Hero's Reward

Beside the little Pawcatuck River, six miles back of where the Atlantic makes Watch Hill a swank summer resort, the lively 270-year-old town of Westerly, R. I. (pop.: 11,000) lies snug against most ordinary ocean blows. But the one that whistled in on the afternoon of last September 21 was no ordinary blow, it was the wildest in the memory of any New Englander. Having washed a good deal of Watch Hill away, it tossed garages and outbuildings into the air, snapped off church steeples, huffed houses down, crippled the power lines, blew in, among others, the windows at Montgomery Ward & Co.'s store on Canal Street.

The radio and icebox salesman at Montgomery Ward's was tall Wilson Everett Burgess, 29, an amateur radio operator in his spare time. At the first whiff of the big wind, Wilson Burgess, with a radio ham's foresight and resourcefulness, began gathering all the dry cells and radio "B" batteries he could find in stock. Battling his way home with the stuff, he found his wife and baby scared but safe. But the hurricane had blown his garage away, and with it the aerial for his 600-watt transmitter, WiBDC. In a mile-a-minute gale, he slung a new aerial, by 7 p. m. had his transmitter working on five watts of dry-cell power. He sat down by kerosene lamplight, began calling the amateur's land signal of distress, QRR. Soon W2CQD at Roselle, N. J., 165 miles away, picked him up, turned him over to nearer WiSZ at West Hartford, Conn.

Forty-six hours later Wilson Burgess signed off. In that time he had sent more than 900 messages, calls for rescue boats, Red Cross communications for medicine, food, doctors and nurses; orders from local undertakers for coffins; advice to boil water; warnings to looters; instructions to rescue pilots; news details of the hurricane that killed 136 people in the Westerly and nearby beach areas before it swept on up through New England.

Last week Hero Wilson Burgess had the most satisfying reward any radio ham hopes for: selection by his fellows of The American Radio Relay League as tops for the year and the annual William S. Paley Amateur Radio Award for contributing most usefully to the American people in 1938 through amateur radio. When photographers went around to take his picture, Ham Burgess squirmed diffidently, said: "Golly, I feel like Clark Gable."

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