The Origin of the BAD Guys
By Chris Lobdell and John Callarman
I thought you might want to know how the term BAD Guys came about, coming from one of the original BAD Guys, John Callarman:
In 1967, I moved to Boston area to help NRC'er Pete Taylor turn WCAS-740 into a news/information station... and at the same time to establish a solid base of NRC members to help me publish DX News, which then was 34 issues per year, mimeographed, minimum of 20 pages per issue, to more than 400 members. I had convinced Gordon P. Nelson (who had been a URDXC member from California briefly when I (also briefly) edited one of the SWBC columns) to be International DX Digest editor... and he and I pushed other NRC'ers in the greater Boston area to become part of our weekly publishing crew. Gordy and I would drive around to pick up some of the motorlessDX'ers, others would arrange their own transportation, and we had some good Thursday night parties at the apartment I shared with NRC'er Bob Karchevski. We coined the BAD Guys sobriquet, for Boston Area DXers, and it continued after I had to drop out in the summer of 1968 when I got married and the new bride didn't like sharing our home with 6 to 10 DX'ers once a week!
Nelson continued to operate the club, but led the way to exploring offset printing. NRC became the first of the main line DX clubs to go offset in late 1968, but Bad Guy publishing sessions continued through sometime in the early '70s, when club headquarters shifted to New Jersey.
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