Steve (a.k.a. Rattlesnake,(1971-1976),Bolt of Lightning (1977-)) was a member of our local crowd, and someone who seemed to have always been there.  From as early as 1971 (possibly even sooner), up until the early 90's, Steve’s radio presence was pretty much a fixture in the greater Norristown area.  Steve was about 4 years older than me and, also like me, he had lost his father at a young age.  The death of her husband affected Steve's mother mentally and, as a result, she didn’t keep up after him (or herself either).  As a consequence of his mother's inattentiveness, Steve didn’t always have the best personal hygiene, or the best advice on how to cultivate and maintain lasting relationships with other people.  In fact, he had a hard time interacting with people in person.   His physical appearance didn't help him much either as he was short, a bit overweight, had wild bright red hair, and a bad case of acne.  When he would visit someone, he would often make inappropriate comments, purely from ignorance, as he truly didn't know better.  He also never knew when to leave.  He was oblivious to subtle hints, and many people, (Including my mother) after overcoming their initial politeness, had to literally push him out of the door.  These facts would lead many people to conclude that he was socially challenged.  This apparent shortcoming, combined with his not-so-flattering physical features, caused him to endure the lion's share of abuse at the hands of his peers.  This is probably why he felt more comfortable on the radio, a place where he could escape from the consequences of his appearance and some aspects of his personality.  On the plus side, Steve was fairly intelligent and had a strong aptitude for electronics, and would use his talents to repair and modify radios for the locals.  By leveraging his expertise at radio, he was able to worm his way into the radio "in crowd", many of whom were more than willing to put up with his personality quirks, as long as he would fix their stuff for free or very cheap.  But his ineptness at social interactions would usually show through at some point, and he would ultimately alienate many of those same people.  While most people tolerated Steve, largely due to the things which he could do for them, very few would use the term "friend", to describe him.  Steve also had a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde persona developed, no doubt, from his underlying bitterness in response to the abuse that he was forced to endure, which I'm sure he felt no personal responsibility for.  He would put on a smile and talk friendly to a group of people one day, and then the next day, he would ride around in his car and surreptitiously dump carriers, play sound effects, or disguise his voice in order to agitate and disrupt them.  Usually he did it just to liven things up, or to stir up the hornet’s nest on an otherwise orderly, but "boring" (to him) channel.  One of his regular partners in crime was Jimmy, who also enjoyed agitating people, usually those on the "adult" channels.  Outwardly, Steve would play the victim role, and complain about all the trouble that seemed to follow him.  Yet secretly, it seemed that he wasn't truly in his element unless there was some form of strife occurring on the channel, which he was never far away from.  During the numerous channel disputes, Steve also liked to publicly project an air of neutrality, while secretly playing both sides against each other.  But like burning a candle from both ends, sometimes Steve got burned in the middle.  Steve would often come to our aid during disputes with other channel groups, but then we'd come to find out later that he had "double crossed" us, by divulging information about us to the "enemy".   I guess Steve felt that he could buy friendship by being the hero.  I guess he never figured that either side would find out who told them what.  But the biggest point which he didn't seem to understand was that no one had any deep respect for someone who would sell out their friends at the drop of a hat for future considerations.  

Steve lived about a half mile away from me, at the upper end of my neighborhood.  When we first met, he didn’t care much for me as, I guess, he probably viewed me as an up and coming "threat" to his monopolistic stranglehold on radio knowledge within our group.  When our fledgling kids group started to obtain 5 watt CB's, he actually sabotaged one of them, by turning the power down to under 1 watt.  Some time later, he softened in his viewpoint and looked to me as a sort of "kindred spirit" (minus the acne).  He would often call me on the phone to complain about some injustice that he was forced to endure at the hands of a radio adversary, or to talk about some radio related project.  I can also remember visiting his house and marveling at the various haphazard piles of radio parts, and other electronic flotsam, that he had littered all over his bedroom.  It's anyone's guess where he got it all from.  Once in a while, he would give me some trinket of junk to play with.  He once gave me his 5/8th wave ground plane antenna right off of his roof, which he had just smoked after a long on-air battle with the big guns on Channel 4, with amplifiers blazing.  He even had piles of stuff, including his current station radio, spread out on his bed.  I don’t know how (or where) he slept at night.  Steve was always wheeling and dealing in radio gear.  Over the years, he had owned more different rigs, amplifiers, mikes, and antennas, than anyone could have imagined.  If it was a popular radio, Steve had probably owned one at some point.  Helping him feed this habit, was a job which he held for a time at a local radio swap store called "The Electronic Exchange", where people could buy, sell, or trade used electronic gear.  Many of Steve's project radios came from there.  Steve was also the original owner in our local group (I have no idea who owned it before), of what would eventually become my Midland 13-885.  Steve also ran a multitude of H.F. ham rigs on CB, including a Tempo One, a Yaesu FT-101B (and "E"), a Tempo 2020, a Drake TR-7, and an Icom IC-720. 

In the late 70’s, Steve passed the test and got his ham license.  He would then vacillate between CB and ham radio.  He’d buy up a whole bunch of stuff for one service, then sell it all off in a few months, and then buy a bunch of stuff for the other.  He was truly someone caught between the social politics of the two services.  He didn't quite fit in, or feel comfortable with the stiff lipped, serious decorum on ham radio, but felt he was a notch above the backbiting and chatter on CB.  Hence his continual vacillation.  At one time, he even had an operational 2 meter repeater (WA3RQO/R 145.210) nestled among the piles of stuff in his room.  Also around that time, Steve purchased a 70' tilt-over tower, and outfitted it with various ham antennas and topped it with a Avanti Sigma 5/8ths wave CB antenna.  This would give Steve the biggest signal in our general area for a long while to come, which had been a goal of his from the very beginning.  In 1981, after giving me a little prodding, Steve administered the Novice ham test to me (along with Cactus and Uncle Chuckie).  Shortly afterward would begin the slow decline of Steve's CB activity.  Steve got involved with another radio guy and they played around on GMRS and private business frequencies for a spell. I didn't see too much of Steve after the mid 80's, as he made the fatal mistake of insulting my wife (He didn't even realize what he had said) during an impromptu visit, and she threw him out of the house on his tail and told him to never come back.  But I used to bump into him on the air and at hamfests from time to time.  He got a job repairing and maintaining the radios for a local railroad, which was a bit of a commute for him.  While the job paid well, it severely bit into his radio time.  So it was understandable that Steve became pretty much a part timer on CB by the mid 90's.  He would soon suffer a decline in health which would finally end his radio career.

Always controversial, sometimes fun, and always striving for that perfection in signal, Steve was one of the more colorful locals in the area, back in the day.

Today:

Steve unfortunately passed away a few years back, due to complications from a stroke.  His house was sold and remodeled, the weeds and overgrowth cleared away.  You’d never know, except for that large concrete slab where his 70' tower base used to be, that this was the place where the "Bolt of Lightning" once lived.