As part of my most recent round of donations to Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications (see Another Box for DLARC) I found my collection of newsletters from the North Coast Amateur Radio Club (NCARC) of Cleveland, Ohio.
Three of those newsletters were special - it was my first time as Editor of a newsletter - The North Coast Communicator.
My Editorship of the North Coast Communicator was short lived - just the three issues. As I wrote in my oh-so-cleverly-named Editorial "Dropped Bits" (ah... the wonder of Optical Character Recognition scanning):
DROPPED BITS
Editorial by Steve Stroh N8GNJ
Well, it was short, but very sweet. As many of you already know, this will be the last issue of the Communicator that I will be editing. My wife Tina and I will be relocating to the Seattle Washington area, most likely in mid November. Quite simply, we were made an offer we couldn’t refuse. When we investigated whether we could live and work in the area when we vacationed there in mid September, we absolutely fell head over heels in love with the area. A comment made recently by another newsletter editor who I admire has come to mind recently - Do what you have to do. Giving up the Communicator and North Coast is what I have to do, not what I want to do. I've greatly enjoyed my brief stint as Editor, and will miss the chance to try out some of the things I had planned for it.
I certainly hope someone is willing to pick up the Editorship of the Communicator other than Rick. Rick has too many responsibilities as of late, and his offer of handling the actual publishing chores is a very generous one, requiring the editor only to assemble the Communicator. I would hate to see the Communicator go the way of some other amateur club newsletters - one pagers, or newsletters put together by an editor that is obviously under duress.
The process of putting the Conmunicator together is a rather simple one (in my opinion) if you have access to an IBM PC type computer - the PC's large memory and reasonable amount of disk space make it relatively easy to assemble each issue with almost any PC word processing program. Although the three issues I have edited are on the large side because there was a lot of catching up to do from the summer, future issues shouldn't be all that large - 10 to 20 sides per issue. Most of each issue is submitted material - minutes, member articles, reprints, news of club activities, etc. So please, if you have the time, and the tools, and a desire to help the club continue to grow and prosper, please volunteer to edit the Communicator. It really isn't a bad Job!
Since I am no longer Editor of the Communicator as of the completion of this issue, please send all submissions for future issues of the Communicator to the club's P.O. box - P.O. Box 30529, Cleveland, Ohio 44130.
(The OCR of my consumer grade scanner and software isn't perfect - had to make a dozen or so corrections.)
I can see some continuity from my brief experience with the North Coast Communicator to Zero Retries :-)
As I said in the linked article, I trust Internet Archive to do a great job of digitizing and making available online these newsletters than I can do. My time is better spent getting my material out of N8GNJ Labs and to DLARC for archiving.
But those three issues that I edited were just too precious not to scan and make available myself. So here they are:
North Coast Communicator - September 1987, Volume 4, Number 5
North Coast Communicator - October 1987, Volume 4, Number 6
North Coast Communicator - November 1987, Volume 4, Number 7
Unfortunately, I quickly fell out of touch with the good folks at NCARC after our move. That was my fault in the tumult of getting established in a new city, new house, finding a new job. And, that was in the pre-Internet era, so it wasn't nearly as easy to stay in casual touch as it is now. Though I haven't had any contact with NCARC since my departure for the Seattle area in November 1987, I'm delighted to report that NCARC is still going strong per their website https://www.n8nc.org/.
Steve Stroh N8GNJ
2023-08-01