Radio Landmark at Moose River

When word that the men might be alive reached the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission’s newsroom in Halifax, J. Frank Willis grabbed a desk microphone and whatever meagre equipment he could lay his hands on, and with his colleagues from CHNS, Arleigh Canning and Cecil Landry, rushed to the disaster site where they began a round— the-clock narration of the rescue operations.

Willis’ dramatic voice and Vivid narration transfixed listeners in front of their radio sets across the whole of North America. They felt they were actually standing there at the pit head. Throughout the ten days of the operation, work stopped, people cried and held prayer vigils in the fervent hope that the exhausted rescue workers would be successful.

The Moose River Broadcasts, as they came to be called, were the first significant actuality radio news reports in North America. It was a marathon with radio stations on the air night and day. All of the 58 radio stations in Canada carried the broadcasts and 650 radio stations in the United States of the Mutual, Columbia and National broadcasting networks did so as well, broadcasting reports every hour on the hour. Dad never closed down radio station CFCY as long as the reports were coming in, and during the final days we stayed on the air all night long. The lone voice of Frank Willis, brimming with emotion and compas- sion, was the focal point for millions of people as they heard his account of the last stages of the rescue:

The men are coming out. The rescue has been accomplished. This long looked for victory is now in our hands, and those men are coming out! And I tell you ladies and gentlemen—words almost fail me to describe this macabre, this grotesque scene at the head of this pit—it’s like something from the Arabian Nights. I’ll remember it to the last of my life. It is the most spec- tacular thing I have ever witnessed. Those few lights glimmering down on the hundreds of miners from all over Canada, waiting there, watching to see their victory finally accomplished.

The relief felt was in proportion to the intensity shared, and the Pealing of church bells could be heard throughout the land. There were equally close ties between CFCY and the listeners in

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