OUT OF THIN AIR

Eventually word came back to him that they had been dismantled into numbered sections and stored in a Government warehouse somewhere near Ottawa. These towers were not new, but they were all he could afford at the time. He quickly snapped them up at a warehouse price. They were shipped down to Prince Edward Island on a railroad flatcar. The delivery from the rail siding must have been spectacular, for there were only clay roads then. The site in those days was in the country, but today it is the location for a large shopping mall. How they got the tons of steel delivered there, whether by teams of horses or tractors, or both, I’ll never know; but I do know their arrival and subsequent erection was the talk of the Island, and Dad was whispered about being that nut Rogers again.

To erect steel towers of that weight and height requires the profes— sional skills of trained journeymen. Luckily, the Island hockey team, the Abbies, had two players who had been enticed to come down from Quebec and Ontario to play in the “Big Four” hockey league; Ray Stull and Harry Richardson, the players, were also experienced steel erectors. They stayed over after the hockey season and sorted out and erected the towers between them. The building of the transmitter house was supervised by George Morrison, a master carpenter who worked with Dad. On the day the towers were nearing completion, Dad called my mother on the phone:

“Flo, the steel is rising, I wanted you to know.”

That’s all he could say. He was overcome with emotion. My mother told me he was weeping, but his tears were tears of joy. How far he had come in radio with these giants of steel since the day he had erected his father’s ladder to sling a crude aerial from chimney to barn.

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