I won’t be attending the Dayton Hamvention this year. I’ve already been to the big dance forty times over these last 46 years and figure enough is enough. My son and I have attended together for almost twenty of those years and since the event moved to Xenia we ask each other every year as we walk out the gate to the parking spot, “was that the last time?”

When I was a young man Hamvention was a destination, a place that you went to see what was new in the world of amateur radio and to obtain things that couldn’t be found elsewhere. The internet and online shopping long ago replaced the need to attend, but I kept going anyway, out of tradition I suppose. But now I’m old enough to get annoyed by all the machinations required to get in and out of a big fairgrounds. And why does it always rain?

If I should live to be 75 I think I’d like to go back for one final glimpse at Hamvention before making my grand exit, hopefully without my shoes covered in flea market mud…