Young Wizards of the Airwaves

almost nineteen years. It started in 1907 and that year my father, Keith Sinclair Rogers, was just fifteen years old and he had launched himself, using bits of wire, brass screws and round cardboard boxes, and his own adventuresome imagination, into what was to become the age of radio.

He was one of a pioneering band of men around the world, all captivated by “the wireless”. The prospect of sending voices and music over the air without wires was then as incredible a dream as our dreams today of travel to faraway planets.

My father’s experiments were to carry him, his family and hundreds of colleagues and staff members, into four decades of commercial radio broadcasting in Canada’s Maritime Provinces. During those years he would see frail aerials of his boyhood turn into 550—foot transmitting towers sending news, music, entertainment and public affairs into five provinces. More than 300 people would come to work for him and his station—CFCY, The Friendly Voice of the Maritimes.

As a boy, he sent Morse code through the air to a friend down the block. As a man, he and his staff reached hundreds of thousands of people sitting in country kitchens in the dead of winter, or lolling on sunlit summer cottage porches. His work culminated in the construction of a television station: something he wrote into his charter years before it was a reality, calling it “pictures over the air.”

There were other broadcasters like my father. In some ways he was typical of the first wave of radio entrepreneurs who founded the industry in Canada. They were experimenters first. Then they saw the business potential, and acted upon it. But they also were keenly interested in public service, in the things they knew radio could do for a community, a province, a country.

In 1907, Keith Rogers was fifteen and he carried a little red book around with him. When I came to write these memories of my father, I found this red book while searching through the family papers. It is an old Army Signal Manual, soiled and worn, thumbed through by two generations of soldiers. You can hold it easily in the palm of your hand. I wondered why he had preserved it so carefully.

Its pages are thick with illustrations of men in uniforms predating the Boer War, demonstrating semiphore flags and signalling lamps. Across its title page my father had written, “C.F.C.Y. Radio Station, Charlottetown, started on the impetus of this 1907 class and this manual.” The class referred to were recruits of The No. 12 Signalling

Unit, which was the communications section of the old Island regiment,

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