OUT OF THIN AIR

Les shouted to his mother, “Hold my dinner Mom!” He was a keen cyclist and all that summer had been heavily involved in bicycle racing. The city speed limit for cars then was only twelve miles per hour, but Les could do almost thirty miles per hour on his bike. A quarter of a mile later he screeched to a halt in front of 143 Great George Street.

“Is the job still open, sir?” he asked Dad.

“Where did you come from?”

“From down the far end of Euston Street,” Les said.

“But I just this minute made the announcement,” said Dad, incred- ulously. “How did you get here so fast?”

“On my bicyle, sir.”

Dad hired him on the spot to start work the next day. George Beers, another young fellow, was hired for the same kind of work. Both boys delivered radios to customers in a Model A Ford. Les Peppin stayed on at CFCY for ten years and learned a lot about the radio business, eventually being on the air most of the time announcing and operating. During the war he served as a wireless operator in lonely lighthouses keeping watch on submarines.

When Les was hired, Dad had one full time employee, Ian Cochrane. Ian was a tall, lanky youth whose looks resembled those of Charles Lindburg, the famous aviator; so, everyone called him “Lindy”. Poor Lindy, 'though clever and sensitive, had all the awkwardness of gangling adolescence. He had started about six months earlier than Les, and had helped Tony Shelfoon build the new 100-watt transmitter.

Tony and Ian squabbled a lot, but they were both doing a good job of building the transmitter. Ian’s forte was wiring, while Tony’s was figuring out the intricacies of circuits. Dad was fond of them and amused by them both, so he smoothed over the ruffled feathers and kept them at It.

Towards the end of 1929, when the new Charlottetown Hotel was nearing completion, a small dynamo of a man by the name of John Quincy Adams breezed into the station, threw his hat on the office hat- rack and declared he was going to stay. He had been working on the electrical installation of the new hotel, and now that his work there was finished, he wanted to get a new job. From the start he called Dad, “Poppa.” Jack Adams was short and wirey with skin the colour of parch- ment suggesting a long association with city life. He had the dapper appearance of the former New Yorker that he was. Jack nonchalantly claimed that he was descended from, not one, but two United States

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