In today’s age of digital technology it’s hard to tell what’s a breakthrough in communication and what’s a gimmick.

In this sense, Lou Cancro, 91-year-old Bonney Lake resident, had it easy. Working with technologies like radio, aviation electronics and television as they emerged, he saw the game changers firsthand.

Cancro is a self-taught electronic engineer born in New York City in 1916. Like millions of Americans who came of age in the Great Depression, his family didn’t have much money to spend on entertainment, much less for children.

“My kids don’t understand what young people like me did for fun in the depression,” he said. “I would be on the street, marbles in my right pocket, a top in the other pocket and a 50 cent harmonica in my back pocket.”

In his teen years, Cancro took every chance to travel out of the city to Long Island, where he could spend time at Roosevelt Airfield. He got to know some of the maintenance crew, who progressively let the eager young man help more and more with maintaining and refabricating the craft.

Without much money, Cancro’s family couldn’t send him to college. Instead he picked up every book he could find on electronics and became involved in amateur radio. In the beginning, jobs specializing in electrical setups were hard to come by for a man without a degree.

“Definitely, they didn’t have many jobs for guys without college,” he said. “I was well into amateur radio and I got known. I was designing equipment for an amateur who used to build equipment for lawyers and other fellas that were well off.”

Cancro’s first job in electrical design was with Ansley Radio, a custom house that created special projects that did not yet exist on the mass market and was responsible for some of the first electric pianos, he said.

Before World War II, his work included projects for various presidential political campaigns, including the Roosevelt campaign for the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the Socialist Party. He designed the speaker systems in traveling campaign trucks, the cutting edge in communicating political platforms before the popularization of mass media.

Notably, the young engineer designed several special surveillance devices for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“That was before recording and monitoring devices were available,” Cancro said. “So I made various surveillance stuff like for monitoring phone calls without having to tap the line. They didn’t have tape recording equipment so we took care of that. We made portable radio equipment that you could carry in a suitcase and somebody could sit in a sound truck outside to listen to it.”

During this period, Cancro had built a house on Long Island, where he lived with his first wife, Janet Wood, and their three children.

World War II saw Cancro shift into a new career in aviation, first as an American Airlines staff mechanic and then as an inspector of electronic equipment.

Cancro’s first wife died in 1949 of cancer. He raised his three small children alone for about a year before he remarried to Eileen McSweeney. They had another child together and remained married until she passed away in 2008.

A new technological challenge arrived in the late 1940s when Cancro was offered a job repairing and operating equipment for NBC headquarters in Manhattan. He worked on famous television series such as Mitch Miller, Milton Berle and Howdy Doody. He was also on hand for the network’s coverage of space travel, from John Glenn’s orbital mission to the Apollo 11 moon landing.

As a television network, NBC was still relatively young and Cancro wrote many of the user manuals for the equipment he used.

“The average person couldn’t just get and know how to use a piece of equipment and the equipment testing that equipment,” he said. “And then there was the equipment testing the test equipment.”

Cancro retired in 1976, and he and his wife packed up their life and moved to the Lake Tapps community.He and his wife knew they wanted to move out west, but Cancro had his fill of California from various trips to the state during his careers. Oregon broadcasted the message that it was nice to visit, but they shouldn’t stay there, he said. Washington state won out because three of his four children already lived in the area.

In retirement, he maintained his interest in aviation – though he never flew and acknowledged it was out of the question now – he belonged to a gun sportsman’s club and developed a deep interest in photography until, he said, digital cameras took the challenge out of it.

Now, with his own sons nearing retirement age, Cancro summarized the events in his own life and recognized it had been a full and varied one.

“In my life, I had the aftermath of influenza, World War I, various campaigns for government inbetween and World War II,” he said. “I’ve had an interesting life. I can admit that.”