Young Wizards of the Airwaves But Mother said he was reassured rather slowly because she could never get her speed up. After a courtship of six years, they married at age twenty-one, on May 7, 1913. During the decade prior to World War I, the army was keenly inter¬ ested in wireless telegraphy as radio was known then. Although basic training for signallers was still based mainly on the use of flags and lamps, the armed forces encouraged experimentation with wireless. Indeed, the first government licences issued to wireless communicators were to militia units. One of the earliest in Canada—XAR—was issued in 1909, to my father, at the Charlottetown Armoury. Also during these years, the number of enthusiasts for the new technology was growing. In Charlottetown they tended to gravitate toward the No. 12 Signalling Unit. Wireless was in. The Canadian Coastguard was using it to great advantage. In the winter of 1909, Dad got a job for seven months as wireless operator aboard the ice-breaker Minto relieving the regular operator who was taking time off because his wife was having a baby. Two years later, Grandfather retired as commanding officer of the No. 12 Signalling Unit and Dad , now Lt. K.S. Rogers , replaced him. Around father gathered a group of devotees who, as well as learning from him in the militia, also took a course from him at the Y.M.C. A. Today when we hear a term like "militiaman" an image of a grown man, armed to the teeth, comes to mind. But the militiamen of the No. 12 Signals were young boys. One of them, Major General "Bunny" Weeks, CB, CBE, MC, MM, CD, Rtd., recalled that his mother, because it was raining, wouldn't let him go on a dress parade to be inspected by Sir Ian Hamilton , unless he wore his rubber boots. In the summer of 1911, Father and his squad built the first success¬ ful portable military wireless set in Canada at Petawawa military camp near Ottawa. Today we think of mobile sets as being compact. But this early "portable" wireless pack-set required two horses to drag it onto the field and four men to carry it when horse-power wasn't available. It must be difficult for people born into the high technology era of today to appreciate the excitement felt by the radio pioneers of those days. In old sepia photographs of them posing self-consciously beside antique and cumbersome equipment, they look quaint and unsophisti¬ cated. Nothing could be further from the truth. In their day, they were the sophisticates. They were the astronauts of the airwaves. They lived in a time when people who heard voices 11