OUT OF THIN AIR obsolete as we had been using water-cooled tubes and these with their plumbing complications had to be replaced. He designed a transmitter using the new air-cooled tubes. Another native of Lunenburg, Max Corkum , was hired as Assistant- Engineer . It took two years to replace the transmitter, rack by rack, but finally we had a new high efficiency Class B modulation system. Completely reconstructed inside, the transmitter now needed a classy new front and in the Bruce Stewart Co . they found a local machine shop and foundry well able to do the job. The steel for the front panels was brought in and cut to size. Merrill and Max, having had experience in a well-known foundry in Lunenburg, filed the steel racks and panels to a perfect fit. When it was finished and painted in an autobody shop, it was a professional-looking transmitter with a centre strip running the whole length in deep maroon trimmed with chrome. These old trans¬ mitters were not compact like those of today and the overall length was about sixteen feet. Max told me that it was copied from an RCA Victor model, one of the latest designs of that particular time. Merrill and Max were brothers-in-law and a strong family bond existed between them. They relieved the long monotonous hours at the transmitter with some harmless fun. They persuaded Dad that if they had to be there until one o'clock in the morning to copy news from Transradio Press, they might as well be on the air. Using all the cast-off records from the studio they put on a program of their own for after-midnight listeners. They had gath¬ ered up quite an audience when they decided to try something new. Believing that if you played a record, no matter what it was, over and over again, you could create a hit, they decided to demonstrate this. They picked the worst possible song. "I still remember it", Max declared. "It was called, 'When The Soup Begins To Droop Down Father's Vest' and we played it over and over again using ficticious names for people we said had requested this particular selection. Then we began to get real letters from real people who wanted this perfectly dreadful song played on the air. It became popular—so popular that one time when I was vacationing and went over to , I stopped at a restaurant and there it was printed on the nickelodeon, 'When The Soup Begins To Droop Down Father's Vest'. It was one way to prove a point". Max enjoyed the country. He was a teenager and Dad used to take him fishing and hunting. He would drop into the transmitter. "Come along, Max, I'm going fishing." 130