At Hamcation last January, I renewed my ARRL membership for three years. One of the reasons that I chose three years is that they were offering two premiums for doing so: the book Grounding and Bonding for the Radio Amateur and an ARRL coffee mug. When neither the book nor the mug showed up in a couple of months, I emailed the ARRL. Shortly thereafter, the book appeared in my mailbox, but not he mug.
It took three more emails and several more months to finally get the mug. It arrived on Saturday, six months after I renewed my membership.
The mug features a cartoon by Philip “Gil” Gildersleeve, W1CJD, who contributed over 1500 cartoons and drawings to QST and the ARRL for almost 40 years. This cartoon features a haggard ham in front of his radio. To the left is his attractive wife who comments, “What a relaxing hobby, dear.”
Just by conincidence, I got a message from a new ham this morning, who wrote:
I got my letter to renew my ARRL membership, and they advertise that if you get a 3-year membership you get a “Gil Cartoon Coffee Mug.” The mug is an image of a woman saying “what a relaxing hobby, dear” to a shlubby looking man operating a radio. Could someone explain the joke or context? Is this a famous ham cartoon series or an inside joke that I’m unaware of?
I need to understand the joke before I can use the mug!
I replied:
Gil’s cartoons used to appear regularly in QST. Some of them are still funny, but most of them have seen better days. I certainly think that they could have made a better choice for this particular giveaway. In fact, it probably would have been better to skip the cartoon and just put the ARRL logo on the mug.
Having said that, the joke is similar to the joke that they used to make about computer programmers staying up through the night to use the computer. In this case, it’s the amateur radio operator staying up through the night to either take advantage of night-time propagation (shortwave signals on some frequencies propagate better at night) or to operate all 24 hours of a contest.
To which, she replied:
I think that’s good feedback for them! You can tell them I like the retro cartoon idea, but the tone of the cartoon is a little off putting – the joke is that the woman “doesn’t get it” and then I literally didn’t get it, so that’s not so great from a marketing perspective for attracting newbies/women.
I’m all for tradition—when it’s appropriate. Heck, I’m still a CW operator. But, as a friend of mine put it, “It is important to remember the past, but not get stuck in it.” I think it might be time to move on from Gil cartoons, especially for situations like this. Gil tells the story of a ham radio that used to be, but maybe not what we want it to be.