Addison Miller is frustrated by age’s toll on his 100-year-old body. “Nothing much to do but sit, sit, sit, sit, sit,” the west Lawrence resident said. He needs a motorized wheelchair to get around, his hearing is fading, and his mind won’t always let him say exactly what he wants. But the language Miller uses his fingers to speak flows as fluently as ever.

He has been using Morse code to talk to people around the world on ham radios for more than 80 years. And watching his nimble fingers bang out “dots” and “dashes” on the same Morse code key he has used for decades makes it hard to imagine he is a man who celebrated a century of life Friday.

While age has slowed Miller considerably, his lifelong hobby has kept him active and connected with the outside world.

“If it hadn’t been for radio, I don’t know what I would have done,” he said. “I’d probably have gone nuts by now.”

Miller was introduced to ham radios as a Boy Scout in 1920 when he was 16. He built his first radio to earn his Eagle Scout badge. Miller said that radio was the first thing he ever built.

“It was kind of sloppy,” he said. “But it worked real good … got me to places like Europe without any trouble.”

He first joined a ham radio club in 1924, but he said he thought he was one of the first three or four people in the United States to communicate using a ham radio. Today, more than 170,000 Americans have ham radio licenses, and the hobby is even more popular in Europe, according to the National Association for Amateur Radio.

Ham radio operators use two-way radio stations from their homes to contact other operators around the globe. “Ham” was the term given to amateur radio operators in the early days of radio when government and commercial radio workers had to battle amateur radio operators for bandwidth. The term, originally considered derogatory, eventually was embraced by amateurs.

Though the name is the same, Sue Malloy, Miller’s youngest daughter, who lives next door, said her father’s hobby had changed over the years.

Addison Miller transmits signals on his Morse code key. Miller, above right, purchased the Morse code key in the 1920s for 00, and despite a plethora of modern equipment that can communicate with other amateur radio operators around the world, Miller, now 100, still prefers to send his messages by hand

She remembers her father “working” people, ham-speak for talking to someone, and then visiting them on family vacations.

“It was a gentler time,” she said. “You’d go up to the door and say, ‘Hi, you must be so and so, I’m W0HY (Miller’s call letters).'”

Miller still remembers those trips, but he knows times have changed.

“That was a long time ago,” he said.

In the 1920s, Miller paid $100 for the Morse code key he still uses to pound out messages. At that time, Morse was the only way to communicate on the air. Now, radio operators can use computers or microphones to transmit under ham names.

“Most of these kids like to talk with a microphone now,” Miller said, a change that he didn’t want to accept.

“Dad tried it for a while, but he didn’t like it as much,” Malloy said.

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His family also tried to help him use headphones to make hearing distant Morse code easier, but Miller wanted nothing to do with the technology.

Boxes of cards

Another reminder of the old ways of the ham hobby are the “call cards” that adorn a bulletin board next to Miller’s radio. The tradition between operators was after they worked each other, they would mail out a card with their call sign and location. Some of Miller’s postcard-sized messages bear call signs from operators in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Paris.

“When I’d get a card from someone, why I’d usually send them one,” he said. “Because at that time cards only cost one penny. Today, you couldn’t afford to do that.”

Miller no longer exchanges cards, but his daughter estimates he accumulated more than 10,000 cards in his lifetime. She said she has had to get rid of some of the cards as the family has moved.

Addison Miller

“I just tossed shoebox after shoebox of cards,” she said. “We just couldn’t take them all.”

Though Miller’s bulletin board is covered with a collage of his favorites, his daughter said one card has strong sentimental value — a card with a picture of a family from Poland during the early 1960s. She said her father used to communicate with his Polish friend often, but after political unrest there the conversations ended.

“We often wonder what happened to that family,” she said.

And that is just one story from the thousands of people Miller estimates he has talked to over the years.

“I’ve probably talked to 2,000 or 3,000 hams,” he said.

But Malloy has seen too many “call cards” and seen her father work the radio for too long to believe that.

“It’s more like 20,000,” she said. “If not 200,000.”

Pieces of history

The proof of Miller’s ham experience is in his call letters. Up until the 1980s, he went by W0HY, a four-letter title that was one of only a few left in the world. Miller chose to give up that call signal in 1982 to get a more common five-letter name. Malloy said she didn’t know why her father gave up that piece of history.

“I think he still really regrets it,” she said.

When not spending time with family or working his radio, Miller spent 35 years as a parole officer at Leavenworth Penitentiary. During his career, he said, he had the opportunity to be warden at the famed Alcatraz prison but chose to keep his family in Kansas. Miller is the oldest living retired federal penitentiary worker in the United States, he said.

Miller points to his collection of postcards, photos and fliers he's received from ham radio operators he's contacted around the world.

He is a member of the Douglas County Amateur Radio Club, and Malloy said club members took care of her father any time he needed help with his radio.

When Miller turned 100, he was surrounded by 75 family members and old radio friends at a party in Kansas City.

“I’m not excited at all,” he said. “It’s just another day.”

Miller has another world to visit.

Radio “is perfect for him,” Malloy said. “He can be social and still be removed from society.”

So, even as the microphones and computers invade his hobby, Miller continues to use his old code key to “dot” and “dash” his 100 years of life stories and then listen with a cupped ear for a return answer in a language that he takes pride in keeping alive.