Author: Miriam Villchur Berg

The Villchur Blog posts articles about the life and career of author, educator, and inventor Edgar Villchur.

Edgar Villchur served in the Army Air Corps for four years during World War II, including twenty-eight months in the South Pacific. His unit moved several times, each time setting up camp closer to Japan. Starting from New Guinea in June of 1943, the 348th Fighter Group moved every few months, to several locations in the Philippines and finally to Ie Shima, an island near Okinawa, in July of 1945. One month later, Japan surrendered, and the war was over. The camp was closed on August 31, 1945.

Edgar had been corresponding regularly with his girlfriend Romy back in the states. He had painted her name (Rosemary) on the front of his Army jeep, and sent most of his Army pay home to her. Romy’s conservative Presbyterian parents were a little apprehensive about their daughter’s arty Jewish beau, but they soon accepted him, and two months after he got home, Edgar Villchur married Rosemary Shafer in a simple ceremony at Romy’s parents’ home in Staten Island. Eddie wore his dress uniform, and Romy wore an elegant light green dress.

They set up housekeeping in Greenwich Village, and Eddie started looking for work. In college he had been an art history major, and had received an M.S. in education, so he was qualified to teach art and art history. Eddie had done theatrical set design, including a set for Prometheus Bound, a play by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, in an off-Broadway production. During college, he had also spent summers as a camp counselor, running the dramatics program for the campers. He knew about many aspects of theatrical production—lighting, props, sound, and all the behind-the-scenes details.

Villchur went to visit his City College art history professor, Albert d’Andrea, and asked for guidance. Professor d’Andrea was very candid with Eddie. He said there were very few jobs in the world of theatrical production. He asked Eddie what he had learned during the war, and Eddie told him he had learned to fix radios. Professor d’Andrea advised him to use that, and said that people were depending more and more on their radios and phonographs for entertainment.

The radio had become an essential part of American life. Starting in the 1930s, families spent many evenings in their living rooms, gathered around furniture-sized radio consoles, listening to news, sports, comedy series, dramas, and music. Edgar and his family had for many years enjoyed Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts and other classical music programs such as The Voice of Firestone and The Bell Telephone Hour.

Edgar loved jazz and big band music as well, and listened to the Make-Believe Ballroom regularly. New York’s radio station WNEW started broadcasting the Ballroom in 1935, with Martin Block announcing as if he were a disc jockey at an actual ballroom. Martin Block invented the genre of the radio DJ show. When he started, WNEW had no records other than those Block bought. The station’s management, and most radio broadcasters, thought that the radio audience wanted live music played over the airwaves. They did not believe that advertisers would pay for airtime on an all-recorded-music radio show. Block found his own sponsors, and was enormously successful. In one famous incident, he advertised a sale on refrigerators during a New York City snowstorm, and more than one hundred people slogged through the snow to take advantage of the bargain. After that, advertisers lined up, and the radio station had to keep a waiting list for sponsorship spots on the show.

Block played popular dance tunes by big bands such as those headed by Count Basie, Harry James, and Gene Krupa. One of Villchur’s favorite jazz performances was “Sing, Sing, Sing” by Benny Goodman, with solos by trumpeter Harry James, drummer Gene Krupa, and the bandleader himself on clarinet. On Saturday nights, Block hosted the “Saturday Night in Harlem” segment, introducing America to the music of the great black jazz masters—Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holliday, and others. These were some of Eddie’s favorite performers.

Radio continued to hold a central place in American family entertainment after the war. So Villchur decided Professor d’Andrea was right, and that it made sense for him to use his army training to work in radio repair. He put some of the money he had saved during his time as a soldier and invested it in renting and outfitting a radio repair shop on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village. In addition to radio repair, Villchur built custom sound systems for customers. One of those customers was Abe Hoffman, a friend who later became the chief financial officer of Villchur’s loudspeaker company, Acoustic Research, Inc. In a memoir he wrote in 2005, Hoffman described the system Villchur installed in his apartment in Manhattan:

“I had known Edgar and his wife, Romy, and had visited with them in their Greenwich Village apartment some years before. Also, he had created a one-piece sound reproduction system for me. It consisted of a Jensen speaker, a Meissner tuner, a Garrard turntable and cartridge, and a Villchur-built amplifier. It was housed in a solid walnut cabinet and cost six hundred and twelve dollars including two-percent sales tax. It served me well for that time. I played a lot of Peter and the Wolf for my young son Fred as well as other fine music.”

The Villchurs put the rest of their savings into buying a home. Along with two other couples, they purchased a brownstone at 404 West Twentieth Street in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. It was a historical building—the oldest townhouse in Chelsea, built in 1900 by Clement Moore, the poet who wrote “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” (popularly known by its first line, “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”) Romy and Eddie had the bottom floor, and the other couples had the second and third floors. (I looked it up online, and found that it was in fact for sale in September 2015. It is in need of extensive repair, so it is a fixer-upper, bargain-priced at $6.5 million. In 1947, the Villchurs and their friends paid a total of $6,000 for it, or about $60,000 in today’s dollars.)

Unlike the proverbial cobbler whose children go shoeless, Villchur used his talents to build sound systems for his family, including a phonograph, amplifier, radio tuner, and speaker for the living room. (He also built a small personal set for me, with a bright blue, painted speaker cabinet. My mother found the perfect fabric for the grille cloth. It was a small print with rows of pedestrians on a tree-lined street—not unlike the street on which we lived. I remember listening to Burl Ives singing “The Little White Duck, and “Mr. Froggie Went A-Courtin’” and looking at the tiny pictures of people walking up and down the street, pushing their baby carriages, and greeting their neighbors. It was a perfect little world.)

Edgar’s radio shop prospered. Being an entrepreneur allowed him the freedom to pursue more education in his new field of endeavor. He spent hours in the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, reading all the books he could find on physics and higher mathematics, as well as works on the applied sciences such as audio engineering and sound reproduction. He also started writing articles and submitting them to both technical and general publications. His clear explanations of complex ideas won favor with editors, and he started getting regular writing jobs. Audio Engineering magazine (later renamed Audio) contracted with him for an article each month. He also wrote on more general topics for Saturday Review, edited by Norman Cousins, a well-known activist for nuclear disarmament and world peace.

Edgar made an appointment with the administrators of the night school at New York University, armed with several of his published articles and an outline for a proposed course on sound reproduction. Villchur emphasized his master’s degree in education (and may have downplayed the fact that his major was art history). He was persuasive, he was articulate, he could write and think clearly, and he was offering a course that was of great interest to many students at the time. NYU hired Villchur to teach the course that he designed, entitled “Reproduction of Sound,” one night a week at their campus off Washington Square in Greenwich Village.

In 1951, the Villchurs moved to a residential area in Queens. It offered more outdoor space and less noise than Manhattan, but the family was not happy with the suburban environment. With a fairly regular career in writing and teaching, Villchur realized the family didn’t have to live in the city. He could write from anywhere, and could travel into New York once a week to teach. Eddie had lived in the country as a boy, and had loved it. Romy had grown up in Staten Island, on a property with many trees, a terraced lawn, and gardens. So they started looking for a place to move. Romy saw an ad in Saturday Review for a place for rent in Woodstock, New York. Eddie had heard of the town because the Art Students’ League, a famous New York City art school, had a summer campus there. So the Villchurs made an appointment with a real estate agent, and drove two hours up the Taconic Parkway (the section of the New York State Thruway between New York City and Kingston was not opened until 1954).

The house that had been advertised wasn’t to their liking, but the agent showed them a few other places, including the home of Gene and Hannah Ludens on Chestnut Hill Road in the hamlet of Zena. The whole family fell in love with the house, and the Villchurs and Ludenses got along famously. Gene was a painter, and Hannah was a sculptor. They spent their summers in Woodstock, and traveled to the Midwest each fall to teach art at the University of Iowa. This was the first time they were planning to rent out their house for the whole year, and they wanted to make sure it went to responsible people. When they met the Villchurs, the Ludenses knew they would take good care of the house. The rent was $60 a month.

For the next few years, Eddie wrote his articles in his loft office above the living room. The publishers required a specific number of words, so he would write the articles out longhand, count the words, and adjust as needed before typing the manuscript. (I remember many times coming home from school and hearing my mother say, “We have to be quiet. Papa is counting words.” As I sit here typing this blog post, the number of words in the document appears instantaneously and continuously on the bar at the bottom of the screen.)

Edgar Villchur, in his usual organized and methodical way, set up the life he wanted. He educated himself in his chosen areas of interest. He convinced a prestigious university to hire him to teach a course he himself had invented, using a curriculum he had written. He found a way to support himself and his family and to live in a cozy home in a rural and artistic community.

The scene was set. In the next year, Edgar’s field experience in radio and sound systems, combined with his self-education in physics and engineering theory, would come together in a moment of revelation. But that is a story for next time.

© Miriam Villchur Berg

The Villchur Blog posts articles about the life and career of author, educator, and inventor Edgar Villchur. This is the third article about Villchur’s experiences in World War II.

By Miriam Villchur Berg

Edgar Villchur served in the Army Air Corps for four years during World War II, including more than two years in the Pacific. During that time, he learned how to repair and maintain the all-important radio equipment in the airplanes and on the ground in his unit. But he was more than just a radio repairman. He figured out how to make the equipment work better, and he contributed to the quality of air-to-ground communication in ways that genuinely assisted the war effort.

Villchur made several “Unsatisfactory” reports concerning radio equipment on the P-47 fighter planes while he served as the Communications Officer of his unit. The first was a report on a capacitor that tended to break down suddenly during flight, causing complete failure of the radio receiver and rendering impossible any communication between the pilot and ground control or other aircraft. He discussed the problem with the Communications Officers at the other squadrons in his area, and discovered that each of them had experienced up to fifteen radio failures in a six-month period, all due to this defective part. The fix was simply to replace the capacitor, but Villchur went on to recommend that the manufacturers be told to perform more rigorous inspections of these radio parts to make sure that they were meeting the electrical specifications called for by the Army Air Corps requisitions.

His second “Unsatisfactory” report gave rise to a favorite story that Villchur told friends and family in later years. Airplanes were losing radio reception about fifty miles out from base, when they should have had a much greater range. Villchur, who was not a pilot, had no way to observe the problem first hand, so a pilot offered to take him up in the P-47 to see for himself. The P-47 Thunderbolt is a one-person aircraft, but Villchur, who was five foot nine and one hundred and sixty-five pounds, managed to squeeze himself in under the panel with the pilot. Hearing how the radio signal cut in and out convinced him that the problem was in one of the vacuum tubes.

On returning to base, Villchur tested the tubes in the plane, and found inconsistencies in one of them, the VT-132. He checked all the VT-132 vacuum tubes in stock, looking for defective ones. Without laboratory equipment, he had to invent a system for testing. In his report, he writes: “A controlled check was made of 200 tubes taken from unbroken cartons and selected at random from the shelves of a signal service company…. The receiver was allowed to warm up for thirty minutes to secure stability…. As a check on the constancy of the signal strength and any other affecting conditions, the original VT-132 used in the receiver was substituted after every five tubes were checked…. It is the experience of this section that the greatest factor making for inadequate receiver sensitivity, including that of receivers in new planes sent to this organization, is defective VT-132’s…. It is recommended that the inspection of VT-132’s be made more rigid and the required standard for overall efficiency be raised.”

The report was forwarded up the chain of command, and resulted in a new policy, giving the vacuum tubes an operational check before the Signal Corps would accept them. The Chief of the Communications Maintenance Section added a note: “This report, by virtue of its excellent preparation, will be very effective in expediting corrective action.”

In May 1945, Villchur wrote a detailed Communications Bulletin outlining the procedure for recording the operational performance of aircraft radios. It described making a daily record of the radio performance, including a report from the plane’s mechanic: “Complaints will be recorded as made, whether or not subsequent diagnosis finds them to be justified. The recording of a complaint will state whether the receiver, transmitter, or both are reported defective by the pilot, and whether the component is considered weak, garbled, or totally inoperative.”

During his time as Communications Officer, he also devised a method of testing radios without removing them from the airplanes, saving time and effort.

One day, Villchur was reprimanded by a superior officer because one of his men had left a tool kit out in the rain. Villchur said he would take care of it. The next day he was summoned to the Commanding Officer’s office. When he got there, his squadron CO, the squadron communications officer, and the Group Communications Officer (a group consisted of several squadrons) were all there.

In telling this story to family and friends later in life, he remembered how he had assumed he was going to be punished for leaving the toolbox out in the rain—and he couldn’t believe they were making such a big deal about this little mistake. So he was very surprised when, instead of a reprimand, he was given a Citation of Appreciation for Meritorious Achievement, based on the vacuum tube report he had submitted six months earlier and the in-plane testing system he had devised. His Army superiors had read his reports and decided to change procedures.

Shortly after that, Villchur was promoted to Captain and awarded the Bronze Star, the fifth highest medal given by the US military, awarded for meritorious service in a combat zone. When he told the story years later, he rarely mentioned the medal he received. What made him most proud was the fact that he had figured out what the problem was and made a recommendation as to how it could be remedied. He was surprised that his superior officers had paid attention to his report, and it gave him great satisfaction that they actually changed procedures for testing the vacuum tubes. Because of his careful and detailed report, airplane radios did not fail, and pilots were able to stay in communication with their ground crews. And even though Villchur disdained the Army’s non-egalitarian system of hierarchy and ranks and medals, it didn’t hurt that he received recognition for his efforts—a citation, a promotion, and the Bronze Star.

In his reports, and especially in the report on vacuum tubes, Villchur demonstrated his understanding of the scientific principles of observation, measurement, experimentation, and conclusion. He developed a theory to explain the observed failure of the radios; he designed an experiment that would prove or disprove his theory; he chose a large group of test objects at random to ensure comprehensiveness; he included a control by retesting the original tube after every five tests; he proved conclusively that the defective tubes were causing the poor performance of the radios; and most importantly, he documented every detail of his method, described every step of his procedures, explained his conclusions, and made a specific recommendation to correct the problem. In addition, his report is written in clear, understandable English. In a five-page single-spaced typed report (of which I have a carbon copy), there is not a single typo or correction.

Edgar Villchur was twenty-six years old when he put in his vacuum tube report. His education had consisted of a master’s degree in art education and field training in radio repair from the US Army Air Corps. But he had already figured out how to do original scientific research, how to address and solve specific problems, how to write up his work in a way that would be understood, and how to make a recommendation that would be listened to. The military bureaucracy is often accused of being resistant to changes in procedures. Villchur found a way through that resistance, and effected a change in policy that made the airways safer for American pilots.

© Miriam Villchur Berg

The Villchur Blog posts articles about the life and career of author, educator, and inventor Edgar Villchur. This is the second of three articles about Villchur’s experiences in World War II.

Edgar Villchur spent four years in the Army Air Corps during World War II—two years in various training camps in the US, and twenty-eight months in the South Pacific. Villchur’s unit was the 340th Fighter Squadron, part of the 348th Fighter Group. They arrived in Port Moresby, New Guinea on June 23, 1943, set up camp, and remained there for six months. Over the next two years of his service, the group moved many times, from New Guinea north to the Philippines, and finally to Ie Shima, part of Okinawa. They spent two to three months in each new camp. With each move, the 348th Fighter Group moved closer and closer to Japan.

At each location, the unit had to clear the jungle, erect canvas tents, build wooden floors for those tents, build an airstrip for the twenty-five P-47s and P-51s, and establish good relationships with the native people. Life in the jungle meant dealing with iguanas and monkeys wandering around camp. Mosquitoes were everywhere, carrying malaria and other diseases. Soldiers slept with mosquito netting around their cots. Villchur remembered the sound of the mosquitoes buzzing against the netting, trying to get in. If your arm brushed against the netting by mistake, the bugs would bite you even through the netting, and you would wake up with large welts.

More soldiers were killed by disease than by combat in World War II. Troops in the Pacific battled malaria, beriberi, and dysentery. In the jungle it was nearly impossible to maintain clean, let alone sanitary, conditions. Villchur was one of thousands of US soldiers who contracted hepatitis in 1943. He spent more than a week in the infirmary, and another two weeks recovering in his tent.

Ironically, it was later discovered that the vaccine the army had administered to all its troops against yellow fever had the side effect of causing jaundice and hepatitis in as many as fifteen percent of those vaccinated. Few soldiers died of this hepatitis, but it kept them from performing their regular duties for weeks at a time.

Villchur remembered an incident where a superior officer came into the infirmary to visit the troops. Those who could stand got out of bed, stood at attention, and saluted. Villchur’s nurse urged him to stand up, but he was too weak. The superior officer said it would be fine for him to come to attention while lying in bed. Villchur saluted the officer from the bed, and released his salute once it had been acknowledged by the officer.

Because he had completed Officers’ Candidate School before shipping out, Villchur arrived overseas as a Second Lieutenant, and was promoted to First Lieutenant on March 19, 1943, and to Captain on June 27, 1945. His principal duty was Group Communications Officer of the 348th fighter Group. On March 21, 1945, he was given the additional duties of Cryptographic Security Officer and IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) Officer.

Villchur’s tent mates, all officers, were Arthur Schrager, Joel Pitchford, and Noble D. Jones (“Jonesy”). The four tent mates became close friends. They lived and worked together, and shared a slit trench, or fox hole, during air raids. Villchur remembered the distant whine of Japanese airplanes that meant the camp was under attack. He said it reminded him of the drone of the mosquitoes.

Soon after hearing the planes, the air raid alarm would go off, but most of the GIs had already awakened (if it was nighttime, which it usually was), put on their helmets and shoes, run out of their tents, and jumped into the fox holes. They would all be accounted for except for Jonesy, who invariably arrived, groggily putting on his helmet, just seconds before the first bomb hit. Fortunately, air raids were becoming less frequent by the time Villchur’s unit arrived in 1943, since the Allied forces had turned the corner in the war, and the Japanese were retreating.

Villchur’s main occupation was repairing and maintaining the radio equipment on the ground and in the airplanes Clear, intelligible radio reception was of the utmost importance in the air war in the Pacific. Fighter pilots needed to communicate with each other about enemy aircraft, about anti-aircraft weapons on the land or sea below them, and about the details of their missions. It was also absolutely essential for the pilots to have good communications with base camp.

Villchur told a story of a time when a DC-2 (a plane that carried fourteen passengers with two to three crewmen) approached the airfield without radio contact. The ground radio operator tried again and again to raise the pilot, but there was no answer. None of their planes were expected in, so the approaching plane was highly suspicious. The commanding officer gave the order, and the plane was shot out of the sky. On inspection, it was discovered to be a captured American airplane with a crew of enemy soldiers who had been attempting to attack the camp.

Everyone on base understood the implications of that incident: if an American pilot tried to land without a functioning radio, he was in danger of being shot by friendly fire. Villchur took his job very seriously, and kept the radios on the twenty-five P-47s in his squadron in top working order. He went further, figuring out problems with faulty equipment, recommending changes in Army procedures to correct those problems, and writing up procedures for testing and maintaining the radios on the ground and in the air.

Despite the fact that they were camped in a combat zone, much of their time was taken up with the ordinary activities of daily living—camp maintenance, eating in the mess tent, playing poker (Villchur became a skilled poker player, and was part of a regular game later in life). The soldiers hired indigenous people to clean their tents and do their laundry. One young man from Papua, New Guinea beat Captain Schrager at checkers, to the captain’s great surprise and dismay.

One of Edgar Villchur’s favorite stories of his time overseas demonstrated his inventiveness as well as his esprit de corps. He found out that coke syrup was available from the commissary. Using spare parts, he devised a compressor, added a stainless steel tank and a spigot, and created a machine that dispensed cold Coca Cola. The soldiers could get a cold cup of Coke anytime. It was a welcome reminder of home.

Villchur had a jeep that he named Rosemary after his girlfriend (and later wife) back home. Using his skill with the paintbrush, he decorated his jeep with her name in elegant Trajan lettering, his favorite font. When he started Acoustic Research many years later, he used that same font to create the AR logo.

One night in the camp a soldier cried out, probably from a nightmare. Villchur got up and cocked his 45, and heard the sound of 45s being cocked all around the camp. The soldier had fallen out of bed and gotten tangled in his mosquito netting. No harm was done, but it served as a reminder to all that they were in a combat zone, and that they had to be on guard at every moment.

When Villchur started his military training, he tried to become a weatherman, but was assigned to radio technician school. Many years later, Villchur said “The army, in its infinite wisdom, put me in engineering.” His sarcastic comment was meant to convey his contempt for the army’s habit of asking enlistees for their opinions and then ignoring those opinions. But the Army Air Corps’s decision to give Edgar Villchur an education in engineering allowed him to go on to make major contributions to the fields of both sound reproduction and hearing aid design.