OUT OF THIN AIR

and arranged the backing to buy more stock and to rent a little place on Kent Street, Charlottetown. This little store was situated on the site where the new Veterans Affairs building now stands. Tony Shelfoon did the broadcasting and selling, while Angus MacMaster built radios and Dad concentrated on insurance and the very nascent CFCY.

At this stage there was no formal transmitter at the Kent Street store. The transmitter at Upper Hillsborough Street was unavailable during the day. So in order to put something over the air during the daytime, they improvised by cleverly maladjusting a radio receiver so that it sent out a signal instead of receiving one.

The afternoon “programmes” went out under the call letters CFCY. I say programs in quotes because there was no formal or planned program at all. Tony had the choice of playing a flat disk wind—up gramaphone, or an old wax cylinder Edison-Ediphone, depending on which was the more interesting. The microphone consisted of a con— verted earpiece of an old headset which was suspended in front of which— ever happened to be playing—the gramaphone or the Ediphone.

Tony’s interest, of course, lay in jazz. Jazz in those days was about as obnoxious to the older generation as heavy rock would be to most seniors today. Tony, much to the delight of the younger set, loved to play the “hot” numbers. One lunch time he was playing the “latest” when Dad rushed into the store and whipped off the offensive record and smashed it. “Damn it Tony,” he said, “I don’t mind you playing your infernal noise at times, but not at mealtimes! You just can’t eat soup in time to a fox-trot. It’s uncivilized.”

This was the “studio”. Again I say studio advisedly because the shop, office and studio were all the same thing. They tried to cut down exterior noise by tenting the mike and record—player with a coat or a blanket, but the hiss of the needle drowned out the music. They just let it go in the end. If Tony was playing something over the air and a customer came in, he waited on them and their conversation went over the air too.

Tony recalled later during a trip to Charlottetown that one of the things that stayed with him was Dad’s insistence on the use of proper language:

“The search for the right word and its pronunciation developed in me a feel for language. I didn’t get into what was considered

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