Back in the early 1970s CB Radios were the biggest thing going. No one got into CB’s more than Cecil Lewis. It didn’t matter what it took in the way of equipment to have the latest and greatest he would buy it. He was on a buying frenzy like I had never seen Cec go on before.

He was a mostly a very frugal person. Not stingy at all. He would give a stranger anything he had and a friend, well the sky was the limit. But the CB Age saw him putting up a tall tower at his house. It saw bigger and more powerful radios being purchased regularly. If he thought he could reach further and talk to more people he’d buy anything. Powerful linear’s were the thing to boost signals. He had the biggest, highest wattage ones he could find.

The FCC really frowned on the use of wattage boosters, but Cec enjoyed living on the edge.

His handle was Yellowcat (named after the big one – that hardly ever got away) and my mother was Hummingbird. (She was always darting from one place to the other, with as much energy as one of those tiny birds).

Kenny and I both carried him high, meaning we kind of made fun of him, about his radio habit. Of course we each had one in our pickups. How else were we going to know there was a “smokey” up ahead.

On day in his attempt to demonstrate how effective and necessary a CB was, he related a story to us.

He was down in the pasture fiddling around. A sudden urge hit him. He always carried a roll of toilet paper in the pickup for such occasions. I was always convinced that he was like the little kid that was so busy playing that he waited too long come in, but that’s a whole other issue. Cec could really develop tunnel vision at times.

That particular day he was dressed like he always dressed, in a pair of coveralls. To cut through all the details, after he had made his move, he noticed that the collar of the coveralls had caught his “business”.

Are we all on the same page here?

So he told of stepping out of them and eased back to the pickup to his CB. “Hummingbird, bring me some more clothes and come down here to where the cross fence is”? A few minutes later she rolled up.

Then he said “can you imagine me driving all the way back to the house with nothing but my underwear”?

Kenny and I just looked at each other stupefied. Hadn’t he just broadcast to the western half of the hemisphere what he had done, over his juiced up CB Radio?

That my friends is what growing up with Cecil Lewis was like.