Closed-Door Policy : Reagan May Be Sending a Signal--and Many Appear to Be on His Wavelength

Larry Murdoch, owner of Genie Garage Doors, likes to say that “garage door openers are like garbage disposals--if you ain’t got one, you ain’t livin’. “

But lately, hundreds of his customers have complained that their garage door openers ain’t workin’.

Murdoch said it took “a lot of investigating” to figure out that the President of the United States may have something to do with the problem.

Murdoch discovered that when ever President Reagan vacations at his ranch in Santa Barbara, about 200 miles north of here, garage door openers in these parts go on the blink.

He also noticed that “every time our good President comes to visit us, his communications plane parks at March Air Force Base and our problems begin. When the plane leaves, the problems leave.”

Murdoch, who has received about 1,000 complaints since the aircraft arrived at the base last week, figures the plane is being bombarded with scrambled satellite signals that somehow block the radio transmissions of garage door openers.

The plane in question is a modified Boeing 747 called an E4-B, which is laden with command control and communications equipment for use as the National Emergency Airborne Command Post in the event of war.

The aircraft is controlled by the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff and operated by the Air Force. It sits at the air base, about 10 miles south of San Bernardino, for use by the President, said Catherine Rubin, deputy public affairs officer at March AFB.

Rubin declined to speculate on whether the airplane could be interfering with garage doors. But she did obtain a brief statement from the Strategic Air Command headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., that seems to lend credence to Murdoch’s theory.

“There is always the possibility that the electronic systems of the National Emergency Airborne Command Post are causing some electrical interference,” the statement said. “We are not aware of any complaints of this type from any of the E4-B home bases in the past.”

Murdoch isn’t the only one receiving complaints.

A spokesman for the Sears Service Center in San Bernardino said his office was swamped with nearly 100 calls for help last Friday alone.

Since many of his customers had purchased their openers on warranty, it was costing Sears $19.95 for every service visit it made--and it made “several,” said John Richardson, supervisor of the service center.

Some Sears customers, however, figured their transmitters were broken and decided to buy new ones.

“We were selling transmitters right and left over the weekend,” Richardson said. “Now they are bringing them back.”

Murdoch, for one, has been charging his customers $10 each to change their transmitters to a frequency outside the 300 megahertz range that has been most affected. He said that “325 megahertz is the real bugger--it’s the worst one.”

He has also suggested that customers wait out the problem, which he is sure will disappear once the President heads back to Washington on Sunday.

But before that happens, he said, “I wish Ronnie would come out and talk to me--I’ll spring for lunch.”

What would this owner of a garage door opener company like to say to the Chief Executive?

“I’d tell him we are 100% behind him and if our garage doors don’t work while he’s here, hey, we don’t mind at all. We’ll put up with it.”