Somewhere on my desk I have a frayed, faded and much abused copy of the 1993 edition of Police Call.
I learned today from LA Observed that Gene Hughes, publisher of the magazine, died recently at age 80.
Police Call was a collection of radio frequencies used by police, fire and other government agencies. Hughes, a scanner junkie, put them together and made the gibberish understandable to the lay person.
As much as anything I have Hughes (real name Gene Costin) to thank for my ability to tell the difference between real news and real noise.
Here’s a bit from the LAO post:
Costin was 13 and living in a Los Angeles foster home in 1940 when he discovered that he could listen in on the LAPD’s radios. The rest is history.
Here’s a link to Wired’s obit. The photo is from Wired also.
That’s so cool! I’ve had a ham radio license since 1994 or so. I used to pick up the police band when I was a kid – is it still possible to do that, though? I’m so out of the loop with radio.
Thanks for letting us know about Gene’s passing. I too have a stack of his directories, used to buy them at a little pawn/gun/radio shop on Las Tunas Dr., San Gabriel.
Past couple of years I been using ScanFan, available on-line.
Mike
The Los Angeles Fire Department posted a very nice tribute to Gene on their blog today, at http://lafd.blogspot.com/2008/08/lafd-friend-father-of-police-call-dies.html
Gene’s “Police Call” books were probably the most important single factor in my going into police and fire dispatching 40 years ago this month.
Gene was a real gentlemen, and became a personal friend of mine over the past decade.