Is Anybody Out There ...

By Stuart M. Deluca - Team President
Travis County REACT

History is what happened to everybody else. Experience is what happened to me. Let me tell you a little bit of history and experience.

Just 20 years ago this month (April), a handful of members of a brand-new organization, Travis County REACT (TCR), began monitoring CB Channel 9 in the basement Communications Center of the Austin Police Dept.

In 1976, CB was at the peak of its popularity. Johnny Carson cracked jokes about the calls he heard on the CB in his DeLorean. GM and Chrysler offered a combo AM/FM/CB in their new models. It seemed like everybody was your "good buddy". Well, not quite everybody. During the first six months, TCR monitors logged an average of 10 calls per hour. But at least half of them were false alarms, deliberate or otherwise, which annoyed the heck out of the APD officers who responded to them.

Understandably, not all of the cops were thrilled to have us in their headquarters in the first place. This was before the police discovered the glories of "community policing." As far as they were concerned, we were invaders on their turf, making their jobs harder instead of easier.

By January, 1977, Police Chief Frank Dyson had decided to replace the REACT monitors with his own volunteers, who came to be known as the Austin Police Monitors. They were given their own base station in a rented building off South Lamar.

TCR, having been dispossessed, debated vigorously whether to set up a new central base somewhere else, or adopt "home-base monitoring" instead. The decision finally was to do the latter. About half the members quit the Team. But within a couple of years, the issue became moot. CB suddenly became passé, last year's fad. For the members of both TCR and APM, monitoring CB9 became an exercise in frustration, boredom, and futility. Cellular phones became the new "gotta-have-it."

For a few years in the late 80's, TCR had a central base at the Resurrection Church. But the only TCR member who monitored it was me. The rest of the time, APM members staffed the base. One by one, the TCR members who monitored on their home bases gave up, quit the Team, moved away, or died. When the church decided that they needed the space for something else, APM moved to a new location in East Austin, but their program too eventually faded away.

Now, we're talking about getting back into monitoring, and some people are wondering, "Why bother?" I can think of three good reasons.

First of all, contrary to expectations, CB didn't completely die. There are still quite a few folks out there who have CBs in their cars; some of those radios even work. A lot of people discovered that cell phones, despite their many advantages, aren't exactly perfect. They're expensive, the service isn't available everywhere, and it isn't completely reliable -especially in bad weather.

Secondly, there is (or could be) a lot more to emergency monitoring than just CB. As GMRS grows in popularity (in spite of everything the FCC can do to prevent it), more people will come to expect REACT to monitor .675. There are also emergency calling channels in dozens of other radio services. With the proper equipment and training, we could monitor all of them.

I doubt that we will ever see 10 calls an hour again, and that's just as well, especially since so many of the calls were false.

But that brings me to the third reason to monitor: even if we only get one call per hour, or one call per day, if that one caller truly needs our help, the effort is more than worthwhile.

 They're out there. But are we listening? 

Reprinted from the
"Travis County REACT Team Log"  
[April 1996 issue]