OUT OF THIN AIR

allied victory at the end of the war. I remember this tall, transplanted Englishman during the thirty years that he was the senior newscaster at CFCY. He had come to Canada for his health. He was kindly and courteous and he walked with the grace of the expert tennis player, for he soon became the Island Tennis Champion. When Stuart married Agnes Sherrin of Crapaud and settled down here, he produced and directed operettas and plays.

He was a professional through and through and spent much time preparing and rehearsing the news prior to going on the air.

Earlier, we had received a very limited service of bulletins from The Canadian Press, but this was not extensive enough. We needed more news so my father purchased Transradio Press service. This was sent out from New York by wireless in Morse Code and had to be transcribed. It was the first service available to us, and it was awkward and unreliable as the transmissions would be interrupted by weather conditions and static. The Chief Engineer Merrill Young and his assistants Mac Balcolm and Max Corkum all were proficient Morse Code operators but they were beginning to rebuild the transmitter and Transradio Press was moved into the city studio in order to give the transmitter staff more time. Eddie MacLennan was hired as operator. When Eddie left to join the Ferry Command, Les Peppin transcribed the news for a time, but he too left for wartime service with the Department of Transport and once again my father was looking for an operator. The problem was solved when a young girl, Nora Downe. heard about the job. She had learned the Morse Code as a Girl Guide and had no idea that this was a position that women didn’t normally fill. It was at the beginning of the war. She was put to work immediately.

The apparatus she used was called a Vis—a—Sig. It was a visual indi— cation of a signal and it responded to the sound of the Morse Code char— acters and printed them. A pen would write on a ticker tape that crossed over the top of the typewriter and would mark down little pointed high places for dots and long bars for dashes. In the early war years, Nora would transcribe important news from this machine. At times the static would wipe out the transmission and then she would either leave a large space for Stuart Dickson to figure out, or “just fill in the gaps herself! " I remember hearing Nora say recently,

“Everyone was underpaid. I made $7.50 a week, and finally got up to $16.50 a week. Now girls have apartments, run cars, have clothes and serve wine. We all worked for the love of it. I would have done

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