Hams' Oscar

For the first time since smart Columbia Broadcasting President William S. Paley donated an annual trophy to be awarded to the outstanding U.S. radio amateur, 1940's Oscar was awarded last week to a ham who had not shown himself a hero in some great disaster.*

Heroic in another fashion, for 70 nights of ten Kansas winters since 1929, Marshall H. Ensor has propped his books and notes against the homemade mike of his 1-kilowatt station W9BSP. From 7:30 to 8:30 he has broadcast to a shadowy schoolroom a lesson in how to operate an amateur radio station. By day he taught industrial arts at the Olathe, Kans. high school; by night, according to the proud statisticians of the American Radio Relay League Inc., he taught more people the essentials of radio than any engineering-school professor. Last year Ensor received his master's degree from Kansas State Teachers College, with an 80,000-word thesis on "Teaching Radio by Radio" having done his classwork at summer sessions.

Next week he is going to leave his "shack" (broadcasting room), emplane at Kansas City and fly to New York City to get his prize. The ceremony will be broadcast for thousands of hams who learned to tell the difference between a kilowatt and kilocycle at one of Marshall Ensor's after-supper dot-and-dash parties.

* For 1936 it was awarded to a hardy amateur for heroics during the Allegheny floods in Pennsylvania; for 1937 for similar feats during the Ohio River floods; for 1938 to a young man who kept up communications on Rhode Island's Xarragansett shore, while hurricane and tidal wave ripped past. In 1939 nobody won it.

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