My years of 1961 and 1962
John Sutherland, HPHS, Class of 1961

Today I do a fair amount of family research and documentation which probably helps qualify me as some kind of researcher. And, fortunately, I have the time available today to invest in writing about things and events from the past, and so I do just that. Of course, one of the challenges of doing historical research and writing about things past, is the problem of thinking something is simple and easy to document, and learning once you have gotten into it that you have just opened Pandora’s box. This happens to me all the time, and such is the case of this one segment of my past – a short period of time that helped give my life some focus and what started out as a few pages is now much larger. This is a brief intro to that whole story.

In this story, I’m referring to my personal introduction, while still in high school, to a bunch of bright guys who helped me learn about, and focus on, the scientific and technical aspects of life, ham radio communications, Civil Defense, and volunteer satellite tracking. Like all adventures that we humans get into, we often don’t even know we are involved in a life adventure – we get immersed in the activities and just do it. No inhibitions. No problems. It’s just a young person’s magnificent obsession with some project that helps us grow up and become adults who are then trained in and able to focus on, some particular aspect of life.

For me, satellite tracking at Phototrack 5007 was one of those projects. I had kind of bumbled my way into ham radio (aka amateur radio) while in high school, courtesy of my neighbor across the street Earl F. Sunderland, Jr. (N1AXG). I went from novice class (KN1OSJ) into technician class (K1OSJ) in about six months. Once I connected with Warren Davis and the rest of a small group of guys via ham radio, I was hooked on interesting stuff – not like the boring stuff in high school. This was a great learning period for me. Phototrack 5007, Walpole Civil Defense, ham radio work – it all gelled for me over about a two year period. I sometimes wish I had taken better notes during that time in life. But I was young then…

A few words about ham radio. Radio communications in the U.S. is mothered by (I use the phrase affectionately) the Federal Communications Commission (aka FCC). Amateur radio is a voluntary system of personal training, qualifications testing, and licensing individuals and groups to operate stand-alone non-commercial and non-governmental radio transmitting stations within a set of frequency ranges in the RF spectrum. Depending on the individual’s level of qualified training and experience, he can operate different types of wireless RF communications (e.g. Morse code, AM, FM, TV, etc.) in different RF bands, usually referred to by the wave length grouping (e.g. 10 meters, 2 meters, etc.).

Back to Phototrack. Operation Phototrack was among the volunteer programs quickly organized in the United States, after the Soviet earth satellite Sputnik 1 was launched on 4 October 1957, to fill the temporary tracking gap until the Baker-Nunn cameras specially designed to optically track U.S. satellites became operational. Phototrack was also referred to as the "Independent IGY (International Geophysical Year) Tracking Coordination Program."

The application for the Phototrack 5007 satellite tracking operation had been applied for by Warren Davis during International Geophysical Year (circa 1957), and when I joined the group in 1961, the physical operation had been moved from its brief location in Stoughton, MA to Walpole, MA, where our group built the tower and the supporting cabin. I am fortunate to still have contact with Warren, who has retained an amazing amount of information from those early days a half century ago when we were all young bucks growing up in eastern Massachusetts.

This photo shows four of us standing outside the cabin and tower that we built, in the middle of a cattle farm in Walpole, to house our equipment and the camera we used to photograph the satellites. And yes, we used a gasoline generator for power, and yes, almost all of the materials we used were donated by local businesses.

By the way, let’s not forget that all of this ‘space tracking’ activity happened in the slide rule era – there were no personal computers to help with the calculations, in fact, there were not even any hand calculators. Everything was done manually and by knowing how to create and use formulas – this was more Warren’s strong suit than mine.

This story about Phototrack 5007 is, perhaps, our version of Homer Hickam’s “October Sky.” Everything happened during that exciting time in life after the Russians had woken up a sleepy America with their launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, and told us that we needed to do some serious work if we were going to catch up with the rest of the world. Thank you Russia – ‘ya done good.’

There is a lot more to this story, but this is probably not the right forum in which to tell it. Suffice it to say that maybe all of that good stuff I learned in high school helped prepare me for later life, but it was the actual life experiences that made me the man I am today. I do have to admit, however, that it takes a long time to mature a human, and I think I finally made the transition to mature adulthood by the age of 45. Why does it take so long? Can I go back and kick the restart button for a redo?

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