OUT OF THIN AIR

the subject chosen. The plays were original and Ruth Boswell contrib- uted the music. Claiming to have “always been nervous before a broad- cast” Mrs. Brown remembers one program when the men on the other side of the control room window were laughing so hard they couldn’t keep their minds on the program and she couldn’t understand why. In the play, “The Clown With the Broken Heart” a whistle was required to be blown every time the clown would speak. At the last moment she had rummaged around the house and found a Girl Guide whistle that unfortunately had a very shrill sound. Arriving at the studio she asked the operator to listen over the microphone to see if the whistle would be alright. When she blew it, it nearly blew him out of his chair.

“Don’t ever do that again. . .you’ll blow the whole system to pieces!” he said.

“Then what can I do?”

“Well, you should be back as far as that window at the back of the studio.”

By this time she had taken off her shoes, the better to run in stocking feet. There she was, running to the back of the studio, blowing her whistle and running back to the mike all the time desperately trying to find her place in the play. The control operators laughed all the time she was on the air that day.

These programs were a way of educating children about well-loved books and were enjoyed by grown-ups as well as the children. I remem— ber that every city school was involved and hundreds of young people took part.

The children’s program I knew most about was The Sleepy Town Express. In fact my alter-ego is the Story Teller. I find it difficult to write about this imaginary character who used to talk to a four-inch elf called “Little Nose” and to a duck called “Jennifer”. The Story Teller has trav— elled on excursions through time and space by way of a Magic Machine and at Christmas she talked to Santa Claus. She has been with me since I was twelve and we were on the air together for over forty-five years.

It started out quite naturally back in 1925 when broadcasts were simple affairs without music or sound effects. The fact that the voice could be broadcast and picked up on a receiving set fifty or sixty miles away was a phenomenal event.

My first broadcast, a radio telephone program as they were called then, was on a carbon microphone developed from an early telephone. I was only twelve and in Miss Mary Irving’s Grade Seven class in Prince

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