A Secret Visit from Princess Juliana "If you could do a reasonably good job on CHCK, you were then allowed to try out on the larger station CFCY. One thing I remember most fondly was the amount of freedom that was given to individual announcers to choose their own material. We had Standard and Langworth Transcription Libraries and hundreds of commercial record¬ ings. It was a fine library and I got to know it well as one of my first assignments was to catalogue hundreds of cards." Bill Brown , who had been at CFCY almost four years doing news reporting and sports broadcasting, and Syd Kennedy started the "Early Birds". They wrote the skits and ran the program. Jack Adams , the Chief engineer and his assistant Bob Large would join in from the transmitter and Les Peppin from the control room. It was a breakfast club type of program and they were allowed the greatest latitude. Sometimes Syd would play beautiful music and read poetry. Listeners sent in material too, quite often under assumed names. One listener from Antigonish called herself "Rara Avis" meaning rare bird. No one knew who she was. Syd , who was outgoing and friendly with a tremendous sense of humour, used her letters regularly over a three year period and it became a "friendship through the air", neither having met the other. He read her funny stories and her poetry. Later when she was a member of the Wartime Prices and Trade Board, she went in to see him at his Halifax office at the CBC. Her name was Eileen Cameron Henry and she still lives in Antigonish N.S . where she was Deputy Mayor . Mrs. Henry has published in Ladies Home Journal and Chatelaine and has written three books of poetry, "Comfort Me with Apples", "Dancer In The Dust" and "An ". "The Early Birds" developed a large audience among convalescents and on one occasion Syd , Bill and Les travelled to New Glasgow , Nova Scotia where their broadcast originated at the bedside of a shut-in lis¬ tener, Mary Helen Brown who signed her inspirational letters, "Scraps". One day, the Early Birds played the music for an actual wedding. One of their regular listeners was getting married and she lived in a remote district of Nova Scotia and would be married at home. They had no piano or musical instruments. "I would be ever so grateful to our favourite radio station, CFCY, if you would play the Wedding March for me on the air." This of course excited the imagination of Syd Kennedy who was incurably romantic. He chose the right recording and wrote, assuring the bride-to-be that he would carry out her wishes at the precise time 107