FROM PROMISE TO FULFILLMENT, Part 1.

“God causes all things to work together for good”

The story of how International Short Wave Radio Station KNLS came to be constructed on a 71 acre plot of undeveloped land near the village of Anchor Point on the Kenai Peninsula of the State of Alaska.

As compiled and told by F. M. Perry, Engineer, who had the privilege to serve as the field construction manager.

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INTRODUCTION

The years 1980 through 1988 when Charlotte and I assisted in the start-up of shortwave radio station KNLS are remembered as the most happy and productive years of our lives. All correspondence and notes of every action taken at Anchor Point during those years were preserved to serve as archives of what I considered to be the most important work of my life. At the time of my departure from Anchor Point in 1988 there were some 14 file boxes of such archives. What will become of these, I wondered? The new management was faced with new challenges and needed space. So I suggested they be filed out of the way beneath the floor in the make-shift cellar of the KNLS transmitter/operations building at Anchor Point. Somebody might want to consult these documents again some day to remember the daily excitement, the joys of successes, and sometimes the pains of failures as we tried to complete the myriad tasks to bring KNLS on the air. Why, somebody might someday want to write a book!

I have thought about writing that book myself as the years since 1988 have advanced. I might start on it anytime, I kept thinking. Then the phone rang the other day (March 2006) and Kathy Caudill asked me right out if I might like to write something about the start up of KNLS. Maybe I would remember things that no one else knew, or would remember, she said, and our history should be recorded. (Kathy didn’t say so but realistically I must admit I am 85 years old and my memory may not hold out much longer.) Kathy suggested I might highlight the story by labeling the events by the year in which they occurred, you know, in 1981 we applied for a license, in 1982 we started construction, in 1983 we went on the air, etc. Now, I don’t know if Kathy really had a book in mind. I suspect she had in mind more of an article that would not be so daunting to the average person as a real book. But I know that I can’t stop once I start writing, and brevity is not my style. So I suspect this story, which I am only just now starting, will turn into many pages if I am going to get it right.

I told Kathy I would be happy to write the story of the start up of shortwave radio station KNLS. It will have to be my unique experience that I write about. I started thinking back about how I ever got mixed up with World Christian Broadcasting Corporation in the first place, and before that how I got started in the profession of radio system engineering, and more basic than that, how I became a Christian and how Christian principles and the nearness of the Spirit of my Lord became dominant in my life decisions. I began to realize that if my life had not been just as God’s providence has made it, I would not have been in Anchor Point in 1982 managing the construction of a facility that would soon be broadcasting the gospel of God’s love over the iron and bamboo curtains to millions of God’s creation who had never heard it in its purity.

Old age gives one the sort of incentive to rethink old experiences and wonder how life just happened to turn out as it did. Looking back I am beginning to be amazed at the growing number things which I now realize that the Lord must have “providentially arranged” in my life. Growing up I wanted to be an Aeronautical Engineer. The war (1941) beckoned me to join up and learn to fly. But Christian principles prompted me not to volunteer for the Air Corps but to accept other service. By chance a job for me materialized to go with an expedition to Alaska to construct a defense base on a wilderness site (good experience for the KNLS project 40 years later). When I was finally drafted into the military in 1944 it was by chance into the U. S. Navy where I was chosen to go to school for a year of radio technician training. This changed my professional preference to the field of Electrical (including Radio) Engineering. My training was in the city of Chicago where by chance I met Charlotte, my wife to be. (She was a wife who looked forward to experiences like living at a wilderness site in Alaska.) I spent 13 months at sea operating and maintaining radio sending and receiving equipment. (Good experience for operating and maintaining a radio station.) After the war and our marriage ceremony, the G.I. Bill sent Charlotte and me to the University of Colorado where I received my BS degree in Electrical Engineering. I was somehow moved to write my senior term paper on the subject, “Propagation of Short Radio Waves Via the Ionosphere.” (I never dreamed that I ever would be actually tasked with shortwave radio propagation problems as the manager of a shortwave radio station.)

After graduation from the University, I had many offers of employment the best of which was with the General Electric Company in upstate New York. (In addition to a career in engineering, an opportunity opened there for me to work in developing a Christian children’s camp in an area in which the Church of Christ was virtually unknown. During my life in New York State I came to know Bob Scott who later hired me to manage the construction of KNLS. Had this association with Mr. Scott not occurred, I probably would never have had opportunity to work at KNLS.)

One of my tasks while with the GE Company was to manage the construction of a shortwave radio communication installation at Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. It was to be used for coordinating ships and aircraft in the recovery of earth satellites upon reentry from space. I managed the designing of the system, the procurement of equipment for shipment, and then installing and testing of the system at Johnston Island. (This was good experience for later work managing the installation and introduction of KNLS into the international broadcast spectrum .)

After 15 ½ years with the GE Company, I found myself without a definite assignment but given freedom to canvas the vast GE company for another assignment. Offers I received, one to work in Florida under a GE contract with the Space Agency NASA and another to work at Los Alamos Laboratory, did not appeal to me. An offer outside of GE, to go into Federal Government service as a Telecommunications Advisor with the Agency for International Development, a Foreign Service position, did appeal to me. I accepted assignments abroad (to be accompanied by my family) assisting police departments in underdeveloped countries of the world to improve public safety services by development of radio communication systems. My work included collaboration in teams with other kinds of professional police advisors. We went into those third world client countries of United States AID programs who requested our services. (Police work as a public safety service was a new concept in some countries!)

Practicing this type of consulting for 2 years in the country of Pakistan and 3 years in the country of Thailand I tried to improve skills by teaching, by laboratory work, and by going into the field police stations to assist by inspections and in the actual doing of installation work. Calling on my previous on-the-job experience at GE as a team leader and manager, I wrote a book on management as applied to design and installation of police communication systems. It was translated into the Thai language for Thai Police use. (Later the classic management fundamentals of Planning, Organizing, Integrating, and Measuring were a conscious part of my work in managing the KNLS project enabling us to meet the original schedule at lowest cost.)

Life for me and my family in the Islamic country of Pakistan and the Buddhist country of Thailand was both a challenge and a blessing for us. We were able to live and offer influence as Christians in both countries, but far more openly and easily in Thailand than in Pakistan. We found that there are many people professing Christianity in Pakistan (perhaps two million of the more than 100 million total population) whom the Muslim majority does not acknowledge. The Christians live in separate small villages from the rest of the population. We were welcomed to teach and preach in the Christian villages but were never allowed to preach in Muslim villages. Christian churches meet in the large cities of Pakistan but many do not advertize their meeting places, trying not to attract the attention of belligerent Muslims.

In my professional work in Pakistan I had the respect and friendship of my Muslim counterparts. Some Muslims came to me offering their commendation that I did not drink or smoke. One of my major counterparts, a Pakistani Superintendent of Police, came to the U. S. for a special U. S. Government training session some years after I had left Pakistan. He and his wife stayed with us in our home near Washington during his U. S. training session. He attended Sunday worship and entered discussions in Bible study classes with us. We exchanged personal correspondence after he returned home to Pakistan and he gave “between the lines” signs in correspondence that he wanted to become a Christian. Still later, when country of Pakistan became somewhat estranged politically from the U. S., he failed to answer one of my letters and our correspondence ceased. (It has been my burning desire for many years to try to get the gospel into Pakistan via the medium of shortwave radio. How to implement shortwave broadcasts into Pakistan have been a subject of studies in my work with WCBC. They will come to fruition with the installation of the “Voice of Madagascar” project now underway.)

My work as a Foreign Service Telecommunications Advisor also included about 10 years of work with the Washington, DC office as base, making trips abroad from time to time. My family and I lived and thrived during that time in the new city of Reston, Virginia. I served the police departments of many countries around the world by correspondence and made extended trips to Jamaica, Guyana, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico. During our life in the DC area we helped start a new Church of Christ congregation in the public library building of Herndon, Virginia. This congregation later built a meeting house in Great Falls, Virginia and became known as the Great Falls Church of Christ. Mr. Don Morgan and I were chosen as the first elders of the congregation and we served as such for about two years.

After a total of 15 years with the Foreign Service and 5 earlier years of government (including military) service, I was credited with 20 years of total government service and allowed to retire in 1979 with minimum retirement benefits. We were by no means ready to retire from work. Charlotte and I felt that we were just setting ourselves free to hopefully take on more meaningful tasks. We sold our house in Reston, Virginia and moved to an old house in the Blue Ridge Mountains that we had procured years before for use as a “home leave” refuge from foreign living.. We had named the old place our “Elim” because it had always seemed like a miraculous resting place after travels abroad. We set to work to make at least a temporary home by some remodeling of the old house. We placed our church membership with a congregation of Christians we already knew in the area at the Front Royal Church of Christ. The congregation asked me to serve as an Elder along with three other Elders already serving. The only definite future plan we had was to make a long planned trip to Alaska during the summer of 1980 to visit the sites where I had lived during the war. (By chance we were poised to start a new work which we as yet knew nothing about. It turned out to be a career managing the construction of international short-wave radio station KNLS.)

Below, as suggested, you will find an account of my unique experiences in bringing International Radio Station KNLS on-the-air. Enjoy!

With love,

Francis M. (F. M.) Perry

(To be continued.)