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He won many awards including the National Headliners Club award for writing the best local interest column in the country in 1962. In 1977 his fellow Tri-State Journalists honored him with with the first Distinguished Service Award. He is the author of five book: A Pig In The Gray Panel Truck, A Dandelion in Winter, Day of a President, Just a 100 Miles From Home, and The Journey in the Red Jalopy. He worked for newspapers in Santa Fe, N.M., Monett, MO, Beckley WV, and Memphis, TN. He began working for the Evansville Courier in 1957. Aaron was born in Cone, Texas and reared on a farm in Portales, NM. He
attented the University of New Mexico where he graduated with honors with a
degree in journalism.
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by Joe Aaron Nowhere in all literature, I believe not even in the starkest tragedies of Shakespeare, or of the Greek dramatists, who could really pour it on will you find a character so tormented, so endlessly thwarted and cheated and lied to and, in the end, so horribly alone as was Nathan B. Stubblefield, the Kentucky farm boy who grew up to invent the radio.
A measure of his bitter defeat is the fact that few even credit him with his historic invention; few, indeed, have ever heard of him outside his native Calloway County, Ky. where he was generally looked upon as a odd, irascible old man, and the threat of Old Nate will get you if you dont be good, was used with telling effect over the years to improve the behavior of mischievous children.
Consider, then, for a moment, a capsule biography of this grotesquely mistreated man:
He drove himself ruthlessly, for year upon year, on the invention that changed history then, because he delayed for years in applying for a patent until the radio was perfected, he received none of the credit for it, and none of the fortunes that it inspired.
He was ruthlessly cheated of his holdings in the company that eventually was formed to exploit his invention and when he returned to his Kentucky home from the East Coast, he was a broken man, in pocketbook and spirit.
So destitute was he, indeed, that he bought materials costing $1.27 for work on another invention and he had to buy it on credit, from a Murray hardware store.
To obtain a consistent source of power for broadcasting by radio, he invented the electric battery which was popularized by another man, who made a fortune.
Stubblefield, a spare, sad-eyed man with a walrus mustache, lost his Calloway County home to creditors.
One by one first his wife and then each of his children deserted him, and when he died, of starvation, in a dirt-floored shack of corn stalks and tin where he had fled from an inhospitable world, he died alone, only a pet cat beside him.
Today he lies in a largely untended grave in a tiny cemetery outside of Murray and plans by townspeople to erect a fitting monument to him have been thwarted by surviving members of his family.
Despite it all, however, it seems incontestable that it was he and not Marconi who invented the radio, first broadcasting over it in 1892, when Marconi was only 18 years old.
Friends pleaded with him to patent his work but he steadfastly refused. There were bugs to be worked out, he insisted, and he would settle for nothing less than perfection.
Word of his astounding invention leaked to the world and an army of investors, promoters and swindlers descended upon him, offering him the moon in a pink ribbon.
He met them all at the door with his shotgun and drove them away, spurning offers ranging up to half a million dollars for a part interest in his strange device.
So they moved in, the sharpies and the leeches, and they stole it from him trading him, in its place, stock in a worthless company.
And even the stock, though it was worthless, was stolen too.
He returned to Kentucky and in a bitter rage methodically destroyed hundreds of radio prototypes that he had spent a lifetime building.
Then he retreated to his crude shack and there he lived, in jealous solitude, the final 20 of his 69 years, growing vegetables for food and living for months at a time, it is said, on turnips.
But still he dreamed and still he experimented, and his hovel was decorated, outside and in, with highly polished metal discs the forerunner, some have surmised, of a solar heater.
He confided to two dear friends that he was working on an invention that would make the radio seem like a childish toy.
But what astounding thing it was none can say for within days he was dead, starved of everything that a man must have.
And when you tend to fret in days to come, of the crummy deals that have come to you, you might remember the story of Nathan B. Stubblefield, who knew the meaning of anguish as few of us ever do.
