IT WAS A COLD CLEAR NIGHT IN SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA, IN THE summer of 1944. Two teenage boys had set up camp on the floor of the Shell gas station at the corner of Carrillo and De La Vina Streets.
Young Dudley Buck and his best friend Lee Meadows were determined to catch a thief. Repeated attempts had been made to break into Dan’s Radio Den, a well-stocked shop selling amplifiers, speakers, and all the other radio equipment of the day.
It was only a small shop, about thirty feet long by twenty feet wide, tucked in the corner of the gas station, but the equipment inside was state-of-the-art.
Dan Foote, who owned the shop, was a close friend of the two boys. He specialized in car radios, equipping the local highway patrol cars, among others. He was one of several local electronics experts who helped and encouraged the two young radio hams—offering discounts on parts and equipment as well as weekend work in his shop. Buck and Meadows wanted to help him out; they laid a trap for any would-be thief using their radio gear.
A small speaker was bolted to the shop door, where two previous break-in attempts had been made. They had switched the wiring around to turn the speaker into a microphone, and with a long cable that ran across the forecourt hooked up an amplifier in their hideout at the opposite side. The volume was turned up high to magnify any sounds coming from the door of the shop.
As the two boys settled down for the night, they put on their heavy, Bakelite headphones and listened in. It was their second stakeout of Dan’s Radio Den. The weekend before, they had climbed onto the roof of the garage and set up a listening post there. Not only was it too cold on the roof, but there were logistical issues: even if they heard the thief, they would not be able to clamber back down in time to catch him.
The new plan was much better. The sleeping bags solved the problem of the cold. Buck had somehow procured a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun that lay by his side as they slept on the hard concrete floor. Shortly after they drifted off, a loud crackle blasted into their headphones. The trap had been sprung.
Buck reached for the gun and darted for the door of Dan’s Radio Den. A man was standing with his back to the boys, carefully cutting a four-inch hole in the door with a hand drill. It would be just big enough to get his hand inside to spring the lock—and he was almost finished.
“Drop everything and put your hands up,” barked the gun-wielding teenager.
The burglar jumped. He spun around to find himself staring down the gun’s long barrel. As his eyes traced up to the young face whose hand held the gun, he cracked a smile. “You won’t have the guts to pull the trigger, kid,” he laughed, trying to call Buck’s bluff.
“Yes I will!” snapped Buck. He pumped the gun to load the cartridge shell. Somehow the cartridge jumped out of the breach and dropped to the ground.
“Okay, okay, I’ll go,” said the burglar, picking up his tools and gradually walking toward his car, parked by the side of the building. The battered vehicle had been there for hours. It later emerged that the burglar worked Saturday nights at the Greyhound bus depot across the street and regularly parked around the back of Dan’s Radio Den. The boys had not heard a car pull up, as it had been there all along.
Buck made a fresh attempt to load the gun, all the time keeping his sights trained on the bumbling burglar. Again the cartridge slipped from the gun and dropped to the ground.
“Watch what you’re doing, Dud,” warned Lee Meadows as he made a dash for the garage telephone and dialed the operator. “Burglary in process,” he said into the receiver, repeating the line he had rehearsed as part of the plan. “Dan’s Radio Den, corner of Carrillo and De La Vina.”
The burglar opened the trunk of the car and threw the tool bag in the back as Buck pumped the shotgun for a third time. For a third time, the cartridge dropped out. On the other side of De La Vina Street, two off-duty marines were walking home. Meadows spotted them as he ran back from the phone and yelled for help.
They charged across the road toward the burglar. Suddenly his face fell, realizing that the game was up. As the two marines limbered up to dish out their own version of justice, a police car screeched to a halt and arrested the foiled intruder. Buck and Meadows’ plan had worked, without firing a shot—or even loading the gun successfully. The two boys were sent home by the police with a pat on the back of congratulations and a warning about handling weapons.
The next day, Dudley Buck and Lee Meadows, the two young vigilantes, made the headlines of the local paper, the Santa Barbara News-Press. It was not the first time that Buck had made a name for himself in the local community; nor was it the first time that he had caught the eye of the authorities.
DUDLEY ALLEN BUCK was born in San Francisco on April 25, 1927, to Edna and Allen Buck. Two years later, his sister Virginia was born, and two years after that they were joined by baby brother Frank.
The family lived in an apartment at 1260 California Street, a block or so below the summit of Nob Hill—in the shadow of Grace Cathedral, the imposing neo-Gothic landmark built with money from the California gold rush. From their elevated spot the family had panoramic views of the city and San Francisco Bay; there was a park nearby where Dudley would play with his sister and baby brother. But most of the time he just wanted to build things. Every Christmas he would ask for another Meccano erector set—allowing him to build ever more complex creations.
When he wasn’t building things, Dudley would take to wandering the streets—straying much farther than his mother ever realized. When he was as young as six he would take his sister Virginia down to the building site of the Golden Gate Bridge; they would stand for hours watching the thousands of men from the Bethlehem Steel Corporation bolt girders together and raise them into place, day after day, year after year. By the time the bridge towers reached their full height of 746 feet, and the bridge opened with a parade of 200,000 people on foot or roller skates, Dudley was ten years old.
Around the same time, he got a job selling magazines door to door, which gave him not only the pocket money he needed to buy more parts for his erector sets but also an excuse to keep wandering the streets. One of his favorite spots was the cable car power station at the junction of Mason and Washington Streets, one of many that kept the famous San Francisco cable car system moving. He would watch the huge cogs revolve as they pulled the loops of thick steel cable in and out of the building and under the street.
Life was good for Dudley and his younger siblings until Edna, their young Irish mother, suffered a bizarre, tragic accident. One day, at home in the kitchen, she stumbled and fell into the stove. She hit her head with such force that it caused a giant brain hemorrhage. Edna Buck was never the same again. She needed a lot of care and wasn’t able to look after her family anymore. Dudley was twelve at the time.
Allen Buck spent a few months trying to juggle holding down a full-time job with looking after his wife and raising the kids on his own. He was a college-educated man with a polite turn of phrase who had an office job with the US Postal Service. Adding three children and a seriously ill wife to his workload was too much for him to handle.
The two older children, Dudley and Virginia, were sent to live with their paternal grandmother, Delia Buck, a few hours away in Santa Barbara. The decision was sudden; just a few days after they were told of the plan, Dudley and Virginia found themselves packed on the bus with their suitcases, waving out the window to Frank, their younger brother, who was left behind.
Delia Buck was a formidable woman, with a small neat frame and a piercing stare. She was of Swedish stock—the Peterson family had made their way from Göteborg to a farm in Looking Glass, Nebraska. Delia had become a schoolteacher and traveled every day to her one-room schoolhouse on horseback.
She then married Martin H. Buck, also a schoolteacher; he was a very bright man who “read for the law.” They migrated to California, eventually settling in Santa Barbara. No one knows if Martin ever formally attended a law school of any kind, but he passed all the state law exams and was certified by the District Court of Los Angeles on May 13, 1905. He opened a law practice on State Street in Santa Barbara, and the family began to flourish.
They set up home in a large California-style bungalow at 1215 De La Vina Street, which runs parallel to State Street, the main business thoroughfare of Santa Barbara. The house was built in a Spanish Moorish style that was popular at the time. It had views of the Montecito Hills from the front veranda, and there was a park across the street.
Martin Buck died young, at the age of forty-nine, leaving Delia with five children (a sixth child, Hazel, had died in infancy), and the sprawling house, to look after. She had learned to do things for herself.
Delia was soft-spoken and intelligent; whenever she offered an opinion, her words were clear and unambiguous. (Many of those opinions were about the perils of alcohol—Grandma Delia led the local temperance movement.) Everyone listened to her.
By the time Dudley and Virginia were sent to live with Grandma Delia she was already sixty-two years old, and was long accustomed to life as a widow. She had learned to paint, and churned out canvases relentlessly. Each member of the family had at least one Grandma Delia original hanging on his or her wall.
If work needed to be done around the house, it was Delia who would pick up a hammer and nails and set to the work herself.
Behind the main house there was a garden with lemon, fig, and avocado trees. Then there were two small houses: a tiny guesthouse and a playhouse for the kids. A driveway ran down the middle of the yard, with garages lining either side—two dozen garages in total, butted one against the other in two parallel rows.
The garages were Grandma Delia’s business. The motorcar was increasingly common in prosperous Santa Barbara, so downtown parking space came at a premium. Grandma Delia kept the family going by renting out the garages.
No sooner had Dudley stepped off the bus from San Francisco than he laid claim to one of the garages for himself. Garage number 1—nearest to the house—happened to be vacant at the time. It became Dudley’s laboratory.
The windowless steel structure had a power supply but not much else. Dudley would trawl around town picking up any potential equipment he could find and drag it back to his lab. To make it clear that garage number 1 was off-limits to any visitors, he electrified the door handle.
Dudley and Virginia soon settled into the local school and got used to life without their parents, living under the rule of Grandma Delia. Their world was about to be tipped on end once again, however.
Delia, Dudley, and Virginia were in church on Sunday, December 7, 1941, when they heard that the Japanese had bombed the naval base at Pearl Harbor, forcing America into World War II. The house at 1215 De La Vina street was about to get a lot busier.
All of Dudley’s uncles signed up for active duty straightaway and were shipped overseas. Their wives—Dudley’s aunts Grace, Gladys, and Ruth—came home to Santa Barbara to live with their mother for the duration of the war, where they all found jobs locally.
The onset of war came amid other struggles for the family. Burt Peterson, one of Grandma Delia’s farming brothers back in Nebraska, had been driven out of business. A biblical combination of severe drought, dust storms, and a plague of grasshoppers had wiped out what had once been a very prosperous farm.
Burt had grown corn, wheat, and some oats, and had reared cattle and bred horses. The Petersons were the first farmers in their county to buy a rubber-tired tractor; they also bought a big generator to supply electricity to the barn and outbuildings.
His four children had already lost their mother. After the dust covered the fence posts of the farm, the Peterson children were told to pick their most treasured possessions and jump in the car, and Burt’s family also came to live with Delia in Santa Barbara. The two older sons had signed up to join the war effort, but Burt’s daughter, Doris, and his younger boy, Dean, were still of school age. With Burt and his two youngest kids added to the fold, Grandma Delia’s household expanded to nine. Then Uncle Ed, another of Delia’s farming brothers from Nebraska, also saw his farm struck by drought; he too joined the family at 1215 De La Vina while he tried to find work.
For young Dudley, life with Grandma Delia had transformed from an existence dominated by church and school into a bubbling chaos of cousins, aunts, and uncles, all living on top of one another.
The Petersons (Burt, Ed, Dean, and Doris) blended in seamlessly with the Bucks (Dudley, Grace, Gladys, Ruth, and Virginia). At some point Dudley’s parents moved down to Santa Barbara from San Francisco to join the rest of the family. Edna was still in bad condition. Allen and Edna rented their own small apartment nearby, but Dudley and Virginia continued to live with Grandma Delia, and their younger brother Frank was sent to join them.
Miraculously, Delia managed to fit everyone in. There had been an open veranda on three sides of the house, but she had glassed in two sides to create extra bedrooms. It was a full house, but a happy one.
Young Dudley was left largely to his own devices, spending much of his time in garage number 1 working on his next experiment. The small lab was primarily dedicated to the creation of pranks. One such prank was to set up a hidden microphone in his sister Virginia’s bedroom, which was wired back to his garage lair; he used it to listen in on the girly teenage conversations between Virginia and her best friend Amy. Dudley had a thing for Amy. His aunts were also targeted. Early one Saturday morning he rigged a speaker just below the window of the bedroom his aunts shared. Using his amplifier, he simulated the sound of a hissing snake. The family’s old dog Paddy was known to have a particular hatred of snakes. As soon as the dog heard the noise, he bounded into the bedroom, barked ferociously, and caused general mayhem. Given that Saturday morning was the only day in the week that the hardworking aunts were able to sleep in, this didn’t make Dudley too popular.
The local church was also a victim of Dudley’s practical jokes. Grandma Delia was a very strict fundamentalist Baptist. As soon as the Buck children arrived in Santa Barbara, they were signed up for Sunday school, where each of them had perfect attendance records year after year. They were also sent to Bible camp every summer.
One year all of the children who had attended Bible camp were asked to share something with the congregation that they had learned. Many of the little girls recited an important Bible verse. Most of the boys held up wooden crosses they had whittled. Others had created an object or figure for the board used to tell Bible stories. Dudley, however, hauled some of his lab equipment into the sanctuary and proceeded to make a stink bomb.
As coughing fits erupted around the room and handkerchiefs were pulled from pockets to cover noses and mouths, Grandma Delia sat motionless, stunned by what had just happened.
There were dozens of other such incidents, all motivated by mischief rather than malice.
Young Dudley was a hard worker. By the time he was fourteen, he had a paper route and a job in the herb garden at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden; he awarded himself the rather grand title of “assistant curator of the herbarium,” even though his job was just to pull the weeds.
Dudley and his older cousin Dean also made money by collecting wrappers from bread and hamburger buns. One of the local bakeries offered one cent for every wrapper, so they would spend hours gathering them, earning enough to pay the forty-cent ticket price for the matinee showings at the local Granada Theater.
Dudley was an exemplary student at La Cumbre Junior High School, winning prizes and awards for everything. Virginia called Dudley Wonder Boy, and he was a hard act to follow; Virginia and Frank were known by the teachers and the principal as “Dudley Buck’s sister” and “Dudley Buck’s brother.”
It was tough for Frank, who had a harder time with school and often fell on the wrong side of Grandma Delia’s iron rule. Frank referred to Dudley as Little Jesus, even though Dudley always came to his defense.
On one occasion Dudley doctored the year’s final report card that was sent home with Frank to Grandma—turning all the fails into passes by amending each F into a P with a flick of the pen. Under the section reserved for “remarks by teachers,” Dudley penned, “Frank’s work is a true inspiration to the whole class and his work compares with a college senior. I believe, however, that he is far too humdrummed at home. He should be given his own way more often as this encourages individualism. Sincerely, Wm. J. Kircher.”
Dudley became an Eagle Scout. He also started evening classes on radio operation at the local high school, which is where he met Lee Meadows.
The two boys were perfect foils for each other. Meadows too had been forced by circumstances to move to Santa Barbara. His family came from Danville, Illinois, where his father had owned a Studebaker and Nash car dealership. The business went bust at the tail end of the Great Depression, forcing the family west to California for a new start.
Lee Meadows was the same age as Dudley. He was also knowledgeable about radios and electronics, and had designed an amplifier for a public address system while still in the eighth grade. In his spare time he was helping one of their high-school radio instructors build a similar system for use in the school.
They took evening classes together in radio electronics, which was how they came to know Dan Foote and other local enthusiasts. Dudley and Lee realized they made a good team. Dudley was the brighter of the two, and more creative, but Lee was better with his hands. They decided to set up a business together, using their electrical skills to make money.
And so Santa Barbara Sound Laboratories Unlimited was created—one of the first mobile disc jockey businesses in California, Meadows claims. “We called ourselves Santa Barbara Sound, but we weren’t licensed or anything,” he recalls.
The two boys bought what little equipment they could afford and scrounged the rest. From Val Shannon at Channel Radio Supply, the instructor for their evening classes, the boys acquired a Bell fifteen-watt amplifier on a rent-to-buy basis. They cobbled together the cash to buy two twelve-inch speakers, and built two more from parts borrowed from other local radio shop owners that they had met in their class. They had two microphones—one Electrolux and one Shure. Thanks to a little ingenuity, the two boys were able to cram all this equipment into Lee’s Graham-Paige coupe.
It was late 1942. World War II was in full force, but it was all happening too far away to completely disrupt the flow of life in central California.
As the only two boys in school who knew anything about radios and sound systems, they soon became popular. They would set up their sound system for school dances. As word started to get out about the two young entrepreneurs, they picked up jobs providing the public address system for ballgames, dances, and just about any other event.
Then they got regular gigs at the Montecito Country Club, amplifying the bands for their Saturday night dances. According to the detailed books the two boys kept, they would get paid $13.25 for their evening’s work—about $190 in today’s terms.
Thanks to those high-profile jobs, Dudley and Lee were then hired by local socialite Pearl Chase to provide sound systems for her regular social events and fund-raisers. Chase was one of Santa Barbara’s community pillars; the campaign to protect the town’s architecture and heritage carries on in her name today.
If anyone in the area needed a sound system, they would turn to Santa Barbara Sound Laboratories. The young company was even touched by stardom: when Nat King Cole came to play the Santa Barbara Bowl, it was Dudley and Lee who provided the sound, Meadows claims. The King Cole Trio, as it was known then, had already earned a degree of fame and was about to sign to Capitol Records.
A steady income was coming from the sound business. It was not all about the cash and the glamour, however. Every time the two boys set up their equipment they learned a little bit more about the vagaries of electromagnetic fields and transformers. It led to them designing their own microphone cables to reduce the magnetic humming noise produced by their equipment.
Shortly after his fifteenth birthday, in 1942, Dudley got a part-time job with Val Shannon repairing radio receivers. Six months later he moved on to a job as a radio serviceman at Feliz Radio and Appliance at 30 East Carrillo Street.
He studied for his radio licenses along the way. In June 1943 Dudley passed exams set by the Federal Communications Commission that saw him earn a first-class commercial radio license. Although he was still just sixteen, he was hired by the local radio station KTMS the day after he passed his test to work weekends. For his twenty hours a week, Dudley earned a salary of one hundred dollars a month—about thirteen hundred dollars in today’s terms.
The significant sums of cash being earned by young Dudley were mostly squirreled away for the future. He did not drink or smoke; Grandma Delia had distilled the spirit of temperance in him from a young age. He went on trips to the movies with Lee, his sister Virginia, and her best friend Amy, but Dudley got most of his kicks from his experiments.
As he started working professionally with bigger and better pieces of radio equipment, the experiments in Grandma Delia’s garage became more elaborate. He built a system that allowed him to listen to his records from any room in Grandma Delia’s house. It was based on a small AM radio transmitter created using a single vacuum tube. He could hook it up to his record player and broadcast the songs on a chosen AM frequency, allowing it to be picked up from a normal radio receiver. To put it in a twenty-first-century context, it was a bit like streaming music over a wireless Internet connection.
His little brother Frank and the neighbors were big fans of Dudley’s self-built radio station. Though it worked very well, he kept it small and low-powered—and with good reason; it was illegal.
Amateur radio operations had been mostly shut down since the outbreak of World War II. It was part of a plot to track down spies: if the amateur signals were cut out of the equation, any signal that was not produced by the military or an official commercial broadcaster would most probably be a spy trying to communicate with his or her handlers. That was the theory, anyway.
Dudley’s wireless system had attracted some unexpected attention. Pilots at the nearby air base had been disrupted on their training missions by radio broadcasts of the latest swing and big band hits. Although Dudley had been careful to avoid the frequencies used by the US Air Force, his transmitter had been unwittingly broadcasting signals on other frequencies.
The sixteen-year-old knew nothing about the flaw in his device until Grandma Delia opened the door to two agents from the Federal Communications Commission.
They dismantled the contraption in Dudley’s garage laboratory, took note of his name, and gave him a stern warning about the dangers of interfering with the work of the US Department of Defense.
A few months later Dudley was plucked out of high school and sent on a fast-track training scheme for America’s best and brightest.