Behind that door was a room no bigger than a closet. One small window, painted black. A wooden desk. And on the desk, covered in a bedsheet gone gray with dust, was an old ham radio set. Tubes and dials and a heavy black microphone on a stand.
On the wall above it, a hand painted sign. W8KJM.
The fella who hired me, a retired nurse named Paul, came in behind me and let out a long whistle.
On the shelf beside the radio were logbooks. Twenty of them. Spiral notebooks, every page filled with dates, times, call signs, and names. And notes. Lots of notes.
Called Mrs. Hardesty, told her Danny safe. Patched Sgt. Wilson through to his wife, 9 minutes. Baby born, 7 lbs, told him it was a boy. He cried.
The dates ran from 1966 to 1972.
I knew what it was. My uncle told me about it once. During Vietnam, ham radio operators in the States would connect soldiers overseas to their families back home. A soldier would get on a radio at a base, a ham operator here would pick up the signal, and then call the family on a regular phone and hold the receiver up to the speaker. They called them phone patches. It was the only way most of those boys ever heard the voices of their mothers for a whole year.
A man in a hidden room in Sistersville had spent six years connecting soldiers to home, one crackling call at a time, and nobody ever knew his name.
Paul looked up the call sign. It belonged to a man named Kenneth Morrow, who lived in that house from 1951 until he died in 1998. He worked at the glass plant. His neighbors knew him as the quiet man who stayed up late.
Paul called the local paper. They ran a story with a photo of the logbooks. They asked if anyone had ever gotten a call from W8KJM.
The phone at the paper did not stop ringing for a week.
A woman in Parkersburg said she heard the voice of her husband for the first time in eight months on Christmas Eve 1968, because of that call sign. A man in Ohio said his father was patched through the day he was born. A veteran in Kentucky said he was the one on the other end, and that man in Sistersville was the only reason he did not lose his mind that year.
Twenty three families reached out. The paper put all their stories together in one article.
Paul contacted a local amateur radio club. Some of the members came out and got the old set working again. It took them three weekends.
On Veterans Day, they set it up in the Sistersville library. The club made one call, on the same frequency Kenneth used. They reached a ham operator in Texas, who happened to be a Vietnam veteran himself.
He said he remembered that call sign.
I finished the wallpaper in the rest of the house. But I left that one door plain, so anybody could find it.
I have stripped a lot of wallpaper. That is the only wall I ever found a voice behind.