3 of Us Get Our Cables Cut

The timeframe was during the summer of 1982, and the Channel 30 CB group was running hot and heavy. Most of us would do our radio thing in the later evenings which then would normally last well into the wee hours of the morning. I had been recently laid-off from my job, so I was around quite a bit, both during the day and at night. Many nights were spent at "Uncle" Chuckie's or hanging out at the Park Ridge shopping center parking lot with some of the other locals. There were also occasional impromptu road trips, as well as some cool parties.  Most of us had a blast that summer.  But beneath that air of joviality, and free flowing fun, there was a sinister element of two-faced backstabbing festering in the background.

Sometime between the demise of Channel 13, and the formation of Channel 30, I had met up with three guys who were squatting on Channel 14; David, Frank and Mark. After an initial confrontation, we would eventually hit it off and spent the fall/winter of 1981-82 running the New Jersey nightclub circuit (The legal drinking age was 19 in Jersey and those guys were 20 at the time), as well as general goofing around on the radio. They were also friends with Ray who, like me, was another leftover from Channel 13 and who was probably the person who first introduced me to these guys. I should have been more suspicious of the tenuous "friendship" that existed then, but I was a lot more trusting back then.

When the Channel 30 group started growing as the year progressed, David, Frank, and Mark moved up there as well, but they kept somewhat aloof.  In retrospect, It seemed that these guys didn't trust too many people outside of themselves. David especially, looked at many activities with suspicion and paranoia. At some point, David began dating one of the Channel 30 regulars, a girl named Patti.  Patti was a bit wild and crazy, and enjoyed flirting, and playing around over the radio.  Naturally David (who Patti gave the not-so-flattering nickname of "Stubby"), was suspicious and jealous of Patti's interactions with other guys on the radio. David would have a problem with even the most innocent fun and truly believed that people were talking about him behind his back. I attempted to ease his suspicions, but he seemed to be getting fed contrary information from another source which helped to re-enforce his initial suspicions.

Eventually, he got the impression that I was one of those people who was plotting behind his back to undermine his "relationship" with Patti.  Some of this suspicion may have been perpetuated by Patti herself, as she may have gotten a bit of warped pleasure seeing David get all worked up and jealous.  In the very beginning, I was unaware of the suspicion which was being cast in my direction, as I was just doing my thing like normal, and didn't get involved in "soap-opera" like gossip. Things would take a turn for the worse though, when I helped Patti put up her base station antenna. I was around during the day, and enjoyed helping other people with their radio projects.  But David was convinced that there was more going on than just an antenna party. When he gave me the third degree later on, I denied that anything was going on.  But I could tell that he didn't quite believe me. Things were never quite the same between us after that. Maybe it was just that I finally got a glimpse of how he really felt.

Then there was Marybeth. She was a friend of Patti's, and was also not one to keep her feelings to herself, and over the course of time she had had a few "scuffles" with David and Co. Marybeth was a bit overweight, and David and Co. liked to bust her stones about it. She made it known that there was no love lost between herself and David.  It didn't take long then, for "Dr. Paranoia" (David) to align Marybeth in with the "conspiracy" to stab him in the back. Somehow, even "Uncle" Chuckie got caught up in the conspiracy, perhaps because most of us hung out at his place at various times and he knew almost everything that was going on.

Things started getting ugly when I went to a local carnival one night and returned to find a knife wound in one of the tires of my truck. Then one night shortly afterward, I returned home to find that one of the windows where I ran my coax cable into had been mysteriously broken. Further investigation revealed that someone had attempted to damage my coax cable by taping an M-80 to it. When it went off, it did nothing but scorch the cable.  But the force of the explosion broke the nearby window. Suspecting further incidents, I rigged a sort of "alarm" trip out of monofilament fishing line, which would sound a buzzer in my room, if anyone approached my antenna mast. Despite my precautions though, a few nights later, I came home to find that my receive was awfully dead. A quick SWR check showed an off the scale reading. A quick look outside confirmed the worst, my coax cable had become 2 pieces. Even in the total darkness, the vandals somehow saw the trip line,  managed to step over it, and performed their deed unhampered. Using a handheld radio, I contacted Art (Who lived up the street) and told him what had happened.  He relayed to me that he had heard activity outside of his house, and that whoever was out there had made hasty retreat when he went outside to check. Art then jumped into his mobile, came by to pick me up and we took a quick run around the neighborhood. After finding nothing, we then headed over to Uncle Chuckie's. When we entered Chuck's radio room, Chuck didn't say a word, but he reached over to his TRC-458 and cranked the volume full clockwise, in a gesture to demonstrate just how quiet his receive had suddenly gotten. With a quick look outside, we determined that his cable had also been cut.  But Chuck was lucky, he had 2 antennas, and the "cutters" had only hit the cable for one of them. It started to looked like a bunch of us had been targeted. So we took another drive to ascertain the extent of the damage to the locals. We eventually ended up at Marybeth's house, and found out that she too had been "hit". The final tally of people who had their cable's cut was 3; Chuck,  Marybeth, and myself. Art may or may not have been an intended target. But nothing further ever occurred, so we were never really sure.

The aftermath of this action was not all that great. Chuck simply switched to his other antenna, until splicing his cut cable. I had a spare run of RG-8/U, which I put up the next day. Marybeth did most of her talking from the mobile, so she wasn't affected all that much. But these nefarious activities started a whole bunch of finger pointing, and even more suspicious gossiping. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who the likely perpetrators were.  Past history had shown that David was brash enough to carry out this type of deed. Needless to say, he became an instant outcast, which probably suited him fine, since he no longer had to put on the pretense of amiable interaction with the people that he felt had "betrayed" him. Mark had started pulling away from David, and had hooked up with a girl who was friends with a few of the radio regulars. Ray came clean and admitted his part in the whole thing, which surprised even me, since even though Ray was somewhat sneaky, he was not known for damaging property. Ray even offered restitution to Chuck for the cost of new cable (Although none was offered to me or Marybeth). I was not so upset by that, but what did bug me was that a few years later, Chuck and I had a falling out over my unavailability to do "spot" radio repairs. I found it somewhat disheartening that Chuck forgave Ray for what he did to him (and in fact they remained friends for a while), yet even though I did nothing to him, I was suddenly "dirt", just because my life's priorities had changed somewhat. Well, I guess nobody's perfect.