My path to amateur radio at age 72

Anthony Doerr's NY Times Best Seller, ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE captures the excitement of radio for Werner Pfennig and his sister Jutta. They are orphans in the mining town of Zollverein, Germany in the 1930s. At age 8 "ferreting about the refuse behind a storage shed," Werner finds a crystal set. It does not work, but by examining its parts he notes that "its longest wire coiled hundreds of times around a central cylinder" is broken. He and Jutta splice and recoil it and then...He hears a fizz of static. Then, from somewhere deep inside the earpiece, a stream of consonants issues forth... The sound fades as quickly as it came. He shifts the pin a quarter inch. More static. Another quarter inch. Nothing... Werner guides the tuning pin back and forth. Static. Static. He is about to hand the earphone to Jutta when -- clear and unblemished, about halfway down the coil -- he hears the quick drastic strikes of a bow dashing across the strings of a violin. He tries to hold the pin perfectly still. A second violin joins the first. Jutta drags herself closer; she watches her brother with outsize eyes... "Werner?" Jutta whispers. He blinks; he has to swallow back tears. The parlor looks the same as it always has... Yet now there is music. As if, inside Werner's head, an infinitesimal orchestra has stirred to life. The room seems to fall into a slow spin. His sister says his name more urgently, and he presses the earphone to her ear...he watches his sister's face, motionless except for her eyelids, and in the kitchen Frau Elena holds her flour-whitened hands in the air and cocks her head, studying Werner, and two older boys rush in and stop, sensing some change in the air, and the little radio with its four terminals and trailing aerial sits motionless on the floor between them all like a miracle.