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Paul M. Elliott Bishop, TX Hobbs, NM QCWA # 5900 |
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Kingsville - Paul Miller Elliott Jr. of Kingsville Tx passed away on June 26 2019 at his home in Hobbs NM, at the age of 96. He was preceded in death by his sister Barbara Elliott Young and by two of his sons, Lee and Tommy Elliott. He is survived by his wife Abbi Lamb Elliott, his son Roger Elliott of Lufkin Tx, and eight grandchildren through his first wife Evelyn Richardson Elliott.
Paul was born in Kingsville Tx and grew up during the hard years of the Great Depression, helping his father Paul Sr. keep the family auto repair business open and solvent .... Elliott Motor Company on South 6th St. was a well-known part of Kingsville life for many years.
Paul received an appointment to the US Naval Academy, graduated with distinction in June 1944, and was sent to the Pacific where he was a gunnery officer on the destroyer USS Callaghan. He went through the last climactic year of the war with Halsey's Seventh Fleet until the Callaghan was sunk by a kamikaze plane on July 29 1945, at the very end of the Battle of Okinawa .... he survived but many unfortunate sailors did not.
After the war, he returned to South Texas and married Evelyn Richardson of Bishop .... he was a farmer, an engineer for Celanese Chemical, then went back to school, earned a Ph.D. in physics from Texas A&M, and then was a professor of physics at Texas A&I University in Kingsville for many years. He was very proud of his good students and it is certain that many of them will always remember him.
Some of his favorite years were from 1948 through 1962, living on our farm and helping my two brothers and me to grow up, running around barefoot and dodging the rattlesnakes.
He was a great marksman, an avid hunter, and he enjoyed escaping from civilization in the wilds of McMullen County, from where he and my brother Lee brought home many a deer.
Paul was a licensed pilot for over 75 years .... while teaching at A&I, he discovered sailplane flying .... soaring ....which was to be his main passion for the rest of his life. After his first marriage ended, he moved to Hobbs NM with his second wife Abbi and he greatly enjoyed the superior soaring conditions there. He was always a teacher and he taught many young people how to fly, how to enjoy it, and how to learn and survive to fly another day and always aspire toward self-improvement.
Paul was a great son, husband, father, and grandfather, but he was also very much his Own Man, and this will be his greatest legacy .... he refused to bend the knee and he always spoke the truth as best he saw it .... truth always tempered with kindness.
His favorite books of the Bible were Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.
There is much more that could be written here, but I can hear him saying "Enough .... I did the best I could, that is all that a man can do."
For those of us who knew him and loved him, his best was very special .... we shall not see his like again.
Published in Corpus-Christi Caller-Times on July 3, 2019
81 Years A Ham
PAUL M ELLIOTT Sat, 20 Jan 2018 18:16:31
Yesterday was the 81st anniversary of my first ham license. My ham radio operating has been quite low key, mostly low power cw, logging by hand, without beams and beverages, since 1987 from a noisy city lot in SE NM. I have managed 186 countries on 160 m, 326 mixed on 160 thru 10 m. Pre-ham experiences, like how to "make" a galena crystal detector for an AM receiver, fall in the "who wants to know" category.
My thanks to all the kind and knowledgeable hams who have helped me over the years.
73
Paul W5DM
New Mexico Radio Amateur Marks 80 Years as a Licensee
01/25/2017
"Made it! 80 Years a ham." That.s how ARRL member Paul Elliott, W5DM, of Hobbs, New Mexico, recently posted his milestone on the Top Band reflector. Growing up during the Great Depression in Kingsville, Texas, Elliott got his ham ticket at age 14 as W5GGV. Now 94, Elliott eventually worked his way to the top rung . Amateur Extra . back in the day when that license offered no additional privileges, just prestige. It did later allow him to apply for a two-letter suffix call sign, and he became W5DM.
His first rig was homebrewed from Atwater Kent radio parts, with a wire to a tree for an antenna, but he remembers making his own galena crystal for a crystal set and experimenting with a Model T spark coil. He continued building his own transmitters and receivers for a couple of decades, operating CW until SSB came along. Elliott succeeded in working all states on 160 meters from a 120 ×120 foot electrically noisy city lot with .a long but low semi-inverted L,. as he described it. He now has 189 DXCC entities confirmed on Top Band.
A Texas native and World War II veteran, Elliott is a graduate of the US Naval Academy and served in the Pacific. After the war, he was a Navy aviator. In the late 1940s, he began farming cotton and maize, which he continued until 1980 on 200 South Texas acres, then taking on a second job as a chemical plant engineer, before going back to school to earn a doctorate in physics from Texas A&M.
"I'm basically a peasant with a lot of education," is how he describes himself. He spent more than 20 years in academia as a professor of physics at his alma mater. In addition to Amateur Radio, Elliott enjoyed flying and was a licensed commercial pilot.
"Basically, all I'm doing today is chasing the occasional DX," Elliott told ARRL. He said he has a transceiver and a couple of wire antennas that he makes work on all bands. Elliott has 325 DXCC entities confirmed on all bands . plus a lot of memories from an earlier era of Amateur Radio. He recalled a fellow ham in Texas who had directly coupled the final tube of his transmitter, with 1,500 V dc on the plate, to his antenna. When he received a .pink slip. (advisory notice) from an FCC monitoring station in Hawaii for harmonics, his friend saw the bright side and bragged about the distance his signal had traveled.
"Age, not surprisingly, has taken its toll," Elliott said on the Top Band reflector, noting that his CW speed was now down to 20-25 WPM because of waning dexterity. "Thanks to all who have had the knowledge and the kindness to help me over the years,. he said.