsign for a station I had already heard. My AM radio had a rotary dial, so it was not possible to real accurately figure out just from the dial where you were on the band.

I also remember listening to Radio Moscow, it was around 610 on the AM dial. I remember one night two features that I heard:

• Some commentator was saying that other countries have the idea that Soviets could not criticize their government. He was going to tell us that was absolutely not true. He then launched into a big criticism of the weather bureau, that they had a lousy run recently of predicting the weather. He then told us that the weather bureau was a government agency, but he was not getting hauled away for his criticism of the government.
• The next interview was of an engineer who controlled the whole power grid. He told how he could just flip a switch, and a giant section of Siberia would suddenly be without power. He was obviously an important man, not someone to be criticized.