I'll help out with that...
Lockheed made them in the 50's.

Good luck!!

There is also the US Tower MA series of tubular towers. Add the self supporting rotor base and the raising (tilt-over) fixture and life is pretty good.

Shipping can be expensive with any tower that has to be delivered and you usually are responsible for getting it off the truck from what I understand.

If you can find a crank up  locally, they can be moved inexpensively with a rented boat trailer of 20ft or so.

We did once bring a 40ft or so crank up back from eastern WA. lashed down to the roof of an old van...THAT was an experience!!

IMO with a dipole I would just ground the shield where the coax enters the house.
With a tower it is a bigger concern. My friend has a FM broadcast tower and antennas on his property. It is about 40-50 ft, I'm not sure how high. It has the heliax shield grounded to the tower in several places along it's route down.
How far you want to go with ham antenna grounding depends I suppose on your perception of the potential risk. In some parts of the country it is a far greater threat than in others.
In any case, all lightning grounds on your property should be bonded to the ground for your electrical service.

What makes a good RF ground is different than what makes a good lightning ground.

Pretty good article about lightning protection here;
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14868226/lightning-protectiontaming-thors-thunderon-a-budget

Coax shields should be grounded to a ground rod just as the cable enters the house at a minimum.
DX Engineering has a $15 bracket for doing just that.
The arrestors also make doing that easy and afford some protection from currents in the center conductor as well.

And there ya go. it can stay within the KISS method!
Here the avenues run north/south and streets are east/west. As long as you are not in a curved part of an avenue it is pretty easy to judge north since a house is usually squared to the street it is on.

Phone or CW, it isn't very hard to do and it's a blast.

Modes really won't be a big concern. The rigs these days have all the conventional modes so you would have AM FM CW and SSB anyway. For digital modes you add a sound card interface and away you go, try a few and see what you like. For me it is just RTTY, I don't much care about the others. Maybe someday though.

http://www.rollanet.org/~n0klu/Ham_Radio/History%20of%20Ham%20Radio.pdf

...and probably the book "200 Meters and Down"

Chances are something other than the link above is out there as well that has that info in it already.

Trees don't matter much at all until you get up above 30MHz a ways.
They make good antenna supports!
I have a 102ft inverted V about 40ft up in a fir tree that is probably 80 or more feet tall. Trees like that are all over the place in this neighborhood!! I have 4 of them on my property all twice as tall as my 40ft tower.

The best key out there is the one YOU like.
Everybody likes something different in a key.
Many have several, I have six of them.
Two Iambic keys, single lever, hand key, touch key, and a double speed or "cootie" key.
I have had two Bencher BY-1 keys and sold them, I just didn't like them. It is a popular key though. Many buy it as a first key and never buy a different one. The MFJ copy (sort of) is pathetic.
The favorite is my Hamco Scotia, it's much the same as a Vibroplex Brass Racer.

Bencher and Kent keys are marketed widely so they have an advantage in becoming popular.

There should be some articles out there about building an amp like that.

If you happen to already have many of the parts or can get then at a very reasonable price you can do ok with an amp project.
If you have to chase all the parts down and buy them at retail and pay for shipping from different companies then building your own can be a pricey project, but a fun one none the less.

Many CB amps didn't have any manufacturer info on them. Many were made in fly by night sorts of shops, basements and garages. Usually they were poorly designed without any biasing etc. They all had warnings about use on CB but that is what the target market was. There are very few ham amplifiers that you cannot find info about on the internet.
The 6LQ6 is a sweep tube with 30 watts of plate dissipation and is not a good choice for a linear amplifier. They were however extremely cheap to purchase back then so if you wanted to keep costs down to maximize profits they were a good choice on only that dimension.
Good for a few parts but that is about it.

I would get a Pro 3 or forget it. I would want to get up to the newest most refined model of the series as I can get. I would rather wait until I could afford it or make a big effort to make it affordable i.e. sell some other gear, etc.

Look up the Koch method on the web.
Far better way of going about it.

In a word, no.
In several words, it actually never was!

I was there! I used the Ameco record which is probably the same. I got through it ok but didn't know any better at the time.
Back then we had to be able to write stuff down and focused far too much on that. We had to have 1 perfect continuous minute of hard copy SOMEWHERE inside of 5 minutes that was sent. Now you don't so I wouldn't want to learn it that way. I would want to learn it as just "head copy" and not written.
There are much better methods out there these days.

I still have what I copied on paper for my novice test...pretty scary looking!!