Looking Ahead to Television

in the hall. This of course was before the years of Dr. Dudley White and his enlightened programs of rehabilitation.

My father’s answer to the isolation his heart attack had placed him in, was to turn on his amateur radio transmitter and “chew the rag” with his “ham” friends in distant countries. First he had the help of other amateur operators. Some equipment was moved from the basement to his bedroom and wires, like in the old days, were strung everywhere. He was putting out up to five hundred watts. For an antenna several years before, Dad had searched the Island for the highest tree but could not find one that suited him and with the help of the telephone company, he ordered a large pole from British Columbia. It arrived one day at high noon, tying up traffic for blocks around as the men endeavoured to get it around a corner. It was set up in a deep hole'in the middle of Mother’s garden. Dad had fibbed a little. It wouldn’t be much of a pole, he had told her. She would hardly be able to see it among the trees and shrubs. When it arrived the pole was big and round and ugly. It was nearly fifty feet high. The situation was saved because when my Mother saw it, she was so shocked she couldn’t utter a word.

I’ve been told by Walter Hyndman that Dad was the first amateur ham radio operator in Prince Edward Island but I am not sure there is proof of that. Certainly he was one of the first. He referred to himself as 1H1 “One Happy Indian”. His cheery voice could be heard calling “CQ....CQ, VElHI calling CQ....come in anyone...calling CQ....”

He would talk to a “Ham” in South Gate, California and in Derby, England, and to one in Chicago. A log of the cards that came that year were from states all over the USA, but he also talked to such diverse places as Resolution Island in the north and to the R.A.F. base in Rangoon, Burma. Marianne hurried over from Halifax to cheer him up. She found him sitting up in bed in the middle of it all and he told her that amateur radio had “saved his life”.

When spring finally came and he heard the wild geese honking as they flew over his house and headed up the West River, he was deter— mined that he would get well, and he took a trip out west to attend the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters. On the way he wanted to see the place called Sand Point, Idaho just over the border from Canada, where his father “WK.” and his mother had lived in the early days of their marriage. My brother Bill went with them to do some of the driving. Being true Prince Edward Island people they stopped every once in a while to visit a relative here and one there, and

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