Looking Ahead to Television

For the past four years, my father had also been worrying about the family insurance business, W.K. Rogers Agencies. It was experi— encing financial problems and it was an emotional as well as a financial drain. He would spend hours going over the books, coming back to CFCY in the late afternoons looking grey and tired and very old. He finally had to look for a purchaser and he found one. The “Colonel” suddenly looked years younger. His step was quick. He was back to his brim-full life.

Happiness can be very intense, and it can be very brief. Three days after celebrating his sixty—second birthday and just nine days after he had spoken to the Men’s Association about television, my father died suddenly from a heart seizure.

His interest in communication had lasted a lifetime. He had been on the air using his amateur wireless transmitter VB 1 H1 in the days just before he died, talking to Robert Griffiths at the isolated Hudson Bay Company store at Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island to relay the happy news that his wife had just given birth to a son at the Prince Edward Island Hospital. Mrs. Griffiths had talked to her husband in the North over my Dad’s amateur wireless station.

I never heard my father say things like “I love life” or “I love people”. He didn’t need to. His humour, his sadnesses, his regrets, and his actions spoke these sentiments for him. Sometimes how a person feels about life and his fellow human beings can be reflected, caught, in the unasked-for gesture of another. For example, on the day of Dad’s funeral, early morning snow had fallen, but when the family woke up it had all been removed from the driveway and the steps—from all up and down in front of the house. Charlie Chamberlain had come very early in the morning and shovelled all that snow. It was his way of showing his respect and love.

The funeral was a solemn military one and I can remember the young soldiers in their uniforms and the flowers. But mostly I remember the streets lined with people that Sunday afternoon. Many had been lis- teners to his Sacred Hour and other programmes he had started. From the church right out to the cemetery people stood quietly on the side- walks or sat in their cars with their hats off as the funeral procession

passed by.

165