THE GIFT OF THE GAB

Following the graduation ceremonies and Convocation Ball at four o'clock in the afternoon on that first Friday of May, 1929, my father and I drove back from Saskatoon to Moose Jaw on Saturday. At six that evening I rang Fred Workman, News Editor of the Times-Herald, at his home and asked for a job as cub reporter. After all, I had covered the Boys ' Parliament sessions and other church activities for him on a free lance basis, and I was sure he knew I was determined to take up journalism as a full-time and life-long career.

Mr Workman was a tall rangy Presbyterian with crew-cut greying hair and was an inveterate pipe-smoker. At the Times-Herald he was second in command to Mr Thomas Miller, the owner and proprietor of the newspaper. When I spoke to him after nine o'clock Saturday evening he said he had me in mind but the paper could pay only $15 per week. I could never have said it to him face to face, but over the telephone I hesitated and said at nine thirty PM , But I thought the newspaper business was booming! Well, yes, Fred Workman said, but we always start reporters at $15. There was another pause, and I waited; then he said, Did you get a B.A. degree? I admitted it and there was a shorter pause, O.K. said Mr. Workman, We'll start you at $20. Come in by 8.30 in the morning . He rang off and I felt a warm glow of appreciation for Fred Workman who had just offered me my first full-time job in journalism.

So it was that just after eight fifteen in the morning on Monday, May 6th, 1929 I arrived at the Times-Herald editorial offices and found the place locked up tight. Ten minutes later the staff began to arrive and at nine o'clock Fred Workman walked in to introduce me to the staff and show me around the building.

The Times Block was a three-storey building with the upper two floors given over to residential flats. It was located on First Avenue, N.W. between the Stadacona Apartments and the Court House. Down a metal stairway from the lane was a small square of benches where the newspaper delivery boys sat in a queue, awaiting their turn with Mr. Ted Pegg, Circulation Manager, to receive the papers for delivery. Here in the basement and behind Mr Pegg was Bill Joyner and his wrapping counter, beyond which roared the mighty Goss Printing Press which poured out 300 copies of the 16-page daily every minute. Joe Upex was engineer in charge of the press and he was also captain of the Times-Herald baseball team. Being a very friendly fellow he once let me punch the red button that started the press at six every morning . It was fascinating to watch the great rolls of white newsprint turn as the thin sheets moved into the press, round inky lead plates, through rollers and down the V-shaped folding machine, to be cut into proper size, folded, stacked sideways and passed into waiting hands by nine o'clock AM . The remaining basement space was devoted to poster printing machines, and the furnace at the back, where the asbestos cards, each in the form of a page, were placed in moulds for molten lead to flow around them producing curved plates, one for each page. These were fastened, when cool, to the press rollers by seven PM .

The ground floor of the Times Building housed the Business Office(Circulation, Want-Ads, Accounts and the private office of Mr Thomas Miller) at the front; behind it was the Composing Room with its rows of eight linotype machines along the north wall and the fonts of type and form-tables. On these the lead type was laid out in arranged columns by Bill Adair the foreman. Later in my newspaper career I was privileged to act as front page editor for a short time during which I enjoyed writing the 8-column headline and then arranging the other headlines, photo blocks and single or double columns to present a well-balanced and good looking front page spread. When all details of the front page set-up were agreed, and Bill Adair had tightened up the form with his screw-lock, the plate was wheeled on its steel trolley to the back where the asbestos mat was impressed. The mat was then sent below to Joe Upex and the plate-making lead cauldron.

In the northwest corner of the first floor was the small office of W.V. Stevens, the tall, balding, pipe-smoking Telegraph Editor, who dealt with world news. This was received in the next room on Creed teleprinters from the wires of the Canadian Press. These machines were presided over and kept in order by the operator, Floyd Dash. This young man later persuaded me to arrange and present a series of music appreciation talks every Monday evening for the Baptist Young People's Group of which he was president.

The editorial offices of the Times-Herald were crowded into three rooms at the front of the building. Fred Workman shared a room with Harold Davies, an older Englishman who was Chief Reporter and who often sat in for Fred as Editor. The middle room was occupied by Mrs Effie Storer, the Social Editor, who handled the ladies ' page, and the third room contained five small desks, a typewriter on each. On one side of this room were the Sports Editor and his assistant, Murray Brown, and next to them was a general reporter, Allan Robinson, while in the left corner was Jim Miller, nephew of the Times-Herald owner. The fifth desk was mine. Jim showed me around for awhile and we became friends until he moved to news work in Toronto within the year.

In 1929 the work of a cub reporter on a small town daily newspaper occupied his time from early morning until often late at night, seven days a week in other words whenever something newsworthy was happening it had to be covered, and there were no limits to the time spent or the hours required to adequately cover any given assignment. There were no unions or guilds or other associations for they were not needed; our employers were fair-minded and trustworthy, but the greatest incentive of all was the fact that, as reporters, we enjoyed the smell of printers ' ink as much as the actor is supposed to enjoy the smell of grease-paint we loved our jobs and would usually much rather be chasing down a hot story than eating.

The owner and Editor-in-Chief of the Times-Herald, Mr Thomas Miller was a staunch Liberal supporter of William Lyon MacKenzie King and in later years was appointed by the Prime Minister as a Canadian Senator. He was an ardent Presbyterian and supported all church activities, especially the Womens ' Christian Temperance Union(WCTU), the Down With Drink Society, the YMCA, the YWCA and St Andrews's Church. As proprietor of the Times-Herald Newspaper he refused to accept advertising for alcoholic drinks, nor would he allow the pages of our puritanical newspaper to be sullied with advertisements for cigarettes or tobacco. However, he never seemed to object to members of his staff who had succumbed to the pleasures of the weed and smoked like chimney-pots. On the whole we were an abstemious lot, but when the depression began to bite into salary rises during the early 30s, and escalating prices made living all the more precarious, some of us wondered if Tom Miller might have paid his staff what they felt to be their well-earned incremental increases by accepting a few extra advertisements. But we were probably wrong to harbour such selfish thoughts, especially when we knew it would never happen.

During the eight years I worked for Fred Workman he never lectured me on the practice or ethics of journalism, and in assigning me to a story he never told me what to do. I like to think he had faith in my common sense to turn in the right report. The general procedure was for the editorial staff to work to a 1.30pm daily deadline, which could sometimes be stretched to 2pm so that the presses could roll anytime between 4 and 4.30pm. The Saturday deadline was 12 noon. Reporters had from 8.30am to 10am to write up the meeting or function they may have been covering the night before, or else they re-wrote stories from the morning edition of the Regina Leader-Post. Just before ten o'clock the reporters set out on their beats. Harold Davies covered the City Hall, the mayor's office and the C.P.R. offices; Jim Miller covered the Police Station and the High Courts, when in session, and I began with the funeral parlour beat and the Board of Trade office, plus weekly meetings and speeches at the Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs in the Grant Hall Hotel. The first story I wrote as a full-time reporter concerned the death of a local man who had been visiting friends in Indiana and whose remains were being sent back to Moose Jaw for burial.

In my first week at work there occurred an extremely gory accident at the College crossing, a point where the main line of the railway crosses the motor road to Regina just east of the city. At dawn on Friday morning a CPR freight train, travelling at high speed, had crashed into an old Model-T Ford killing, in a rather mangled mess, the entire staff of five from a Chinese restaurant who were en route to Regina for a visit with relatives. When I entered the embalming room of the funeral parlour that morning the white-tiled room, ablaze with fluorescent light, was like a charnel-house. On several tables draped with white oil-cloth reposed the battered and bloody remains of what was left of five Chinese bodies, and Fred Peavy, the mortician-embalmer, was apparently trying to piece them together to make up the contents of five plain wooden coffins. As I looked in and stiffened with surprise and horror at the scene, he appeared to be putting a handful of grey matter back into a broken skull. His hands and arms, encased in long white rubber gloves, were crimson with blood and there were gory pieces of human skin and bone on the tables. He looked up at me and grinned, Hell of a mess, he said, but we'll get them sorted out. Shouldn't stay here long, young man. No names for these as yet, they're all Chinese. Lem will give you anything else we've got. He flicked his hand and I thought I saw a few spots of red appear on the shiny white tile beside me. I pulled the door shut and almost ran to the front door and into Langdon Crescent garden, where I stood for five minutes breathing in the fresh air. When I felt able, I returned to the house where Lem, the embalmer's brother, gave me all the particulars he had of the accident and suggested the police department would have any further details.

Soon after taking up my job as cub reporter I bought myself a big radio and a gramophone and continued collecting recordings of Gilbert Sullivan and classical music. During that summer I hitch-hiked to Regina as often as possible on weekends to visit Wilf Scott or Peter Friedgut. The latter had just changed his name to Freygood and was preparing to move to Montreal having recently married a young Jewish girl called Ruby. The marriage did not last, but Peter eventually did very well in Montreal as a printing salesman. It was on one of these weekend trips to Regina that I wrote my first outside interview for the paper an interview with John Philip Sousa.

During the last week of July or the first week of August every year, the Provincial Exhibition was held in Regina a gala display of all manner of farm products, poultry and livestock, coupled with an extravaganza by way of a grandstand show and horse-racing. The 1929 Exhibition featured a 3-hour stage show with vaudeville acts and dancing girls, and the first Canadian appearance of John Philip Sousa's famous band. It was not difficult to secure an appointment to interview the great director and we met in his caravan after the Saturday matinee performance.

He was a burly man of average height, white-haired and distinguished looking. The story I had heard was that, instead of John Philip Sousa being the great all-American bandmaster he was really an Englishman, born in Gosport, Hants. He emigrated to Washington D.C. with his wife and two young sons, John and Philip, and took up a job as cornet player with the Barnum Bailey Circus band. His English name was Samuel Ostrander and on the side of his trumpet case he had painted his initials, S.O. followed by the letters U.S.A. the field of his musical travels with the circus. When he became known as the composer of marches and was about to take up his first bandmaster post, his wife suggested he use the letters on his case, S.O.U.S.A. as a professional name, and he took the names of his sons as his Christian names. Thus for many years and in many lands this great bandmaster was known as John Philip Sousa.

I enjoyed thoroughly my half-hour with Sousa for he was the most genial of hosts, but when I asked for confirmation of the Samuel Ostrander story he only smiled broadly, shaking his head. Seeing my disappointment he winked an eye and said, Well, I must admit that it makes a good story. So we left it at that. Fred Workman was pleased with my scooping the Regina Leader-Post, adding, and we picked it right out of their own front yard.

After a few months as a general news reporter I was given a wider range of assignments and when Jim Miller left, my regular beats included the monthly School Board meetings and the daily Police Court and High Court sessions. In time I was able to replace Harold Davies in covering the Monday evening sessions of the City Council, with daily morning calls on the offices of the mayor and Dan Craven, the City Clerk. Dan always had a friendly welcome for The Press. Meanwhile, the paper had taken on a new cub reporter in the person of Matthew Smith, a tall gangling young man who was to go far in his chosen field.

In the early 1930s in western Canada there was a growing spirit of competition among journalists; it was the age of the great American writers O.O. McIntyre, Don Marquis and Walter Winchell. In Canada we had such writers to look up to as Hector Charlesworth in Toronto, Grattan O'Leary in Ottawa and John W. Dafoe in Winnipeg. Our competition and opposition in Moose Jaw was the resident staff writer of the Regina Leader-Post who managed his paper's local bureau. This post was successively occupied by three of the best: Chris Higgenbotham, Bill Thompson and Dick Sanborn, with whom our Times-Herald man would share Press facilities at most of the local functions and general community activities. We were friends, but we scooped each other whenever and however we could, claiming all to be fair in love and inter-city journalism.

Having established myself in a job I again became active in boys ' work and took charge of additional Tuxis Boys ' groups in company with Lincoln Lovett, Chief Clerk at the Land Titles Office. It was he who taught some of us how to use a.38 calibre revolver when we went hiking on the rolling prairies for shooting competitions, with gophers or tin cans as our main targets.

In my spare time I saw a lot of John Keay, an Agriculture graduate of the U. of Saskatchewan and a good friend, as well as Jerry Harwood and Quincey Moffat with whom I was closely associated in organizing the annual Boys ' Parliament elections. On one occasion I learned the Morse code and, with a hand-made press-switch attached to a light bulb, flashed messages to Willard Hamilton holding a similar device, perched on the roof of his house on Oxford Street. He flashed signals back to me and then ran downstairs to check by telephone to see if the message had been sent and received correctly. During these activities it was Fraser Muirhead who remained my constant friend and companion.

For more than 50 years I have nurtured what might be called an insatiable interest in China and the arts, crafts, and accomplishments of the Chinese people, the oldest extant civilization on earth. Whether this burning interest came from a transmigration from a previous existence I do not know, but it may have been sparked off by a small and relatively insignificant incident which occurred in the spring of 1929.

From time to time, and I think mainly to keep in touch, Aunt Janie would ring me to ask if I could come to the house to help with a small task, such as fixing the cellar door, hammering in a stray loose plank over the cistern and so on although she must have known as well as I did how useless I was at such household chores. One day she rang me to ask if I could come along on Saturday and help plant potatoes in the back yard; Uncle John is far too busy at this time of the year. So I agreed to go along. When I mentioned this to my father he said he had to drive up that way and would take me in the car and call back for me within a couple of hours. This suited me well and by 10am that day I was hoeing and raking the 60-foot square potato patch in preparation for the sowing. Aunt Janie had sliced up two large buckets full of seed potatoes, and I began digging the holes for the planting. I was digging the last row next to the gravel path when my father returned. He looked at the holes I had dug and grinned. A bit deep for potatoes, those holes, he said, My goodness, boy, if you dig much deeper you'll land up in China! I stopped digging and looked at him; what an engaging idea, what a fascinating thought! Ever since then, China in its many and varied aspects has been in my mind, and I believe it was on that Saturday morning in Aunt Janie's potato patch that I first became interested in the Orient.

One of my assets in journalism, as Fred Workman told me some years later, was the habit of creating stories and features by developing an idea and then taking the necessary steps to work it into an acceptable feature. It was simply a question, Fred declared, of having a nose for news and added that only a competent reporter could make a good story out of unlikely ingredients.

I was soon turning in more stories of my own choice and selection than those by regular assignment. Like any other youth, I was thrilled by the annual visits of the big circus, and when the Al G. Barnes Circus came to town I paid my own way in to the show and sat up that night writing the first big-top review for the Times-Herald, which Fred Workman accepted with alacrity. Later that summer I was able to turn in a similar review of the main performance of the Sels Floto Circus. In the weeks following I began to write reviews of local stage plays and the bigger and better films that my friend E.P. Fields brought to the Capitol Theatre. I even wrote a monthly column of book reviews plus a feature on newly released recordings, both popular and classical. I remember a lingering preference for Ruth Etting because she reminded me of Marion Brown.

It was during my second year as a news reporter that I was assigned to the Police Court beat. Every weekday morning just before 10 o'clock I would visit the Chief of Police, John Fyvie, a tall dour and somewhat lugubrious ex-CPR policeman who had first served as a bobbie in his home town of Aberdeen, Scotland. He had spent most of the intervening years with the Canadian Pacific Railway police in Montreal. His office was immediately to the right as one entered the Police Station, with the charge desk on the left, presided over by Inspector Alex Bell, or Sergeant Hendry. On most days there were cases to be heard by Magistrates G.R. Tretheway, Wm. Ross, M.P. or sometimes Charles Schull, father of my fellow-writer Joseph Schull. I would follow the police officers escorting the prisoner or prisoners up a flight of stairs into the small but impressive court-room, where I took a chair reserved for reporters at counsel's table.

Police Court trials usually included a miscellaneous collection of well-known ne'er-do-wells picked up over the weekend and arraigned on Monday morning to face drunk and disorderly charges. There was also the occasional case of petty theft, street fighting or traffic offences which often ended up with a plea of Guilty and a fine of a few dollars or a short period in goal. On occasion there were more serious charges where preliminary hearings were held and the case either dismissed or passed on for trial at a higher court.

On mornings when there was no case for the court I used to enjoy sitting in Chief Fyvie's office and hearing him talk of the good old days of the enforcement of law and order in Scotland and in Montreal. Chief Fyvie may have passed the retirement age but he was still in fine shape physically. I remember being with him when a drunken drug addict, brought to his door by Sgt. Hendry, broke away and lunged at Chief Fyvie bringing up his hand-cuffed wrists to strike the chief in the face. Fending him off with his left arm Chief Fyvie knocked the man down with a tremendous blow of his right fist. The red-faced sergeant scrambled to subdue his recalcitrant prisoner.

It was Chief Fyvie who first introduced me to the fine travelogue books of H.V. Morton when he loaned me a copy of In Search of Scotland. From then on I referred, whenever possible, to my Scottish ancestry when we chatted. Chief Fyvie had a cynical view of the teaching profession, quoting an old Scottish saying that a teacher is a man among boys, and a boy among men. I argued this point with him, but he was obdurate in the matter.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police also enforced the law across Canada and their jurisdiction was in the rural areas beyond city limits. In charge of the Moose Jaw R.C.M.P. contingent was Sergeant Frank Doherty, and, as police reporter, I regularly called at his office for news. On a Tuesday morning in January a telephone call came from a farmer in the Briercrest area to report the murder of a young farm hand, apparently by another farm worker, a mid-European emigrant named Peter Eli Janotte. Bill Thompson of the Leader-Post and I cadged a ride with Sergeant Doherty and his redcoated men to Briercrest and took part in the search for Janotte. The story was that the two men, who shared living quarters in the barn of their farmer-employer, had quarrelled after a drinking bout during the night. When the farmer went to the barn after hearing gunshots he had found the body of the younger worker, but Janotte had vanished with a shotgun. There were tracks over the snow and we followed them that day. At about four o'clock in the afternoon, just before dusk, we came to a wooded bluff. Suddenly shots rang out and I realized with fright that Janotte was shooting at us. Reporters and police rushed for cover, watching Janotte as he ran up the banks of a nearby gully. He turned there and waved his gun at us. In spite of the cold(the temperature was about 30 F below zero) our tracking of the wanted man continued throughout that night, and he was captured, as he slept, by Doherty in an unused farm building the following day. The prisoner pleaded Not Guilty through the preliminary hearings and trial in the King's Bench Court, where Mr Justice Embury found him guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging. Bill Thompson and I, as the reporters who had seen the case through from start to finish, were invited officially to be present at the hanging in Regina Jail. As it happened, we both had other engagements on that bright but final morning for Peter Eli Janotte, who apparently died quietly and without protest, according to those who were able to attend.

Unless either of us was out on a noon-time assignment Fred Workman and I usually had lunch together at Mrs Pete Stewart's Bakery Lunch-Room on Main Street, just down the back lane from the Times ' Building. I learned a great deal from Fred. One bit of hitherto unknown information was that the Canadian Pacific Railway Press Office sometimes gave out passes for rail travel anywhere in Canada to bona fide newspaper reporters. Being one who never liked to let an opportunity slip by, I wrote that afternoon to Hugh Campbell, CPR Press Officer in Winnipeg, requesting a rail pass to Vancouver and return.

When the pass came and I had arranged for a fortnight's holiday I travelled to the Pacific coast in a day coach: overnight to Calgary, and on for another 24 hours through the glorious panorama of the Rockies to Burrard Inlet, English Bay and Stanley Park, Vancouver. Taking a room at the YMCA I made side-trips to Victoria, Nanaimo and Seattle, and vowed that next time I would go further south to see San Francisco, Los Angeles, Hollywood and Mexico. Meanwhile I discovered that the Vancouver Province, a Southam newspaper, was devoting a full page feature every weekend on a Canadian province. I called on the editor and sold him the idea that I should write the feature on my province Saskatchewan, which I did, thus earning $30. towards the expenses of my Vancouver holiday. As a prairie youth I loved Vancouver and the great expanse of open sea, and hoped to live there some day.

By similar arrangement with the CPR next year I travelled to Montreal and, not knowing the city, asked for a room in the CPR hotel which turned out to be the St. Viger. To my surprise and consternation I found the St Viger to be about the oldest hotel in Canada, probably First Class A-l in its time, but now somewhat run down, although the rooms were large and rather ornate. The St Viger was located facing Place Viger in the heart of the French-speaking part of Montreal. While it was charming I was not at all happy there so I gave up the grandiose life and moved over to the Peel Street YMCA. I walked for miles exploring Montreal and enjoyed the view from Mount Royal overlooking the city and the great sweep of the St Lawrence River. Seldom before had I seen so many priests and nuns on the streets or as many churches per square mile. On my last day there I was literally pushed out of a small news agent's shop by a pair of youths for requesting a box of matches in English rather than in French; I even tried my one and only French joke on them and said Quel fromage! but it got me nowhere but out!

The CPR free-pass travel privilege was becoming an annual habit and the following year I took my holidays to New York finding a small but comfortable room at the Hotel Bristol on W. 47th Street, not far from Broadway, Times Square and Radio City. One of Fred Workman's favourite radio stars was Jessica Dragonette, whose beautiful voice was heard with Andre Kostelanetz and his Orchestra every Friday evening from NBC's Radio City. I had promised him that I would look her up, convey his admiring regards, and perhaps even bring him back a signed photograph of Miss Dragonette. Making myself known to the Press Department of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Centre, I was first taken to see the James Melton Show, another extremely popular national network feature. Melton, whose 78 rpm recordings were sold by the million across the USA and Canada, was a charming fellow. After his show, which ended at lOpm, he and I chatted about popularity polls, and at his suggestion, because of the noise in the studio auditorium, we stepped out onto the small balcony adjoining the fire escape stairway. It overlooked the lights of Manhattan some 47 storeys below. When we finished our chat and tried to re-enter the auditorium we found the double doors were tight shut and we were locked out. We banged on the door and shouted to no avail, and after awhile had no choice but to use the fire stairs. It took us more than an hour to make our way down those 47 double flights of metal stairs, but we were young and healthy and we enjoyed steins of lager when we finally reached a ground level bar.

A good eight hour sleep following a hot bath did not prevent a certain stiffness of limbs when I attended the Cities Service programme rehearsal with Jessica Dragonette and Andre Kostelanetz the next afternoon. The show was given before an invited audience of some 1,200 music fans each week, and as a visiting newspaperman I was afforded special treatment. Jessica, a petite blonde with the voice of an angel, was most kind, considerate and friendly; we posed for photos with the director and announcer. After the show we were joined by Jessica's sister, Mrs Celia Lofthouse, and the three of us were soon taxi-bound to the Dragonette apartment in a penthouse at 350 East 57th Street for coffee and a nightcap. In the years that followed I was to be in that lovely apartment many times visiting Jessica and Celia, who served the most delicious toasted bacon sandwiches and coffee that I have ever tasted. Celia was Jessica's unofficial manager, and there were hints and innuendos among show business personnel that she made things difficult and was hard to get along with in any deals with agencies and broadcasting networks. Jessica answered all such charges in her autobiography Fame Is A Song a copy of which, suitably inscribed, she presented to me on a subsequent New York visit. I returned from that first Manhattan holiday aglow with the pleasure of new friends acquired in New York's radio circles, and, of course, a large autographed photo of Jessica for Fred Workman.

In the course of my newspaper work for the Times-Herald I became Provincial Editor, a title which brought no increase in salary. The job involved being in charge of country correspondents in villages scattered within 25 to 50 miles around the city, editing their weekly contributions, measuring their column-inches for payments and generally supervising the rural aspect of the newspaper. Later, because of my own initiative in originating the idea, I became the first Radio Editor in Canada, which meant writing a daily column about radio programmes, stars, and networks.

My reporting for the Times-Herald under the avuncular guidance of Fred Workman ran the whole spectrum of events, incidents and activities: I spent days at the annual Wild West Rodeo and Stampede absorbing as much of the cowboy lingo as possible; I acted as Master of Ceremonies for a fox trot competition sponsored by Cal Temple and Trudie, his business-like wife; I interviewed all visiting celebrities including MacKenzie King, the Prime Minister, and R.B. Bennett, the Leader of the Opposition in Ottawa; I interviewed Jimmy Gardiner as Minister of Agriculture, after he gave up his post as Premier of Saskatchewan; I covered celebrity concerts and the annual Chatauqua programmes, among many other things. On one occasion I persuaded Vaughan Grayson Mann to show me around her house so that I could write a review of the many oil paintings which had brought her national fame as an artist.

By the summer of 1932 the depression was taking its toll in business. This condition was aggravated by the fact that drought and bad weather had resulted in crop failures on the farms for three successive years. Business had come almost to a standstill and the newspaper was adversely affected to an increasing degree. One day Fred Workman called me and Matt Smith in to see him. Matt had only recently married a lovely girl called Isobel Crichton. Without beating around the bush, Fred explained that Mr Miller had decided that the editorial staff must be reduced by one reporter, and were there any volunteers? He looked at us both and became busy with his pipe which he seemed unable to get lighted. Ordinarily I am not a quick thinker but this situation was very clear; it took me only seconds to realize that Matt, with his family, needed the job more than I did, so I said to Fred, In that case, I would like to resign. There was nothing much more to say, and so it was, that at the height of the depression, I was out of a job. BROADCASTING versus JOURNALISM

According to a Scottish professor speaking on Gaelic humour there are 50 million people of Scottish descent living in other parts of the world, plus another 15 million in England. The humorous implication was that obviously Scotland was a good place to be from. In my case, being of Scottish descent does not necessarily mean an appreciation of Scottish humour; I feel the Irish have a finer touch, giving life and subtlety to a jest. I have preferred Irish humour ever since I heard of the Dublin man visiting London who wrote to his wife and if you do not receive this letter you are to let me know at once!

When a little old lady on Weybridge station platform asked the Irish stationmaster why there were two large wall clocks each giving a different time by a few minutes, the answer came in a fine Irish brogue: Ah, yes ma'am! I suppose we could fix them to read the same, but if we did that, ma'am, we wouldn't need two clocks, and it'd be a shame to part with either of them!

That Irish twist could even be likened to the ancient Chinese principle of the yin and yang, or opposites: positive and negative, light and dark, inaction and action, and so on. By the same token when I lost my job, I got a rise in salary.

Before clearing out my desk at the Times-Herald I had a quiet word with Fred Workman who agreed to accept free-lance stories from me. I was to keep on with the Radio Column, some reviews, and any special features I could dream up. At the agreed rate of 10 per column inch it meant that if I could provide two 25-inch columns per day, which was relatively easy for me, I could earn about $30 per week which was $6 more than I was getting when I gave up the staff job. Mind you, the accountant, C.J. Broderick, soon saw what was happening, but it took the best part of a year to re-arrange matters so that the newspaper could save money by hiring me back at $28 per week. Although Fred pretended to be surprised at my earnings I felt sure he knew what was going on all the time.

Nevertheless I remember those unsettled days as making up a hard and rough year. The day after I walked out of the Times-Herald office I went to see Joe Hallonquist at his office in the Hammond Building. Joe was a tall heavily built middle aged man of Scandinavian extraction. He was the local representative of the Imperial Life Assurance Company of Canada. I told him my story and he promptly offered me an unsalaried post as a life insurance salesman. He spent half a day teaching me about the various policies and endowments, the way to figure cash surrender values, the matter of group insurance, and the various approaches to a prospect by the insurance salesman. He told me that out of every 100 contacts a salesman found one prospect, and out of every ten prospects he should, on average, secure one sale. It meant that all one had to do was to go on contacting enough people and one would make the necessary sales. But it was very hard work. Joe Hallonquist was a top-flight salesman because he believed firmly in the value of his product: that life insurance was the strongest possible financial anchor and safeguard for the future. Because he was right he was extremely convincing; he used the sincere and frank approach and it worked. His senior salesman on the other hand, suggested other pitches, and, probably trying to be helpful, advised me: Selling life insurance is easy! he said, Find a young guy, just married, see. Buy him a cup of coffee or a beer, and after a bit you say, Do you love your wife? Course he says Yes, and you say Then why don't you protect her future with this handy-dandy $10.000 policy? One buck gets you ten that he'll be eating out of your hand by the second beer. Useful though it may have been, I never tried that approach; I did not have the heart, and I was sure that I always had to leave my intended customer a face-saving way out. Somewhere I had read that a gentleman is one who never causes pain; perhaps I was trying to be a gentleman. Although I hated the very idea of selling things to people who might not want to buy them(even if it was good for them) I made quite a few sales, the main commission deriving from the sale of a Group Insurance Scheme to 32 men from the Times-Herald staff. But my heart was not in insurance, and when Fred Workman recalled me to the editorial offices I rushed back to my old love. As Fred said with a grin, We'll save money by putting you back on the staff rather than pay you free-lance rates.

My interest in China was increased from time to time by my acquaintance with a Cantonese who operated a shoe repair shop on the High Street. His name was Joe Jack, and after my first visit I went back many times to hear him talk as he carved out the shape of a leather sole or polished a repaired shoe on his rotary machine. He liked to talk about China and I could be a good listener when interested. We sometimes drank small cups of China tea and he gave me colour prints of Chinese landscapes and mountain scenery at Christmas and the Chinese New Year.

My daily Radio Column covered a wide spectrum of programme interests, a large part of which was concerned with local broadcasts. The one commercial station in the city was CJRM, owned and operated by James Richardson Sons, although CKCK, the Leader-Post station in Regina, and CFQC in Saskatoon, were received without interference. In competition with these commercial outlets, the Moose Jaw Amateur Radio Association operated a station, with the call letters 1OAB, from a third floor back room. This was provided without charge by the Norman Bellamy Furniture Company on Main Street. With publicity campaigns and the flagrant use of my column by way of promotion, the radio group sold more than a thousand annual $1 memberships. The revenue covered the expense involved in broadcasting several hours each evening, with longer periods on Saturdays and Sundays. For these services, and following a series of travel talks which I wrote and broadcast in the autumn of 1929, I was made an Honorary Member of the M.J.A.R.A., and appointed to the executive committee.

The Chairman of that committee was H. Carson Buchanan, a young lawyer, while the Chief Engineer was Alf. Jacobson, Chief Electrician at Government Elevators, the huge grain storage plant just west of the city. The other principal and active member was another lawyer, A.J. Wickens, K.C., who owned an extensive collection of recordings at his Third Avenue N.W. home from whence he broadcast special programmes over the dinner hour on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. As time passed I became more and more interested in the intriguing field of radio broadcasting, little knowing that this was only the beginning of a radio career lasting for the next 50 years. But I had many other interests which kept me fully occupied at the time.

Aviation was one of them and I was completely fascinated by the thrill of flying, so much so that I thought seriously of giving up journalism and becoming an aviator. I joined the Moose Jaw Flying Club and took weekly flying lessons from Dick Ryan, the instructor, who taught me how to handle a deHavilland and a Gypsy Moth aircraft. When I learned one day that an amateur American flyer had set the world's record in altitude for a single-engined aircraft, carrying two to a height of more than 18,000 feet, I saw the possibility of a news story if I could beat that record. Dick Ryan, who was a real pal of mine not only because he was such a good all-round chap, but also because he was a teacher of English Literature at Ross Collegiate, thought so too. With appointed judges and a news reporter on the ground at the Flying Field, Dick and I took off one Saturday morning with petrol tank full, and spiralled up into the great blue yonder. From 15,000 feet onwards our ascent was slower but we ploughed on until, having reached the altitude of 21,000 we found the air somewhat thin. Satisfied with breaking the world record, we turned the little aircraft nose downward to commence the longest nose-dive I ever want to experience. Our descent was made in one-fifth the time it had taken us to climb to our record-breaking altitude. We were applauded when we reported our record, and one of the newly recruited flying students opened a few bottles of root beer by way of celebration. Such is fame: our exploit brought us international mention with a few lines by the Canadian Press but our feat was not mentioned in Robert Ripley's Believe It or Not column, and we had never heard of the Guinness Book of Records in those early days. The adrenalin-pumping thrill of the experience for itself alone, was good enough for us. Twenty years later when Dick Ryan had become President of Canadian Pacific Airlines, we met by chance at Sea Island Airport, Vancouver. I was with my future father-in-law, Frank Semmens. We spoke of our 1931 altitude record and of our progress over the years between. I think Frank was glad to have met Ryan and I hoped he was also slightly impressed with Hellen's current friend, his future son-in-law.

One of the most capable and widely respected of radio managers in Canada is Sid Boyling, with whom I had the pleasure of working, back in those early days of broadcasting at 1OAB where he was chief announcer. Sid was a handsome and debonair charmer and I enjoyed a happy relationship with his family including his father, mother and grandmother. All of them were English-born and helped to imbue in me a loyal appreciation of the Royal Family.

Sid Boyling and I joined forces that year on a holiday to New York, and spent some days in Toronto, en route, visiting the Canadian National Exhibition. We also took a bus across the Niagara peninsula to see the falls, both from the riverside and from the sprayblown decks of that small sight-seeing steamer Maid of the Mist. This short cruise took us right behind the great cascade. In New York we paid the usual visit to Radio City, had lunch with Jessica Dragonette, took a Sunday boat trip around Manhattan Island, saw the show Tobacco Road, and also the musical On Your Toes featuring the fine dancing of Ray Bolger.

Returning to our work Sid and I became more and more closely connected with Radio Station 1OAB and during the Annual General Meeting of the association that year I was appointed Programme Director. We extended the hours of service considerably, right away, and managed to persuade Charlie Crane, manager of the city's main hotel, Grant Hall, to give us free use of a room on the top floor at the back of the building. In the years that followed, this space was extended to four rooms. But at the outset Alf Jacobson installed his home-made 500 watt transmitter at the far end of the one long room and constructed an announcer's desk with double turn-tables. A partition divided the room into a small studio and the Control/Transmitter room.

It was from this very basic set up that we began to originate new musical programmes, interviews, debates, special community service talks, special events, and sports coverage. We also originated remote control broadcasts every Sunday morning from a number of local churches on a rota schedule. We had no system to let the announcer know when to speak until a glass studio window was installed. Before that, the control-room operator, facing the blank wall beyond which was the studio, would pound heavily against the plaster wall with the monkey wrench provided on the table for that purpose. Years later, on my last visit to that pioneering control-room, I could still see the marks on the wall where our preliminary broadcast signals were given.

In the beginning we had three announcers Sid Boyling, whose rich round voice went down well with our listeners, Louis Bourgeois, a gentle and studious young man with noticeable literary talent, and Bob MacLean, the very steady and well-spoken son of a senior CPR official. The four of us worked out announcing shifts and kept the station on the air. The Grant Hall Hotel was next door to Zion United Church where I still spent many weekday evenings in boys ' work, and it was now handy to finish at the church and then cross over to the radio station for the late night shift. One of the most popular programmes on 1OAB was The Fort San Programme which I presented each Sunday at 12.30 noon and which featured 90 minutes of records requested for patients in the tuberculosis sanatorium at Fort Qu'Appelle. This programme rated tops in provincial popularity and our fan-mail was tremendous. In western Canada, in those days, people held somewhat puritanical ideas which excluded almost anything but hymns and classical music on the Sabbath day. Our use of some light music on the Fort San Programme was excused because it had been requested for those patients recovering in hospital. At any rate, the programme drew a large and regular fan mail.

Station 1OAB grew increasingly popular. We pared costs by doing our own sweeping, cleaning and polishing, and we were able to purchase a few new 78rpm records each week. I introduced a weekly Sunday series called The Symphony Hour, which I repeated in at least a dozen other cities around the world over the next 50 years. But our amateur popularity did not find favour with the commercial stations and there were somewhat ugly rumours coming out of Ottawa. It seemed the recently created Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission frowned on an amateur station which undermined the popularity of commercial stations, and M.P.'s were being asked to do something about it.

It was at this point that I gave up any hopes for an aviation career simply because of the increasing high cost of hiring that DH Moth for a few hours every weekend. But there were other ways of flying. That pioneering aviation company, Western Canada Airways Limited, had engaged a number of the famous bush pilots of the northern flying service to operate a daily air mail service over the 800 mile route between Winnipeg and Calgary. Moose Jaw was almost exactly half way. The bush pilots I knew included Buck Buchanan, Harry MacConachie and Neville Hollick-Kenyon, the latter being a debonair Englishman who had previously flown for Imperial Airways on the flying boat service from London to New York. To write a feature story on the Inaugural First Flight it was arranged for me to join the westbound plane at Moose Jaw and telegraph back the story from Calgary.

The first flight was scheduled for the last week in January, and as luck would have it there was a wild prairie blizzard blowing across western Canada at just the wrong time. But, as they say in the entertainment field, the show must go on. Despite the weather, the Mayor, Aldermen, and other high officials were on the landing strip to meet Buck Buchanan and his twin engined Fokker as the storm seemed to clear. Formalities were hurried over, and we took off into a lowering western sky. Flight companions, apart from Buchanan and his co-pilot, were an official of the federal Post Office in charge of the air mail, and a fellow-reporter, Dick Sanborn of the Leader-Post. The weather was very rough and it was evident that we were heading into another part of the blizzard; white cascades of billowy snow swirled around us, as the aircraft roared, bumped and bucketed towards our goal some 400 miles to the west.

After about 45 minutes we noticed that the Post Office official, seated in the bucket seat across the fuselage from Dick and me, seemed to have turned a rather sickly white, and he even tried to stand up quickly despite his safety belt. We thought the bumpy flight must have brought on a bout of air-sickness, but it was not so. When he could make himself heard over the roar of the aircraft and the storm outside we heard him say: My God, I forgot to bring the air mail! And so we very nearly had to write the unusual story of the inaugural air mail flight that flew without the air mail. It seemed the poor fellow, in the exuberance of his first air flight and the excitement of his history-making mission, had hurried onto the plane, leaving two mail-bags, both probably full of First Day Covers, in the rest-room at Moose Jaw Airport. By this time the unfortunate P.O. man was really ill and was making use of the paper bag provided for the purpose. With the Fokker lurching and shuddering in the storm I unfastened my safety-belt, staggered up to the pilot's cockpit and was finally able to bellow into Buck Buchanan's ear that the mail had been left behind. It was just as well, I thought, that the noise of the storm and the engines kept me from hearing what he said.

Cursing the Post Office and the weather in equal proportions, Buck Buchanan slowly brought the aircraft around and with a considerable tailwind we headed back to Moose Jaw only to find the airport building deserted except for the night watchman huddled by his coal-oil heater with the mail-bags beside him. In deference to all concerned in the service there was no publicity given to the story of the forgotten air mail. We took off within minutes and flew about 100 miles to Swift Current, at which point the storm had increased to such velocity that Buchanan made an emergency landing and we all found a hotel in the town for the night.

Next morning the sky had cleared but the winds had increased and the remainder of that 300 mile flight from Swift Current to Calgary was the roughest I have ever experienced before or since. At one point in the turbulence I felt certain I was going to be air-sick and the very thought was unsettling, because I knew we would have to write and file our first flight story from Calgary within an hour or two, and that story had to be sent, come what may, including sickness. It was just a question of Mind over Matter, I thought, and tried to steel myself against the physical effects of an increasingly rough ride. I thought of other things; a fast hockey-match, an adventure story, the problems in a game of chess, a field of snowdrops and crocus in springtime, the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven and as many other happy subjects as I could conjure up. Either the mental strategy worked or the weather became slowly but imperceptibly better, for I was not air-sick and have usually been a good sailor by air or by sea ever since. We finally arrived in Calgary on the afternoon of the second day, thus inaugurating the first flight of the western Canada air mail service. After writing the story and filing it by telegraph I revelled in a hot bath, a good dinner, and a warm bed as the guest of the Palliser Hotel.

In the years that followed I made many flights with those intrepid bush pilots and watched the development of aviation in Canada.

In the summer of the same year that saw the first air mail service across Western Canada I met Hollick-Kenyon by arrangement in New York. He was good enough to organize a complimentary flight for me on the Imperial Airways ' flying boat which plied the sea and air routes between Long Island Sound and Bermuda several times each week. The experience of travelling in the huge amphibian, and the take-offs and landings on water increased my interest in aviation, but not enough to effect any change in my plans.

In Bermuda I took a room at the Belmont Manor Hotel in Warwick county and was interested to see the notice informing guests that gentlemen were not permitted in the dining-room for dinner without a jacket and tie.

Bermuda in the mid-30s was even more charming than it is now: motor cars were not allowed on the island and most residents travelled on bicycles, usually with a large wicker pannier between the handle-bars. There were horse-drawn vehicles, and when the Governor arrived to open the island's parliament he drove in a stately coach and four. A single line railway ran from St George's to Kelly's Island, the full length of the colony, and many Bermudians brought their bicycles part of the way to town on the flat-cars attached to the train for that purpose.

The local newspaper, the Mid-Ocean Times, printed a short story about the arrival of Canada's first radio columnist and this brought about a radio interview at ZBM, Radio Bermuda.

Back in New York I stayed at the Park Central Hotel(now the Park Sheraton) where I made the acquaintance of a young American actor called Tom Sanders. We visited the Radio City Music Hall show together and enjoyed the dancing Rocketts. On several subsequent Manhattan visits I met Tom again and between visits we exchanged letters and limericks.

Intending to spend two quiet days in Montreal on the way home I took a room in the Mount Royal Hotel there, and almost immediately ran into Pierre Leveque in the lobby. We had met a year or two before when he was secretary of the Canadian Mayors ' Federation. Now, apparently, he was on the staff of Camilien Houde, the infamous mayor of Montreal, of whom it was said he was running the city on the same basis of protection rackets as some of the big-time gangsters of Chicago. Mayor Houde made his business headquarters at the Mount Royal, and when I enquired the reason for a long queue of nondescript citizens waiting before a desk on the mezzanine floor, I was told that it was pay-off day for contributors to the mayor's charity fund for their protection. But I felt sure that Leveque was not involved in the racket side of the mayor's activities.

Pierre Leveque had arranged for me to join a small party attending the season-opening hockey match that evening at the Molson Stadium, with the local Montreal Canadiens playing the New York Rangers, but I did not realize it was the mayoral party until we arrived. We met His Worship Mayor Camilien Houde in the anteroom, about a dozen of us, and walked through a passageway under the bleachers to the side of the rink. It was floodlit but empty, with the match due to start in ten minutes. A gate onto the ice was opened and we all began the trek across to the royal box on the opposite side. As it happened, I was between Mayor Houde and Leveque; as soon as the crowd that filled the stadium recognized the person of Mayor Houde a great roar of boos and hisses started up and I became slightly alarmed. The booing and the catcalls continued. Camilien Houde was grinning; he touched my arm and said Do not worry, my fren'! As Pierre will tell you thees booing is not for you, it ees for me! We reached the enclosed box in safety and the match was as exciting as it was enjoyable, with the Canadiens turning in a 3-0 score. For his pro-Nazi activities and other connections Houde was interned at the outbreak of the war in 1939, but as my friend Robert LaPalme, the famous Montreal caricaturist, later told me, Whatever else he was, Camilien Houde was a bright character in a dull world!

In Toronto on that homeward trip I first met Ernest L. Bushnell who had come into radio as one-quarter of a male quartet and who rose in the ranks of Canadian radio until he became the top executive of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation some years later. On the same Toronto junket, following a rather splendid lunch at the Granite Club with a friend from CFRB, I met Roy Thomson for the first time. He had acquired the small radio station at Timmins, Ontario, north of Toronto, and was feeling his way into radio. We had a long and interesting chat over coffee at a Yonge Street restaurant. One could not help but admire the perspicacity and ability of this dapper little man with the thick glasses and the easy smile. My friendship with Roy Thomson lasted for more than 20 years.

Back in Moose Jaw, busy with newspaper and radio work, it was not long before I was engaged in preparing and delivering a series of illustrated talks on musical appreciation on Wednesday evenings to audiences of 900 or more in the public auditorium of the Technical School. This had been arranged by Bart Pragnell, the arts department head of that institution. An assistant would play the recordings on a huge panasonic machine while I gave brief talks between the selections. I well remember describing the circumstances of Handel's Water Music suite one evening as a thundering rainstorm began outside. When the water music reached its climax and mixed with the roar and slashing of the rain on windows, the whole performance sounded more like Handel going over Niagara Falls than chamber music from a Thames barge.

So far as the development of my interests in China was concerned, I continued frequent visits with Joe Jack, the cobbler, and found myself more frequently patronising the Canton Cafe to talk with another Chinese friend, George Wong, whose father owned the small restaurant. But George was a born Canadian and knew no more about China than I did; he shared with me the wish and determination to visit China, which seemed to us to be a land of fabulous culture. But the real impetus towards things Chinese came from my association with Dr Tehyi Hsieh who lectured in Chatauqua circuits.

During the 30s an American organization brought cultural entertainment, under canvas, to rural areas of the United States and Canada. The large brown tent was about 300 feet in length, with a seating capacity of some 750, and they called the travelling performances Chatauqua. For a week there would be seven different programmes: i.e. a brass band one night, a string quartet the next, followed by a small choir with soloists, and perhaps a pianist. Interspersed with the musical entertainment would be several lectures. One year, a Dr Tehyi Hsieh was billed to lecture on China Yesterday and Today. I covered the lecture for the Times Herald, and it was an unusual performance.

As the curtain opened there hobbled from the wings what appeared to be an old Chinese mandarin with flowing blue robes, black silk jacket and red-buttoned Mandarin cap over hair that fell down his back in a long pigtail. With hands in sleeves, the old man looked extremely Oriental, long moustaches curving down from the upper lip. He spoke in a kind of pidgin-English. So happy to gleet my good fliends here tonight, he began, and spoke for a few moments on the glories of old Cathay. Then, coming to the point where he said But, my fliends, all that has changed, he suddenly straightened up, his left hand swung up to remove the moustache, the mandarin cap and the pigtail, while his right hand peeled off the Chinese jacket and gown. Flinging off the old costume as he turned around, there stood Dr Tehyi Hsieh in white tie and tails, his polished shoes agleam and his black hair slicked back. He smiled and spoke in a highly cultivated English voice as he continued his sentence for now in this 20th century the great nation of China is quickly being modernized. The whole effect was electric, and the audience broke into spontaneous applause. For the next 90 minutes there followed an exemplary lecture on most aspects of Chinese life, given by a master scholar and showman.

Dr Tehyi Hsieh took five curtain calls after that lecture, and I went back-stage for an interview afterwards. I found him a most agreeable man and we seemed to get along well from the start. After a short chat he invited me to join him at a small Chinese gathering in the hall usually used for Tong meetings on River Street West. He had a taxi waiting, and on arrival we found a long cloth-draped table in the centre of the room, around which were seated what seemed to be the entire Chinese population of the city some 30 Chinese, mainly from laundries and restaurants. In front of each was a Chinese bowl and in the middle of the table from top to bottom were some dozen bottles of Black Label Johnnie Walker whiskey. The gathering lasted until the small hours of next morning and Dr Hsieh talked about China in English, answering many questions and telling a number of highly entertaining stories of how modern changes in China were being effected. Dr Tehyi Hsieh and I remained friends and corresponded for more than two decades. He sent me a number of his books, all suitably inscribed in his very Chinese style, and I stopped off to visit him and his wife at Brighton, south of Boston, in 1951. Dr Tehyi Hsieh was known as the Teddy Roosevelt of China, and he did more than many other Chinese scholars to familiarize westerners with the real story of that oldest of all extant civilizations China, ancient and modern.

Meanwhile, my interest in classical music was increasing by leaps and bounds. To the neophyte, it must be the programme music which first appeals, because it portrays a simple story or picture. I came to know and admire Beethoven's Pastoral symphony for the scenes depicted; I enjoyed Saint Saens ' Carnival of the Animals, Prokofieff's Peter and the Wolf, and Benjamin Britten's Guide to the Orchestra as well as Ein Heldenleben(A Hero's Life) by Richard Strauss, the symphonies of Brahms, Haydn and Tschaikowsky, and especially, for a few years at any rate, the latter's 1812 Overture. I also thought I had fallen in love with a music-teacher. Her name was Esme Craven and she had studied under Mrs. Armstrong, well-known as the doyenne of piano teachers in the city. Esme gave piano lessons to a score or more of young hopefuls. In my innocence and with musical aspirations, I thought it would be lovely to be married to a professional pianist; after all, my good friend Fraser Muirhead was paying a great deal of attention to Margaret Geddes, another of the city's first class piano teachers. He later married Margaret.

Percy Grainger, the Australian pianist and composer, was scheduled to give a concert in Zion United Church, and I invited Esme to go with me. I thought he played brilliantly, but Esme said No, Grainger is a second rate pianist. When I protested, she declared, Anyone who includes Country Gardens in a classical programme is definitely second-rate! Thus spake Esme, the first-rate pianist of Moose Jaw, and I became disillusioned, deciding not to ask her to marry me after all. I was just too busy with unromantic things that really mattered. In a feature interview with Percy Grainger next day I found him to be a charming and modest man, and was glad to write in glowing terms of his keyboard mastery, his repertoire, and his travels.

As the popularity of Radio Station 1OAB continued to grow, so did the opposition to our progress. We were ordered by the Broadcasting Commission to close down. Carson Buchanan, Alf Jacobson and I held a meeting to discuss the situation; the question was whether or not we should pull in our horns and try to placate the commercial stations and the politicians whom they had influenced. Carson, being a lawyer, felt this would result in the peace and tranquillity we all preferred. I pointed out that by slackening our programme efforts we would simply court mediocrity. Alf Jacobson was non-committal saying he could agree with both sides of the argument.

Carson was such an affable chap that I persuaded him to agree with me(and Alf) to continue along progressive lines. I even hinted, without any good reason for thinking it, that in the course of time our little amateur effort at 1OAB might evolve into another commercial station, which caused considerable laughter from both my pioneer radio partners. So we continued our popular programmes. The Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, now headed by that great Canadian, Mr Hector Charlesworth, was beset with complaints from Quebec about English being spoken on national network stations in their province, while listeners in the prairies, maritimes and west coast regions cursed the CRBC when the French-Canadian announcers said Ici Radio Canada and went on to announce the programme in French. Hector Charlesworth broadcast a Dominion Day speech, in both English and French, in which he pointed out that a famous French writer had said that A man with two languages is a man with two souls and he felt that if LaRochfoucauld could make such a statement it might well be embraced by all true Canadians. But the problem was not so easily solved, nor do I believe, nearly half a century later, that it has been happily settled yet. Meanwhile, complaints about station 1OAB competing with the commercial stations continued to plague the Ottawa board, and shortly after our decision to carry on as before, the CRBC abruptly cancelled our license to broadcast and ruled Station 1OAB off the air by the end of the month.

The closure notice was peremptory and we made the most of the fact that a poor, struggling little community service radio station, without benefit of commercial revenue, serving the southern and central parts of the province from gratis studios and operated by a completely voluntary staff, was being victimized by a powerful political federal body without regard to the expressed wishes of the people. As a public relations man this was my dish, and the campaign to get 1OAB back on the air was right up my street. This time both Carson and Alf were behind me one hundred percent. The battle was on!

Fred Workman gave me a free hand, bless him, and through my Radio Column, feature stories and editorials we blasted the CRBC, the federal Members of Parliament as well as the M.L.A.'s, and also included the local Mayor and Councillors for not taking preventative action to preserve our pioneering radio station long before. We organized at least a dozen Letters to the Editor each day these were mainly unsolicited, but we encouraged more and spread them about so as to appear in a number of newspapers and magazines across the country. We had prominent citizens and influential groups cable the Prime Minister and the provincial Premier. One ardent supporter, no doubt worked up as a result of our pressure campaign, suggested a telegram to H.M. the King! It was reported that over-ripe tomatoes and some oldish eggs had been tossed at the door of two southern commercial stations, which was a smear tactic we deplored with emphasis. We telephoned Mr Hector Charlesworth but he was, as yet, unable to take any remedial action, although I had the distinct impression that he would have liked to do so. I organized a daily reminder in the press, on the So Many Shopping Days to Christmas idea with a slow count-down until Radio Station 1OAB would be no more. This motif was used on the air every day and we rang all possible changes on the we're being done in by the big bogey-man theme, so much so that we had some of our faithful old lady listeners actually in tears. In retrospect, perhaps we played on the heart-strings of our listeners too heavily, but it was, in actual fact, a hearty, healthy exercise in a good cause for the benefit of the community, and in defiance of the written and spoken diatribes of a federal political bureaucracy.

Thus it was that we made use of every method in the book to fan into flame the natural resentment of the public against a big and unfair bully kicking a man when he was down. People offered to raise whatever sum of money needed to keep the Community Radio Station on the air; even those who never cared or listened much, now felt that 1OAB must be preserved! As the day of our final hour approached our publicity releases continued to whip up public opinion, and I carefully planned the last programme for broadcast from 9pm on the last evening until the station's license expired with the stroke of midnight. If a listeners ' poll had been taken that evening I believe we would have rated 100% listenership.

I took the microphone myself, with Carson Buchanan, Alf Jacobson, Sid Boyling, Louis Bourgeois and Bob Maclean contributing. The first two hours were devoted to special requests and dedications, and we rang in the names of scores of prominent people, organizations, clubs, lodges and service groups throughout the community, with special emphasis on our many listeners in Fort San and other hospitals. We saluted the Press, mentioning the government forces that insisted on closing down our city's own broadcasting station. I had written a particularly tear-jerking script for 1OAB's last hour for which we might well have played Hearts and Flowers as an obbligato.

Instead, we opened with a symphonic version of the Dead March from Saul, fading out into the reading of a six-stanza poetic eulogy written for the occasion by a local lady admirer and 1OAB fan. In a mock salute to the CRBC and Ottawa we played Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf from the currently popular Walt Disney cartoon. This was followed by a trio of voices relating the history of 1OAB's community service from birth to enforced closure, after which we played the doleful song There's a Gold Mine in the Sky. Following a last salute to all old friends and listeners everywhere, we finished with that popular cowboy dirge, I'm Headin' for the Last Round-Up! After this concluded, there was a pause of three seconds until I said And so Good Night, Thank You and Goodbye! and played God Save the King. Our campaign and that programme aroused so much feeling that CRBC reconsidered and granted a new license making 1OAB a commercial station with call-letters CHAB. University Memorial Gates Saskatoon, Saskatchewan GO WEST YOUNG MAN!

My father died in his sleep on the morning of July 4th, 1934 at the age of 67. He had been ill for a short time and when uremic poisoning developed, he was moved to a private ward in the Moose Jaw General Hospital. Some months earlier he, my step-mother and I had moved into a bungalow at 1122 Henleaze Avenue. The night before his death I spent more than an hour with him and we spoke quietly of the future; he wanted to be sure that Ray and I would look after Margaret, our step-mother, whom we had come to admire greatly for her devotion to Father. You go and look after things, he said as I was about to leave, and his last words to me were Bless you and keep you! He closed his eyes, and I left the room. Next morning he was dead.

Because I felt extremely low, and needed company, I telephoned Esme on Wednesday evening, the day Father died, to ask if she would come out for a canoe ride from the Aquatic Club to River Park, but she said she must stay in and practise for a forthcoming piano recital. It seemed to me that she was embarrassed by my family bereavement and felt it was not necessary to be part of it. The funeral was on Friday afternoon in the chapel at Broadfoot Bros. Funeral Home and was well attended. Ray had come in from the country bank and we sat with Margaret through the short service. Uncle John was in attendance but Aunt Janie sent a message to say she could not come, she did not like funerals and found them depressing. But Fred Workman and a number of Times-Herald staff turned up. I remember how calm and serene my father looked as he lay in his coffin and how I seemed to feel something break within me when they lowered the plush-covered lid and we rode behind the hearse to Rosedale Cemetery for the interment. I recall feeling an empty numbness on that day and for many months after.

Meanwhile, with the sweet taste of victory over bureaucracy in our mouths, we set about disbanding the old Amateur Radio Association, relinquishing the amateur call letters 1OAB, and organizing a commercial company, CHAB, Limited. Alf Jacobson was President, Roy Dunlop Vice-President and Carson Buchanan Secretary-Treasurer. A.J. Wickens, K.C. and other prominent citizens made up the Board of Directors and we began to look for commercial advertisers. Within a few months business looked good, so well had the way been prepared for the success of our own Community Station. We had official visits from Hector Charlesworth as head of the C.R.B.C. and his right hand programme and administration official, Ernie Bushnell. As Programme Director for the new radio station, I enlisted the services of our original staff(Sid Boyling, Louis Bourgeois and Bob McLean) as announcers, and we shortly made use of Louis H. Lewry, later to be known as Scoop Lewry, and Hendy Henderson. I also recruited Elwood Glover straight from high school. CHAB Limited was a successful business venture from the beginning, and it still serves the community as both radio and television outlet.

It was during the early 30s and on one of my annual visits to eastern Canada that I first became acquainted with that noted Canadian humorist, Dr.Stephen Leacock. We met at a luncheon party at the University Club in Montreal and came away together, since we seemed to have something in common and got along well. As head of an academic department(Economics) at McGill University, he had interested himself in student publications in the various universities across Canada, and he had some kind things to say about my attempts at humorous prose in the weekly Adventures of Dizzy Dick. He suggested it was Clever stuff, adding, but that is an impossible title. As a writer of humorous tales, a learned professor of international monetary theories and a disciple of John Maynard Keynes, Dr. Leacock was not a funny man. The clowns of this world are often a sad and sorry lot in real life, yet Dr Leacock was seldom dour in our sketches.

Outside McGill University gates on St. Catherine's Street in Montreal is a white marble statue of three young men holding up what looks like an alabaster bowl. The youths seem to be following one another in a circle on a white marble plinth and their nude figures add a certain aesthetic touch to the hedged alcove in which they shelter. As Stephen Leacock and I walked down the street after that luncheon we found that a small crowd of students was gathered around the white statue. Ordinarily it provoked little or no attention from passers-by. The three figures looked quite awful; someone had painted red, blue and green panties over the mid-sections of the figures perhaps to register objection to their nudity, but this only served to accentuate it. Or was it just a juvenile student prank? According to a report in the Montreal Gazette the statues had been tampered with in this way on several occasions, and the newspaper felt that they should be raised beyond the reach of pranksters or removed to an inside guarded site. My only reason for including this story is to record the short but pithy comment of Canada's leading humorist who, when we had paused to take in the scene, turned to me and said, I don't think it's a bit funny!

It was on Stephen Leacock's advice that I tried my hand at writing humour and found it very arduous work; writing ordinary prose was hard enough, but trying to make it funny was even harder. Yet it was the submission of two humorous scripts in The Raconteur series that finally won me a job with the C.B.C.

For eight years I had revelled in the dual careers of journalism and broadcasting, between 1929 and 1937, and these years coincided with the boom to bust period, winding up with the deepest depression of the century. Soup kitchens for the poor and needy were the order of the day. But the young crowd still danced to the music of Guy Lombardo, Ben Bernie, Rudy Vallee and Duke Ellington. My growing interest in China was whetted by the best-seller The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, while the newspapers reported daily on the Japanese attack on China at Chapei.

As we struggled to make both ends meet, during years of crop failure and recession in western Canada, we knew that the unemployment figure in the U.S.A. had reached 15 million despite F.D.R.'s New Deal for the American economy. In Europe the names of Hitler and Mussolini appeared increasingly in the news. I remember the 1935 headlines when Will Rogers and Wiley Post were killed in a plane crash and when Mrs Dionne gave birth to quintuplets in northern Ontario. The most enjoyable film that year was Charles Laughton's portrayal of Henry VIII, while chain letters were the rage among young and old alike, in vain endeavour to regain the good fortune of earlier years.

Out of this morass of doleful depression there came a bright ray of hope and a rhyming solace to the weary and dispirited housewives of the country in the person of Edna Jacques. As Provincial Editor I handled correspondents news reports from more than a score of outlying communities and our Times-Herald reporter for the Briercrest area was a Mrs Edna Jacques. She was a fine upstanding middle-aged lady with sharp eyes and a lucid tongue. Although her reports usually arrived by post, she brought them along in person on one occasion, because she had written a poem and wondered if it was worthy of publication.

If I remember rightly it was called My Kitchen Window and I liked it for its succinct simplicity and the fact that it rang true. I took it to Fred Workman, and he liked it too. He was glad to publish it and paid Mrs Jacques an extra $5. that week. Thus began the new career of Edna Jacques as the farmers poetess of western Canada. That first poem by Edna Jacques read: MY KITCHEN WINDOW My kitchen window is above the sink, With dotted curtains looped with tiny folds, A frame for mountains and a bit of sea; And all day long it glows and shines and holds A hundred pictures for my heart's delight. People who hurry by and stars at night. What matter if my work be drab and dull If I can lift my eyes from pots and pans And see a mountain etched against the sky, A fleet of clouds like shining caravans, Setting their course for harbours dim and far, In some vast heaven where the blessed are. I don't mind making pies and loaves of bread If I can look out from my window high And see a little girl with flying hair, Poised on a scooter as she dashes by Such breathless sunny joy her heart must know, Seems leaven for a whole wide world of woe. So my small window with its curtains prim Brings all the world a-knocking at my heart; A mother passing by, a priest, a child, Makes me in tiny rooms a living part Of all this glad good earth and makes me kin Of all the glory that has ever been.

Whatever else Edna Jacques had, she did have the common touch and her verses seemed to bring a breath of warmth and kindly understanding to thousands of prairie wives who laboured unwept, unhonoured and unsung in the deepening trenches of the depression. Soon after her Moose Jaw success with poems in the Times-Herald she was selling her verse to the Winnipeg Free Press, the Calgary Herald, the Vancouver Province, the Toronto Star and the agricultural publication, The Saskatchewan Farmer. She was hailed as the Eugene Field of Canada. Donald Gordon, when president of the Canadian National Railway, went so far as to say What Robert Burns is to Scotland, Edna Jacques is to Canada.

For the next 40 years the name of Edna Jacques was the synonym for saleable verse and she published volume after volume. Her book sales amounted to more than a quarter of a million. Many of her poems did well abroad; Flanders Fields used in pamphlet form raised over a million dollars in the U.S.A. and this poem was also used at the ceremony for the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery near Washington D.C. It is inscribed on a scroll inside the chapel there. Her poem Thankful for What was cast in bronze on a plaque 45 feet high at the World's Fair in San Francisco. The Rt. Hon W.L. MacKenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, admitted shyly to Edna Jacques that he had been an ardent fan for over 20 years, and Mrs Nellie McClung, the Canadian novelist, said to her You have the gift, Edna dear, to ring bells in the hearts of the people.

After leaving the prairies in 1937 my working career took me to many lands around the world for 37 years, and I must confess that during all that time I scarcely thought of my old friend Edna Jacques until January of 1974, when we were living in Anguilla. Over the years Fred Workman and I had kept in touch and in a note with his 1973 Christmas card he had mentioned Edna's rise to fame and fortune, and gave me her address. She had bought a farm at Willowdale, Ontario. So I wrote to her to recall pleasant memories of the old prairie days. Back came a signed copy of her latest book The Best of Edna Jacques and a letter typed on the same old machine on which she pounded out her poems. She wrote, in part:

Dear Roy: I was so pleased to get your letter and stuff enclosed about your travels. My, you have done a lot with your life isn't it funny how one kid growing up in some little town will branch out and really make a name for himself. As I get older I am coming to believe that our lives are planned before we are born things happen so fast sometimes as you look back you can see the pattern plain as day, where you took some turn, or events happened that you had nothing to do with. Well, anyway, you must have taken some fascinating turns and I feel I have, too. I have had such a busy life travelling speeches writing, I sure would hate to go through it again I'd cut my throat rather than do it again I went on CBC last month and sold a hundred books, some of them away up in the Yukon my publishers are getting out another book my fifteenth. It will have a nice cover and a new title, Poems of a Pioneer. I have made twelve tapes for the CBC and they want me back why couldn't some of this have happened ten years ago? I will be 83 next week and just can't be bothered any more I just love sitting and reading and doing NOTHING a huge man came here the other day and practically THREATENED me if I wouldn't write my life story offered me any money I asked for but thank God I am well off now. I bought a little farm near Oakville some years ago at four thousand an acre sold it two years ago at fifteen thousand an acre wasn't that lucky! after all the hard-up years I lived through almost starving at times it was Mr Workman who gave me your address for this letter poor old Fred he's getting old like the rest of us Briercrest is slowly dying just a few old widows there now not one living soul lives on the farms any more all the old men are dead but the old girls still have their little teas and their Ladies ' Aid meetings have gardens and are happy as larks I still watch Elwood Glover's TV programme at noon he sure keeps going and has a wonderful following he is so tactful and pleasant while interviewing anyone, and women flock to his programme so here I go to watch Elwood and then to lunch much love to all. Sincerely, EDNA

The Elwood Glover referred to graduated to CBC national network status from the announcers ' staff of CHAB, Moose Jaw. Elwood lived with his parents on Ross Street West, and I remember going to his house one day in late June when he had just completed his high school training to offer him a job at CHAB. He took with alacrity and never looked back. Later in Toronto he became a national personality.

There is a travesty on the Edna Jacques story in a mid-40s publication entitled Sara Binks the Sweet Song-bird of Southern Saskatchewan which first appeared as a series of articles in several prairie newspapers. The story was by one Paul Hiebert and did not appear in book form until 1947. Opposite the title page was the inscription: All the characters in this book are fictitious including the author. Sara Binks, as a work of prairie humour, may have had its enlightened passages, but it was not subtle and the lampoon never quite came off.

But speaking of poets and their works has brought to mind a brief meeting in Chicago with Carl Sandberg, the great contemporary American poet. One of Peter Freygood's friends in Regina was a chap called Geoffrey Byrnes who had taken up a literary job in Chicago in 1935. On my visit to New York that summer I travelled via Chicago, overnighting at the Maryland Hotel near the skyscraper in which Geoffrey had his office. On the second evening of my visit he took me to a literary party given by the Chicago Tribune in honour of Carl Sandberg in the sumptuous lounge of a club called The 333(at 333 Michigan Boulevard). Having admired his free verse for some years I had recently ploughed through his somewhat monumental work, the first two volumes of Abraham Lincoln The Prairie Years and enjoyed it.

When I was introduced to Sandberg as a visiting Canadian journalist, he lifted his shaggy head of white hair and his wrinkled face broke into a smile of welcome -he was always very interested in those from pioneer prairie lands and admired Canadians as a hardy persevering race. He seemed pleased when I told him how much I appreciated such poems as Cool Tombs, The Hangman, Kalamazoo, Chicago Hog Butcher, and his later volume Good Morning, America. Always out for a laugh, I mentioned that his volumes of free verse were costing me up to $2. per copy, and he promised to send me his next book. My continuing admiration for his work is not diminished by the fact that I have never received it, nor did I really expect it.

By the autumn of 1935 the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission(and Hector Charlesworth) were replaced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation with a Director-General brought over from London in the person of W.E. Gladstone Murray. It was Mr Murray, we understood, who had made such a roaring success of the BBC publications, The Listener and Radio Times. All across Canada there had been outbursts of feelings against the way radio broadcasting had been handled, and one of these certainly came from the Moose Jaw area. Mr Murray set about to counteract any ill feeling towards government radio policies by arranging a nation-wide tour of all trouble spots, and his schedule called for a visit to Moose Jaw during the second week of February, 1936. As it happened, the visit occurred on a day when southern Saskatchewan was experiencing one of the heaviest snow blizzards in years.

Gladstone Murray and party, which included his newly-appointed Programme Director, Ernie Bushnell, and CBC Western representative, Horace Stovin, arrived in Moose Jaw during the afternoon and were escorted to suites of rooms in the Grant Hall Hotel. They were to meet members of the Board of Trade at six o'clock and were scheduled to be available for public questioning at a meeting on the mezzanine floor of the hotel at seven. Mr Murray had agreed to broadcast a message to CHAB listeners at 8.30 and the party was due to go on, by train, to Regina at 9.15 pm. Carson Buchanan, Alf Jacobson and I had been in charge of the arrangements and a liberal supply of liquid refreshment was on hand to demonstrate our hospitality as The Friendly City. We found we had done the right thing: Mr Murray was partial to a wee whiskey.

The Board of Trade meeting went off very well, with both Mr Murray and Mr Bushnell answering questions with exactly the right tact and diplomacy. Then we all retired to the adjoining suite for another round of refreshment. During the public question period later, the most serious query was why western listeners to national network programmes had to hear announcements in French as well as in English, just because they originated in Quebec. Mr Murray, who was by now in great form, talked his way adroitly around this one and almost but not quite persuaded our gathering that it was a special privilege to hear well-spoken French. When this meeting broke up at about 8.15 I took Mr Murray aside to remind him that he was scheduled to broadcast from our CHAB studio on the top floor in 15 minutes. Gladstone Murray was a round-faced balding man whose spectacles often slipped down his nose; he had a greying moustache and he invariably carried his drinking glass between two fingers at the top of the glass. His brow was moist with perspiration as I reminded him of the broadcast.

Be a good chap, he smiled, and do something for me ?, Of course, I nodded. Well, said Mr Murray, about this broadcast; will you get me the Indian name for this city? Write it down on a bit of paper, that's a good chap! So far as I knew there was no Indian name for Moose Jaw, but I had a brain-wave that might help. At a Tuxis Boys ' camp the year before we had coined the word MELACHUSETUCK as an Indian name for the camp. Guiding our distinguished visitor to the hotel lift I quickly scribbled the word MELACHUSETUCK on a blank page from my note-book and handed it to Mr Murray. Good, he said How do you pronounce this? I told him and we reached the CHAB studios with only a few moments to settle Mr Murray before the microphone and be ready for the red light signifying we were on the air. When Sid Boyling gave us the light and waved us on, I read my brief prepared introduction and Mr Murray began: My friends, I speak to you from Melachusetuck, the old Indian name for Moose Jaw, and it is my pleasure to visit the studios of CHAB, your own community station, which your loyal support and encouragement over the years has made possible. Tonight, as a cold wintry blizzard rages outside, our hearts are warm with the satisfaction of the continuing public service which you have all enjoyed from your own station CHAB, and which the C.B.C. will always support as far as it is possible to do so. It is the spirit of the prairie pioneers that continues to ensure all listeners with the quality of programmes they deserve. Believe it or not, Mr Murray continued in this well articulated vein for nearly 20 minutes and ended with an emotionally patriotic finale which sounded very much like long live the new CHAB and God save the King. We learned later that many listeners had been moved by the simple eloquence of Gladstone Murray's broadcast.

When the red light went out after my closing announcement, Mr Murray turned to me with a broad grin Was that all right ? he asked, and I shook his hand acknowledging his ad-lib masterpiece. Carson Buchanan entered with a tray and a tall whiskey For our speaker of the evening. Our telephone was jammed with calls of approval and thanks, For some listeners had Feared that the new C.B.C. might well succumb to Ottawa pressures and close down the station once again. That this was not to be was good news indeed.

With glasses replenished we sat in the CHAB studio where we were soon joined by His Worship the Mayor and a number of other leading citizens who had stayed behind in the hotel to hear the broadcast. They were unanimously exuberant in their appreciation of Mr Murray's speech which, by assuring the future of the community radio station, also augured well for the progress of the city. At this point, Alf Jacobson entered the room to inform us that when he rang the Canadian Pacific Railway to check on the 9.15pm train by which Mr Murray and party were to travel to Regina, he was informed that the train was held up at Swift Current because of the blizzard, and that it would seem the CBC party might have to spend the night in Moose Jaw. In Melachusetuck, you mean ? grinned Gladstone Murray who was in a most affable mood. No, he said, Can't do that! Must get on to Regina tonight. No chance of flying, I suppose, he ruminated, adding, No of course not, in this foul weather. But am I not right in supposing that Moose Jaw is the mid-west divisional point of the C.P.R.? When we nodded assent, Mr Murray smiled And would it be true to suggest that my old friend Tom Warner is the Divisional Superintendent here for the C.P.R.? That being so, please get him on the phone for me!

Moments later he was chatting to the C.P.R. Divisional Superintendent, Tom Warner, thanking him for his obviously favourable comments on the broadcast, and he went on, But seriously, Tom, I want a favour. Can you possibly, to oblige an old friend, lay on an engine and one coach to get us to Regina tonight? One small coach will do got to get to Regina tonight, you see! We waited while the phone receiver, now held aloft in Murray's hand, spluttered and then was silent. You can ? said Mr Murray, I knew you'd help. Right you are; we'll be a party of six; see you at the station in an hour!

And so it was that Gladstone Murray, Ernie L. Bushnell and four others, including myself, staggered through the winter blizzard at just after 10 o'clock that evening and through the C.P.R. station to Eastbound Track No1. True to his word, Tom Warner had located an immense 8-wheeled transcontinental locomotive, not yet cooled down at the divisional changing point, assembled a crew of engineer and fireman, loaded the engine with coal and water, and attached the engine to the Divisional Superintendent's own private railway coach. Drawn up and panting on the open track, Engine No.707 and coach 3113 looked black against the swirling snowstorm. Two of our number, feeling no pain from imbibed refreshment, climbed into the engine tender by mistake, but they were soon herded back to the warmth and light of the Superintendent's coach, which was the ultimate in railway luxury.

The full-length private coach was furnished in the fashion of a club car in the Pullman Service, but it also had a medium-sized galley and a fully equipped bar, with a chef and two porters to look after our needs. Drinks were served and these were followed by a splendid steak dinner at the large dining-table. After a hard day's labour in the interests of broadcasting in general, and the community in particular, I felt that dinner was a feast. Hurtling along the open track and through what might be called a blinding blizzard, the C.P.R. Special carried Gladstone Murray and his party to Regina in just over an hour. At the Regina station Mr Murray insisted on climbing up into the engine tender to shake hands with and thank the engineer and fireman who had brought us through the storm on this far-from-ordinary journey. Cars had been laid on in advance by Tom Warner's telegram, and we were soon settled in our respective suites or rooms in the C.P.R.'s palatial Hotel Saskatchewan. Before turning in for the night I telephoned Fred Workman to say I would be back at my desk by mid-morning and would be covering the visit of Mr Gladstone Murray to our city, his meetings and his broadcast speech, for the next day's evening edition. At 8.30 next morning, the weather having cleared somewhat, I caught the Diesel jitney back home.

Having been granted, in effect, a longer lease of life, Radio Station CHAB slowly expanded its community services. We doubled our remote control broadcasts of baseball games, football matches, and the annual Stampede and Rodeo staged each July at the Exhibition Grounds. One evening when we were broadcasting a live commentary on a baseball game under floodlights, the lighting failed and I ad-libbed for 45 minutes until they were repaired and the game continued. This occasion certainly proved that the gift of the gab was not only an asset, it was an essential for an up-and-coming professional broadcaster. That same summer, on a holiday, I visited Ottawa, stayed two nights at the Chateau Laurier, and interviewed Hon Jimmy Gardiner, newly appointed Federal Minister of Agriculture.

It was in 1935 that MGM went classical with an elaborate and costly production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream starring a score of Hollywood actors, including Dick Powell, James Cagney, Joe E. Brown, Hugh Herbert and Mickey Rooney. The latter, as a younger version of Puck, flew through the underbrush on a swinging vine rather like Johnny Weismuller's portrayal of Tarzan of the Apes. This extravaganza was directed by Max Reinhart and it gave me my first experience as an impresario, for I was commissioned by the MGM office for Canada to organize the promotion of the film in our area. With both press and radio facilities at my disposal, this was not too difficult. The advance publicity campaign began with school essay competitions, radio talks on the play by Shakespeare experts, several renditions of the Mendlessohn overture, and thumb-nail career sketches of the famous stars featured in the film. There was a gala reception attended by the Mayor and City Council, with provincial and federal members of government and many other leading personalities, all drinking toasts in champagne to MGM and Shakespeare before the first showing of the film. Any production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with a host of well-known film stars, plus music by Mendelssohn, could not help but be of interest, but apparently it never did make a box-office fortune for MGM. Personally I liked it, but felt it was not worth all the publicity I had helped create for it. It was a year of truly great films including David Copperfield with W.C. Fields, Anna Karenina with Greta Garbo, and Mutiny on the Bounty starring Charles Laughton, all providing real competition for Shakespeare.

By the summer of 1937 I had busied myself with journalism and with radio programme production for eight years, and I was becoming restless. Although I did not know it, my encounter with Gladstone Murray and Ernie Bushnell in February was beginning to bear fruit, and my days as newspaperman cum radio programme director were numbered.

Already I had put in a formal application to Gladstone Murray for a producer's post with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Ernie Bushnell suggested I submit a programme script for consideration. I posted two scripts for a series to be called The Raconteur, which were a collection of after-dinner stories tied together by narration. I never heard of these scripts again and they were never broadcast to my knowledge, but, for whatever interest they may have, I included one of them in my collection of short stories, scripts and plot summaries under the title Bits and Pieces to be published one day.

Many young people like myself who were born and grew up on the flat albeit slightly rolling prairies, sometimes feel a yearning for the mountains and the sea, and I was no exception. My first visit to Vancouver had resulted in a great liking for the west coast, and I was determined to return. In the meantime, and for a fortnight in the summer of 1936, I enjoyed the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, staying at Banff Springs Hotel and later at Chateau Lake Louise. At Banff I climbed my first and last mountain Mount Rundle. After that I could never see the point of toiling up a steep incline in preference to riding comfortably on a ski-lift! But the scenic grandeur of the mountains was a tonic in itself, and the luxury of those splendid C.P.R. hotels made a memorable holiday.

When I returned to Moose Jaw about mid-August I had a long talk with Fred Workman, who told me he had noticed a certain restlessness in me as if I were hoping for a change of scene. He agreed that I had gone about as far as I could go in Moose Jaw, and together we composed a night-letter telegram to Gladstone Murray in Ottawa requesting a reply to my job application. I have always been particularly grateful to Fred for this generous and helpful boost when I was at the crossroads. Three days later I received the following telegram: DUNLOP TIMES-HERALD MOOSEJAW THANKS REMINDER IF BASIC TERMS AGREEABLE REPORT VANCOUVER CBC 15 SEPTEMBER. BY THE BEAUTIFUL SEA

To have lived through three-quarters of the 20th century from 1908 to the mid-80s in my case has been a great privilege. Among many blessings, which I count from time to time, is the good fortune of being born in this age of progress in all directions and the fact that I was born with an innate curiosity. That nose for news which is the prerequisite of every good journalist is part of it. Not only do I want to know the story but I want to know the whys and wherefores. For instance having retired to this lovely English village, and assembled my wits and memories to compile this narrative, I have had the satisfaction recently of discovering the original meaning of three common expressions which I have been using for years.

We are all familiar with the saying robbing Peter to pay Paul. This originated during the reign of Henry VI in London, where the two leading churches were Westminster Abbey, officially listed as the Collegiate Church of St Peter, and St Paul's Cathedral. As the result of some petty altercation with the Bishop of St Peter's, that church was demoted by the king into the parish of St Pancras, and St Paul's was given its own separate parish. From this re-arrangement came the expression robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The second expression for which I have traced the origin is a cock and bull story, which originated in the Bedfordshire village of Stoney Stratford, where the two most popular public houses were The Cock and The Bull. Both of them could attribute their popularity to the fact that in the old days, when opening hours were not so well controlled, they stayed open longer than others, with the result that patrons of The Cock and The Bull were usually the most tipsy. Tales and stories retold by Cock and Bull customers were more unbelievable than any other, hence, a cock and bull story is generally beyond belief.

The third common expression for which my journalistic curiosity found the origin, was Hobson's choice. It seems that during the 18th century in the beautiful city of Cambridge, the leading livery stable was owned and operated by one Charles Hobson who had made a small fortune in renting cabs and carriages to the gentry, so much so that he had acquired that lovely house and property known as Anglesey Abbey for his country residence. When gentle-folk rented horse-drawn transport from Mr Hobson, they were never allowed to select their own horse and carriage, but paid dearly for what Hobson deigned to provide; hence the expression Hobson's choice, meaning no choice at all, but the necessity of making do with whatever was offered.

I was never unduly ambitious, certainly not for financial or personal gain, but I have always felt compelled to strive for progress, which is perhaps the urge of all creative people. There were no doubts or misgivings about the move from my chosen field of journalism to the wider horizons of radio broadcasting. If creative writing was still the sine qua non of my life, I would continue to write, but for a greater and wider public. By writing for a national radio network, I would enjoy the best of both worlds.

There were no farewell parties for me when I left Moose Jaw, although Fred Workman took me to lunch and treated us both to a glass of ale at the Grant Hall Hotel. However Carson Buchanan and Alf Jacobson gathered the CHAB staff together for a Saturday afternoon tea party. I said good-bye to Uncle John and Aunt Janie, gathered my few belongings together and bought a one-way CPR ticket to Vancouver. Early in my journalistic career I learned that one should never use a preposition to end a sentence with remembering it because it committed the error it condemned; whatever the consequence, I was now fully convinced that Moose Jaw was not a bad place to be from.

Old-time newspapermen in Canada will remember the practice of ending a news story with the symbol -30- which simply meant end of story no more to come. This indication was helpful to the sub-editor as well as the type-setter. It happened this way: in the early days of the northwest telegraph service, the stations along the line were designated by numbers, and they ended each day's transmissions with that number. On one occasion a great forest fire raged through the area of Telegraph Station 30. The story is that the brave telegraphist continued to tap out messages and calls for help as the roaring fire closed in around his log cabin No 30 beside the railroad track, and he was still tapping out the Morse code for end of message 30 end of message 30 as the burning log cabin collapsed around him. Some days later when the forest fire had been brought under control, rescuers arrived to find the charred remains of the brave telegraph despatcher, his finger still on the telegraph key. Ever since then, as the story goes, journalists have kept up the tradition of ending the final page of each story with the sign -30-.

So it was that on a golden autumn evening, towards mid-September of 1937, I came to write my -30- to a career of journalism cum radio, and sat watching the flatness of the prairies give way to rising foothills as the twin-engined CPR Dominion crawled westward up the slopes of the mountain. On we went past the grandeur of Mount Edith Cavell and Castle Mountain, through Banff and Lake Louise to Kicking Horse Pass and the Great Divide, where rivers on one side flowed back to the Atlantic, and those on the other side ran west to the Pacific Ocean. After the long and winding figure-of-8 Connaught Tunnel leading to the smelters of Trail we were in British Columbia, passing through the Kootenay Valley and Okanagan to the gently sloping side of the Pacific Range. Finally, on a bright sunny morning, our train chugged along the wide expanse of the Fraser River and Vancouver Inlet to that great city itself. Slowly the long train wound past the derelict shanty-town houses between the water and the tracks where Malcolm Lowry was writing his great novel, Under the Volcano, straight to the Pacific terminal of the transcontinental railway.

By 8.30 am, Monday, 15 September 1937, I was making my way slowly up Granville Street lugging two heavy suitcases, one of which was full of favourite books. Reaching Georgia Street I turned right and walked past the old Hotel Vancouver to the Hotel Georgia. I registered in Room 304 which came to be my home for the next three years.

Radio Station CBR, C.B.C. headquarters for the western region, was located on the mezzanine and ground floors of the northwest corner of Hotel Vancouver. The entrance was on Hornby Street just off Georgia Street. When I reported to the station manager, Jack Radford, that first morning I was much impressed. The station included a large double-storey Studio A facing a spacious lobby which accommodated a receptionist-cum-switchboard operator. The lobby was tiled in blue and gave access to a stairway leading to a mezzanine built in U-formation around Studio A. Windows overlooked it from Studios B and C and the Studio A control room. This mezzanine housed offices along the north, or Georgia Street side, the Music Library along the west side, the announcers ' room and recording room along the south side, and a connecting lobby on the east or Hornby Street side a very compact and practical station set-up.

Jack Radford was equally impressive, a brisk, cheerful pipe-smoking man of ruddy complexion, who wore rimless glasses and sported a neat greying moustache. That first morning I met Don Wilson, the portly Chief Announcer, and his associates Jack Peach and Bill Herbert, the Regional Engineer, Norman Olding, and the Station Engineer, Basil Hilton. I was also introduced to the Engineers: James Gilmore, Tony Geluch, Jim Laurie, Don Horne, and Dick Presenz. They were a very friendly lot and I soon felt at home.

The Hotel Vancouver occupied an entire city block and rose to citadel peaks some 16 storeys above the street. A few feet south of the CBR entrance was a side entrance to the hotel leading down to a beer parlour on one side and the spacious Hotel Cafeteria on the other. This self-service emporium was presided over by Emile, the chef behind the counter. Margaret, the charming supervisor, became a great favourite of CBC staff and artists over the years, for most of us ate at least one meal a day in that friendly oasis.

After a cafeteria lunch that day with Jack Radford, Don Wilson and Jack Peach, I met the senior producer, James R. Finlay, who turned out to be friendly and helpful. My employment with CBC began at the salary of $150. per month which was very acceptable, and I was assigned to the newly created post as Talks Producer. The job of a producer is to originate ideas, gather the material, work out the costs, keeping within a given budget, have the scripts written, rehearse the principals and finally preside over the dress rehearsal and the live production on the air.

In point of fact I had enjoyed some experience in radio network production before arriving at CBR, Vancouver. When Ernie Bushnell had appointed Horace Stovin as his programme representative for western Canada, we had sold CBC the idea of a weekly quarter-hour studio production from CHAB. We produced a short series of 15 minute programmes featuring Bert Peachell and his String Quartet, which had a good reception, albeit string quartets are not the most popular of radio fare. Later we had produced an exceedingly popular show featuring Howard Large as Rudolph and his German Band, with Howard's German dialogue and the oom-pah-pah music of a small brass group.

Whatever showmanship may have been developed in the CHAB productions was now to be used originating talks programmes and other current affairs features, including discussion groups, from the Vancouver studios of CBC to the forty-odd stations of the national network. It was an interesting challenge and I responded with alacrity. I had no time for mundane talks such as How To Keep A Bee or Rose Pruning Can Be Fun, no matter how much a specialist the speaker might be. I felt we had to find and develop talk personalities who could be entertaining as well as erudite.

Our first find was Earle Kelly, a bewhiskered and rusty-voiced newsman from the Daily Province, who was engaged to read the 9 o'clock news. His hearty voice was soon familiar to and popular with many thousands of listeners up and down the west coast and he invariably ended his broadcasts with a special Good-Night wish to a different section of the community each evening, such as to June brides, to lighthouse keepers out there in the dark, or to all dentists who might be looking down in the mouth. Not clever stuff, but he got away with it.

Among the many new and original talks personalities brought to Canadian listeners from the west coast were two that really caught the public imagination. By their very quality and integrity they continued for several years after I had been graduated from the post of Talks Producer to higher echelons of musical and dramatic productions. One was called I Cover the Waterfront, which featured a young Irishman, Pat Terry, who was Marine Editor of the Vancouver Sun. His weekly 13-minute yarns were colourful sea stories, most of them true, and all of them spellbinding. The second talk series which brought some notice to Vancouver was called The Cariboo Miner with George MacKerracher as the old-time gold-rush miner seeking his fortune in the Cariboo valley of British Columbia. George MacKerracher was a character in himself, and although I always suspected that he made up most of his stories, he told them with such sincerity and verve that they were quite believable. Both these men became good friends of mine and I frequently visited their homes to deliver large sacks of fan-mail which came in from all parts of the country and the northern U.S.A.

As Talks Producer, I also arranged discussion broadcasts, engaging well-known personalities from the University of British Columbia such as Prof. Fred Soward for current affairs and history, Dr G.G. Sedgewick on literary subjects, Prof. Walter Gage on matters mathematical, and others. On occasion we were also able to make use of the services of local newspaper columnists, namely Eric Nicholl, Jack Scott and Jack Stepler. Talks production included Special Events and it was a pleasure to organize OBs(outside broadcasts) on many fronts.

In 1938 we began the first School Broadcasts for the province, and I was in charge of production. Many of these shows were on subjects such as music appreciation, history, current affairs and so on. I found myself writing one or two half-hour scripts each week scripts entitled The Voice of the Violin, The Story of Dr Sun Yat-Sen, The Thin Red Line(the British empire and commonwealth) and, among others, The Life of John Buchan.

Canadian radio listeners may remember a weekly hour-length feature on the national network called Night Shift, which was a series of actuality broadcasts from a plant, factory, organization or other active centre of interest. The series originated from various communities and when it reached the west coast I had to provide the script for a new show every seven days for ten weeks. We covered a lumber-mill near Vancouver, a North Van. factory, a ship-repair yard and dry-dock in Victoria, a coal-mine near Nanaimo, a condensed milk canning plant in New Westminster and several others. These programmes, in which the versatile talents of Jack Peach and Bill Herbert came into their own, were exciting, and they kept our Night Shift staff busy arranging all details. Memories of those happy days of frantic but productive activity come flooding back, but the incident I remember most was an inconsequential one. At the Nanaimo Hotel after the coal-mine show, two of our engineers who shared a room down the hall knocked on our door one evening just before dusk to ask if we had seen the strange behaviour of the sea-gulls flying outside our hotel room windows, which faced the sea. When we looked out the sea-gulls did seem to be weaving in and out and making rather strange but happy sounds almost as if they were a bit tipsy and as it turned out, such was the case. Our engineer friends had collected crusty rolls from the dining room and, after a few drinks themselves, had set out to experiment with the sea-gulls ' capacity for whiskey. Making a hole in the top of a roll they poured in whiskey until it was well soaked, then threw it to the screaming gulls, who swooped upon it in their dozens. It took some time, but after 36 buns and a 40-ounce bottle of whiskey had been used up, the gulls were found to be reacting admirably and appeared to be enjoying the experiment as much as the engineers. Due to a shortage of whiskey that evening, the party broke up early.

In Vancouver we used Studios B and C for talks and school broadcasts, while the big time shows with full orchestra, choir and soloists originated from Studio A. Station CBR broadcast part of the output of the CBC national network from 6am to midnight, and for a few hour-long or half-hour periods each day, the feed was reversed, and CBR fed programmes to the network. In producing national network programmes(the network basically consisted of telegraph wires stretching some 5,000 miles from Vancouver, on the Pacific to Halifax, Nova Scotia on the Atlantic coast) we soon became familiar with the five time-zones across the country. We knew that 6pm in Vancouver was 7pm on the prairies, 8pm in Winnipeg, 9pm in Toronto Montreal and 10pm in the Maritime provinces. It was necessary therefore to originate our national network shows early in the evening if they were to reach other parts of the country before their respective peak listening hours had passed into bedtimes.

After I had produced talks and features for a year or so, Jack Radford asked me one day if I would like to take charge of a music show. When I jumped at the chance, he assigned me to producing the Mart Kenney Orchestra show from the Hotel Vancouver roof garden. Mart Kenney was a perfectionist, and his high standards set an example for scores of dance bands across the country. His weekly half-hour CBC programme was one of the most popular and kept his Victor recordings high in the rating charts. Art Hallman played clarinet in the band, and also doubled on vocals, but the leading singer was the lovely Georgia Dey. I was greatly attracted to Georgia, and was able to enjoy her company at several film shows or at dinners on evenings when neither of us was working. This pleasant infatuation lasted until the CPR moved Mart Kenney and His Orchestra to the Royal York Hotel in Toronto.

After two years my work was extended to include a number of musical shows, including piano recitals, with such international personalities as Egon Petri and the Australian baritone, Clement Q. Williams and his accompanist-wife, Enid Conley. Late in 1939 Jack Radford was moved back to Toronto and he was sorely missed; he was succeeded by Peter Aylen who proved a most satisfactory station manager for a year until he also was transferred back east and shortly took over the post as Director of Radio for the United Nations Organization in New York. Gladstone Murray next appointed Ira Dilworth to the post of Regional Director of the CBC. Professor Dilworth had been a teacher of English and Principal of Victoria College for years; he was a quiet knowledgeable man of great charm and his love for literature and music was contagious.

Ira Dilworth was a leader who endeared himself to all he worked with; he was strict, but firm and fair, and he had that somewhat rare ability to see and understand another's point of view. His round beaming face with bushy eyebrows and a mop of greying hair sweeping back like a mane from a high forehead was arresting. Out of my 51 working years I spent seven of them with Ira Dilworth and I never had a finer friend to work with; he was admired by all and his contribution to Canadian broadcasting was tremendous. It has been said that he gave too much of himself in his idealistic way, and that the political football aspects of the CBC in eastern Canada, where he was finally transferred, caused a breakdown in health and his early retirement. When I last saw Ira Dilworth it was in a Vancouver nursing home in 1962 when he was suffering terminally with Parkinson's disease. He died the following year.

It was in the autumn of 1938 that I first visited Hollywood, spending the best part of a fortnight in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Travelling by train I landed in the centre of Los Angeles and found a room in a small hotel off Pershing Square. The film capital is a huge sprawling city which seems to stretch indefinitely in all directions; they even said that the outskirts of Los Angeles reached as far as San Francisco! One of my first discoveries in the Mexican quarter of the city was Olvera Street, a typical South American thoroughfare, where tourists are encouraged to throw coins into the fountains for good fortune. The Mexican atmosphere was contagious and I soon found myself on a crowded coach bound for Mexico. It was a Sunday, and the coach took us south of the border to the dusty town of Tia Juana where the passengers wandered about looking for souvenirs and tequila. Some of us decided to attend the much-advertised bull fight scheduled to commence at 3pm in the Plaza del Toro. Two types of tickets to the bull-ring were available Shady Side seats at $3.00 and Sunny Side seats at $2. From a place on the shady side I watched the most forlorn spectacle I have ever seen. It is a cruel sport at best, but the poor show the matadors and toreadors made by running for the outer rail and escaping over the fence when the enraged bull pursued them was not a creditable sight; I spent my time, for as long as I stayed, cheering for the bulls. After watching the slaughter of three bulls there were four more to come some of us left the stadium to catch the bus back to Los Angeles. We were told that the Tia Juana bullfights were not of the best and this we were quite willing to believe.

I had no connections with the bigwigs of the movie capital so I found it impossible as a stranger to make the right contacts among publicity agents at the various studio lots, and to meet the stars. But I did manage a chat with Burgess Meredith, Lewis Stone and Edna Mae Oliver, and also met Daryl F. Zanuck. During the quick tourist tours of other studio lots I was fortunate to watch a number of stars at work, including: Joseph Cotton, Olivia de Havilland, Ned Sparks, Henry Fonda, Pat O'Brian, Mary Astor and Mickey Rooney. But the general impression of the Hollywood scene was of artificial glitter, false fronts on western pioneer town sets, and a little glamour mixed with much frustration. No one seemed to like the dry enervating and dusty climate of the Hollywood hills. The palm-lined streets and even the crowds at the Brown Derby just off Hollywood Boulevard and Vine, Grauman's Chinese Theatre, or the El Morocco Restaurant all supposedly popular with the movie stars seemed almost dull and certainly dreary.

By contrast, San Francisco was a fascinating city of charm and not a little culture. Sipping an evening martini at the Top of the Mark(the glass-encircled roof garden of the Mark Hopkins Hotel high on Nob Hill) one could look down at the lights of that most cosmopolitan city over the warehouses and docks of the Embarcadero, over to Grant Avenue and Chinatown, down the cable-car track to Fisherman's Wharf and beyond to the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge which crossed the bay to Sausolito. The lights of Alcatraz stood out like a ship in the bay, while on the other side shone the twinkling lights of Berkeley. Well do I remember walking up and down the hilly streets of San Francisco, and also attending a performance of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, with that debonair veteran Frenchman Pierre Montreux conducting. Travelling back to Vancouver by train I was amazed at the size and grandeur of the forests of giant sequoia trees which stretch for miles to the north of San Francisco. One tree was large enough to allow a motorcar to pass through it.

During the California visit, newspaper headlines reported the rising power of Adolph Hitler and Herman Goering who were increasing their inhuman persecution of Jews, but back in Canada the same news was reported with less scary and more moderate tones. We were living in a spectacular era: Mussolini made war on hapless Ethiopia; after the death of King George V came the brief reign of Edward VIII, his abdication and marriage to Mrs Wallis Simpson; then the happier reign of King George VI. Japan was invading China, the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek disappeared for a time, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to London from Munich waving a paper to proclaim peace in our time. We at the CBC pressed on with our endeavours to inform and entertain national listeners.

On my visit to New York in August of 1939 I stayed at the St Regis Hotel(having learned it was pro-British and that the Duke of Edinburgh made it his home on Manhattan visits). I was enjoying a drink with Jessica Dragonette and Nadea on their West 57th Street balcony when news came over the radio that the war in Europe had begun. This was the evening of 3rd September. Jessica had been born in India, as it happened, and she always had a sympathetic interest in Commonwealth affairs. If Canada joined Britain for the war, as she most certainly would, which unit of the service would I be joining? Both Jessica and Nadea seemed to agree that it was fitting and appropriate when I told them my first choice would be to serve with the Royal Canadian Air Force. A week later back in Vancouver, when Canada joined Britain in the war against Germany and Italy, I applied to the RCAF recruiting office for a commission, in view of my earlier flying experience. Five days later Ira Dilworth called me to his office where, in his kindly fashion, he expressed surprise that he had heard from the RCAF of my application before I had discussed it with him. My apologies did little to assuage the situation and I was informed that the federal government had ruled against allowing key production personnel to enlist in the armed forces. Mr Dilworth explained that our programmes would form part of the radio services for the troops wherever they were, at home or abroad, that those concerned with broadcast production would be organizing War Bonds and recruiting campaigns, and that keeping at our work would be the best way of serving the war effort. My application to join the RCAF was refused with thanks, and I had no choice but to be content with that ruling.

Soon after this there arrived from Toronto a short ruddy-faced Welshman, Ernest Morgan, as Chief Producer, and as our programme production increased more staff was added, including the versatile and ever helpful announcer Dick Halhed, the tall and sharp-featured Stan(or David) Catton, and the suavely serious Marce Munro. Later the programme staff grew to include producers Archie MacCorquindale, John Barnes and Mrs Ada McGeer. By this time CBR was originating at least half a dozen full-orchestra shows to the national network weekly and we were coming into the golden era of Canadian radio network production. As it happened this period coincided with the arrival in Vancouver of Andrew Allan, later one of Canada's all time great producers, and he was accompanied by his unofficial fiancee that talented actress Judith Evelyn. Andrew joined the CBC staff as a producer with special reference to drama productions.

Both Andrew and Judith arrived in Vancouver much in need of rest to recuperate from their hazardous and near-fatal experiences as passengers on the ill-fated liner Athenia, which was torpedoed and sunk by a Nazi submarine off the Eire coast a few days after the outbreak of World War II. Andrew's father was lost at sea during this tragic incident and both Judith and he spent hours in the cold Atlantic waters before they were rescued. Andrew has described the details of the sinking of the Athenia in his book Andrew Allan A Self Portrait as edited by Harry Boyle, after Andrew's untimely death in January 1974.

The work of a radio producer is all-embracing; he is responsible for everything that goes into a broadcast production. First he has an Idea, say a sweet Melachrino-type string sound; he then decides this will take an orchestra of say 24 players(sidemen) and then chooses a suitable conductor and arranger. In conference each week with them, he selects the musical numbers and their order on the programme. If the show needs a soloist or a choir, this is arranged. With all the ingredients in hand, a regular slot on the weekly network schedule is assigned, and the entire cast meets for several hours ' wood-shed rehearsal where the individual numbers are whittled into shape for the performance. The time devoted to this first rehearsal depends on the budget allowed for the show, with Musicians ' Union rates prevailing. After the woodshed rehearsal, and usually the next day, comes the second run through, followed by a full dress rehearsal timed to end about half an hour before the production hits the network. Before the second day rehearsals the producer has written or arranged for the script and the appropriate announcer for this particular programme.

At CBR our main productions originated in Studio A. In the small mezzanine A -Control Room stood the producer, his eye on the second-hand of the wall-clock and his right hand raised to signal the start to the conductor who watched him from the studio. Beside the producer sat one of the most important cogs in the production wheel, the Control Operator or Engineer. His hands rested on the dials by which he controlled the several microphones used in the studio. Through Master Control the programme was fed to the network and thence across the continent. The happy combination of engineer and producer was often more than half the battle in the smooth production of a good show. In this respect I was indeed fortunate to have such sensitive, understanding and adroit colleagues as Tony Geluch, Jimmy Gilmore and Don Horne working with me on hundreds of productions over my nine years at CBR.

The station had at its beck and call a talented pool of musicians, singers, actors, actresses and conductors. The leading conductor, when I came to CBR, was Percy Harvey, who held the baton on such shows as By the Sea and Music From the Pacific, while an Hungarian violinist from Budapest, Jean deRimanoczy, conducted a string orchestra in Music for Today. Then there was a real showman in the person of debonair Harry Pryce who conducted Stag Party, Musical Mirror and From Leicester Square to Broadway for many years. But a younger and rapidly up and coming pianist-conductor was John Avison, who directed many programmes of light classical music, with choirs and organ. George Calangis was one of the younger conductors of pop groups.

Stag Party was a comedy show featuring Alan Young in the leading role and Jack Peach as straight-man, with veteran actor Frank Vyvyan handling a multiplicity of sound effects. Harry Pryce led the band and Andrew Allan produced, except on occasions when I was asked to handle the production. I enjoyed producing deRimanoczy's orchestra playing modern works of Gustav Holst, Ireland and Boyd Neel in Music for Today, and also the big-band sound of Percy Harvey's 30-piece orchestra with Arthur Ross-Jones on the popular vocals, in the show Music from the Pacific.

But the weekly half-hour I liked best was devoted to the old music hall songs of the gay nineties, many of which I had heard my father sing. I remember him teaching us songs like Daisy Bell, I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard, The Preacher and the Bear and others, including many from the Savoy operas. I wrote the lyrics and Harry Pryce composed the music for a theme song for From Leicester Square to Broadway. The programme featured soloists Isabel McEwan, William Carr and the Barber Shop Quartet, with Harry conducting the pit orchestra, and introductions by the Old Stager, Bill Buckingham. It was a fast moving show that dealt largely in nostalgia. In fact it was the fore-runner of many similar shows in the years that followed, and I understand that From Leicester Square to Broadway enjoyed the longest continuous run of any CBC national network production. This show and a number of other CBC programmes which I had the pleasure of producing were relayed to the Canadian forces overseas by the BBC from London throughout the war. I also enjoyed producing a series of Gilbert Sullivan operas, using orchestra, chorus, soloists and actors. The series concluded with my own story of the W.S. Gilbert-Arthur Sullivan-Rupert D'Oyly Carte triumvirate in dramatic form, with the music of the operas between scenes of the play. In a similar series we also produced Babes in Toyland, Merrie England, The Bohemian Girl, The Land of Smiles and others. That was 40 years ago and they are still playing most of the same melodies today good music does not die!

Among the interesting personalities I encountered as a CBC Talks Producer was the vigorous gnarled-looking retired Indian civil servant, Sir Robert Holland, who lived on Beach Drive in Victoria with his charming niece, Miss Small. Sir Robert had served as Governor of the Indian province of Rajputanah for years, and was a fountain of information on Asian affairs. He used to enjoy telling us of the early trials of the Young husband expedition of 1908 which trekked more than halfway across the lonely reaches of Persia and Afghanistan, and over the Himalaya range to Tibet. When Hollywood moguls decided to make a feature film of Gungha Din they brought Sir Robert from Canada to act as technical advisor. It was he who introduced me to the doyen of all Tibetan experts, Sir Charles Bell who, because of the war, was living quietly at The Old Charming Inn near Victoria while writing his last book. Even today, reference librarians will tell you that the most authoritative books on Tibetan art, government, history and culture were written by Sir Charles Bell. Through a literary agent I had in New York I was able to help Sir Charles arrange the publication of that last book in America and I visited him many times, to hear him talk. At our last meeting he presented me with a pair of small Tibetan scrolls. On previous occasions he had given me a Tibetan prayer-wheel and a monastery bell which I still cherish. The kindly gentleman seemed very English to me, and we often took tea together as he recalled his adventurous exploits in Tibet. I believe he was the first westerner to make contact with the Dalai Lama, who became a great friend.

While producing a series of vocal recitals at CBC I had the pleasure of working with Mrs John Christie(Audrey Mildmay), who was on a visit to Vancouver, and who had a remarkably fine singing voice. It was she and her husband who founded the great English institution now widely known as the Glyndebourne Opera. Another celebrated visitor was the Australian pianist-composer Arthur Benjamin, who had rented a house in Vancouver. Arthur's adaptation of a West Indian theme into the world wide popular Jamaica Rhumba was gaining in popularity, and his infrequent piano recitals were fabulous. Arthur Benjamin and Ira Dilworth became close friends, and I was fortunate to be associated with both. I remember the pleasure it gave a handful of guests at the Dilworth home when Ira and Arthur gave us their four-hand version of Bach's chorale Where Sheep May Safely Graze. Another favourite at our CBR recital series was a young pianist from Winnipeg, Jack Henderson, who became a great friend and companion to Arthur Benjamin, and who accompanied him when he returned to London some years later. By coincidence, Jack Henderson had worked with Hellen Semmens(later my wife) when they were both involved in the production of Gilbert Sullivan operas in Winnipeg, long before I had met either of them. Jack Henderson was with Arthur Benjamin when he died suddenly in Ceylon in 1960, while they were en route to Australia.

Our announcing staff at CBR had been enhanced by the addition of Ray Mackness, Sheila Russell, Ted Devlin and Saul Ornest, but the main shows were still handled by the old reliables, Dick Halhed and Bill Herbert. CBC Regional Offices now occupied the mezzanine floor on the west side of the hotel, where Hilda Wilson was the Senior Secretary. Doug Nixon was the latest producer, and Pat Keatley a newcomer in the News Room. THE WINDRUSH DAYS

I agree with radio critics who declare that the BBC is the finest broadcasting organization in the world. Most people feel that BBC standards are of the highest order, in keeping with the basic principles laid down by Lord Reith, the BBC's founder and first Director-General. The BBC may be old-fashioned Aunty Bebe to some, but ever since the world's first regular broadcast service began from London on November 2, 1922, the good old reliable BBC has retained its meticulous care in all facets of broadcast communication. Over the years we have been thankful to hear the BBC World Service in Chungking, Kuala Lumpur, Los Angeles, Guyana, Nigeria, Alaska and many other places and that clear, calm statement of the news spoken with suave detachment in impeccable English has never ceased to satisfy. Countless thousands all over the globe listen to the hourly news broadcasts with interest, respect and admiration.

My first contact with the BBC came in the person of Lance Sieveking, a fastidious producer who came to Canada on loan to CBC, and spent a week or so in each of the regions. He was a tallish man with a mind as sharp as a razor. He has been described as eccentric but esoteric might have been a more suitable word. During his Vancouver production of the drama Flags on the Matterhorn he asked Frank Vyvyan, our sound effects expert, for the sound of ice-water sluicing through slots of opaque glass, and Frank managed it! We did not have an echo chamber at CBR, so when Lance Sieveking required an echo effect our engineers set up a microphone in the gentlemen's washroom where the reverberation off tiled walls and floor gave the desired effect. The only fiasco during Sieveking's west coast visit was when, right in the middle of the echo chamber scene, someone flushed a loo and the extra effect of a sudden waterfall was added to the scene. Fortunately this occurred during the dress rehearsal, so the general public never knew what they missed.

In spite of his often trying demands, I came to admire Lance Sieveking as a perfectionist, and his dramatic productions were a source of considerable education to junior producers still learning the art. I particularly enjoyed long evening discussions with Lance, whose meticulous methods and ambitions in broadcasting were explained in his book The Stuff of Radio, which he sent me on his return to London, together with a copy of his novel, The Perfect Witch.

Beside these books in my library is a copy of another book, Along My Line, by a BBC mogul, Gilbert Harding, presented to me after our frequent meetings both in Canada and in London. Gilbert with his horn-rimmed glasses and walrus moustache was popular in Canada, but I did not get to know him well until we later met on at least half a dozen occasions for lunch in London. As the somewhat recalcitrant and irascible member of the famous What's My Line panel broadcast on BBC television for years, Gilbert could be and was difficult, but when we met at the Coq d'Or Restaurant on Stratton Street, just off Piccadilly, he was the soul of charm. Charles, the immaculate maitre d'hotel, always gave us his personal attention, and following a gourmet lunch knew exactly when to bring on Gilbert's favourite dessert wild strawberries drenched in kirsch. Since those days I have sometimes wished that I had been able to record on tape the conversations I had with Gilbert Harding, who was an intellectual. His appearance of irascibility during What's My Line was usually part of the act.

Our radio work in Vancouver was frequently interrupted by visits from Toronto department heads of CBC. Don Cameron was Head of Talks, and I was usually in charge of his visit, which kept me busy for the few days he would be with us, twice a year. We also enjoyed similar visits from Rupert Lucas, Head of Drama, a past-master of story-telling, and W.H. Steve Brodie, Head of Announcing, who was a sharp-eyed, peppery Englishman with a constant concern for pronunciation and diction. I first met Steve Brodie on a visit to Toronto when we were both sitting in on a broadcast featuring Percy Faith and his orchestra, and I remember how we both were enthralled by Percy's arrangement of Beyond the Blue Horizon. Later, in a cafe on Yonge Street, we heard a juke-box recording of the Andrews Sisters singing Rum and Coca Cola( working for the Yankee dollar). The term Yankee dollar prompted Steve to say how much he regretted Lorne Green's decision to leave CBC and the National News for an offer in Hollywood. (This move, however, turned into a very literal Bonanza for Lorne Green.) Steve Brodie was always good company and his influence on Canadian radio announcers was tremendous.

As the war went from bad to worse in Europe, many well-known personalities visited Vancouver. A charming couple, to whom I was introduced by Ira Dilworth in the Hotel Vancouver lobby, was Sir John and Lady Barbirolli. Sir John had dark hair, sharp eyes and an aquiline nose; Lady Barbirolli was tall and stately. He was scheduled to conduct the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in Sunday's concert at the Orpheum Theatre. Two days before the concert, Fernie Quinn, the only capable oboist in the vicinity, was taken ill, at which point Lady Barbirolli, who was an oboe player of some renown in Britain, offered to take the part and filled in with considerable distinction.

The permanent conductor of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra was Allard de Ridder, a tall Germanic type, and I used to feel rather sorry for him because he was so often being deposed in favour of a guest conductor like Sir John Barbirolli, Dr Otto Klemperer, Sir Thomas Beecham, Leonard Bernstein or even Sir Ernest MacMillan from Toronto.

As a patron of the Sir Ernest MacMillan Clubs of greater Vancouver I enjoyed a happy professional association with Sir Ernest for some years. The MacMillan Clubs were groups of teen-age students organized in scores of schools throughout the province by the energy and enthusiasm of Marjorie Agnew, a teacher and music-lover herself. Early in my CBC days she persuaded me and John Avison to donate silver cups for an annual music competition. On his regular summer visit to Vancouver Sir Ernest would conduct the symphony orchestra in an open-air concert in the Malkin Bowl in Stanley Park. I would act as Master of Ceremonies introducing Sir Ernest and the various artists who took part as winners of that year's MacMillan Club competitions. The verdant setting of these open air concerts was ideal.

One of the staunch supporters of the Macmillan Clubs, believe it or not, was the famous American contralto Marian Anderson. Under Lily Laverock's auspices, she came to Vancouver on an annual concert tour, and when Marjorie Agnew and I approached her on the matter she was delighted to become a sponsor. Marion Anderson was a tall gentle woman and although plain, had charisma and, of course, that magnificent voice. In 1955 she was the first black person to sing at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. On two occasions it was my pleasure and privilege to introduce Sunday afternoon concerts in Stanley Park, with Sir Ernest MacMillan conducting the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. Marian Anderson was the soloist. Some years later, Hellen and I met her again in Hong Kong, where the impresario, Harry Odell, had brought her for a concert. At a reception afterwards we were happy to see how well she remembered her earlier appearances with Macmillan in Vancouver.

In Stanley Park, there is a solitary rock that stands in the inlet, like a sentinel, a few feet off Prospect Point. It is known as Siwash Rock. The story is, that in bygone days before the advent of the white man, there was a young Siwash Indian whose ardent love of nature made him come to that point of land on the inlet every day to watch the sunset. There he gave thanks for the glories of nature to the Great Spirit of the heavens. Manitou,(the Great Spirit) was so touched by the Indian's devotion that upon his death Manitou made him into a rock standing off the inlet, and that monument has been called Siwash Rock ever since. Gilbert Harding tells the story of Siwash Rock with considerable embellishment in his book Along My Line to which I have referred.

For two months every summer I was engaged to produce, and act as Master of Ceremonies for, the Home Gas Show, a weekly hour-length commercial programme. It was broadcast to the CBC Pacific network at nine o'clock Sunday evenings from the flood-lit Malkin Bowl in Stanley Park. The show featured Harry Pryce and orchestra, with soloists Isabel MacEwan and Bill Carr. We were sometimes able to secure the services of Ann Watt as guest soloist. These highly professional artists presented popular programmes of light opera and semi-classical works that seemed to please the thousands who flocked to hear the concerts.

In the spring of 1940 John Avison and I rounded up a group of like-minded radio people with the object of renting a large house as far away as possible from downtown Vancouver. We hoped it might form the basis of a small colony providing a change for all concerned. It had to be within access of the studios so that normal work could be carried on by those participating in the scheme. After much searching we found a six-bedroomed house called Windrush, located on the sea near Horseshoe Bay at the mouth of Squamish Inlet. It was about 13 miles from Hotel Vancouver and was reached by driving through Stanley Park, across the Lions ' Gate Bridge, then turning left through West Vancouver to the end of Marine Drive. The house was nicely furnished, stood well off the main road, and was hidden by surrounding trees. It was perched on a rocky cliff overlooking a stone path to the sea some 40 feet below.

For creative people working in the confines of downtown Vancouver, Windrush was a heavenly contrast. Andrew Allan was enthusiastic, and so was Judith Evelyn. With Ernest Morgan that made five and we were fortunate to be able to persuade a young Japanese student, on holiday from U.B.C., to join our party as cook and housekeeper. His name was Kunio Hidaka and he fitted in admirably despite the odd mixture of temperaments with which he had to deal. He may not have been much of a fancy cook, but Kunio had a very keen brain and a highly intelligent outlook on life. His contributions during late-hour discussions were considerable. After Pearl Harbour, when Kunio, as a Canadian-Nisi, was moved to eastern Canada, we kept in touch.

As the only lady in the house, Judith took charge of certain household affairs such as the ordering of supplies. At breakfast she occasionally annoyed us by reeling off lists of groceries we were all to pick up during the day and bring home in time for dinner. John and I rebelled at this kind of regimentation but Andrew and Ernest just smiled and said nothing. It was those two who invariably forgot to comply with Judith's requests, while John and I usually showed up with the items, literally bringing home the bacon. Judith took on the role of House Mother. She was a consummate actress and was accustomed to assuming roles; but she was also very good company, a highly intelligent young lady inordinately fond of Andrew Allan. Andrew was indulgent when Judith talked of her ambitions to star in a Broadway production, or better still, in a London West End success and we all voiced assurance and encouragement as one talks to a little boy who hopes to become Prime Minister. A year after our idle talk at Windrush, Judith Evelyn was in New York rehearsing her leading lines for Patrick Campbell's great play Gaslight, in which she starred on Broadway from December, 1941(the same week as Pearl Harbour) for the next two years, and made a lasting name for herself in the American theatre.

My favourite classical composition, for some reason or other, is the Piano Concerto No 4 in G by Beethoven. One of the reasons for this preference may be that I first came to know it at Windrush. We were using my turntable and speakers, and John Avison had brought along a set of 78 rpm Columbia recordings of this work as played by Richard Backhaus, with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Karl Bohm. In the near half-century since that Windrush summer I have heard the work performed by many artists, but never to impress as much as in that lovely seascape setting many years ago. When Hellen and I first came to live near London, the first concert we attended at the Royal Festival Hall was a performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 4, with Robert Casadesus at the piano and Andre Previn conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. This was a brilliant performance, and for me it brought back nostalgic memories of Windrush, and the summer days of 1940.

So pleasant was it at Windrush and so proud were we five of our country estate, as it were, that there was seldom an evening without visitors, and the weekends were sometimes overcrowded. But visitors were welcome as the flowers in May, and many a happy Sunday afternoon swimming party off the Windrush cliffs was enjoyed by all, including the occasional group of Kunio's student friends from U.B.C.

As stated earlier, the Vancouver CBC producers had a splendid pool of talent from which to draw for both musical and dramatic productions. Many of the visitors to Windrush that summer were actors and actresses who appeared with fair regularity on Andrew's drama shows and my special features, music and school broadcasts, most of which required drama casts. Fletcher Markle was a clever actor and script-writer and he was naturally favoured by Andrew. After service in the RCAF, Fletcher went to Hollywood, married Mercedes MacAndrew, the actress, and produced several films. Alan Young, star of CBC's Stag Party, also emigrated to Hollywood, and took the leading part in the film Androcles and the Lion

Other radio names who visited Windrush included the veteran E.V.Young, an exemplary performer, Frank Vyvyan, the English actor, and his wife Gladys who worked with Hilda Wilson in the CBC executive offices, Bill Buckingham, a versatile actor on many shows and his lovely actress wife Doris, Al Pearce, the perfect straight man, Cathy Graham, whom I admired very much for talent as well as personality, Bernard Braden, Barbara Kelly and John Drainie.

A year or two later I was best man at the Braden-Kelly wedding which was performed by Bernie's father, the Rev. Dr. E.D. Braden at the Kerrisdale United Church of which he was minister. The Bradens moved to Toronto where they did well in CBC productions, and in 1949 moved on to London where for the next 30 years they made quite an impression at the BBC, both in radio and in television. On 22 June, 1980, I gave Bernie lunch at the Travellers Club, and we spent three hours recalling the Good Old Days of radio broadcasting with the CBC in Canada.

Another actress well-favoured both by me and Andrew Allan for her talent was Mary MacLeod, but she too, obeyed the call to Hollywood and was later seen in several films one of which also starred Judith Evelyn. Arthur Hill and his friend Peggy Hassard appeared on many of my productions and always gave creditable performances. Arthur and Peggy married later and came to England, living near Box Hill, Surrey. Hellen and I had tea with them there in 1954 when we were living in nearby Cobham. We next saw Arthur 20 years later in the film version of The Andromeda Strain and later yet, at the OMNI Cinema in Miami, we were delighted to see him in A Small Romance, which also featured Sir Laurence Olivier. From that small coterie of fine talented actors half dozen or more went out to make names for themselves using the experience gained during those early days in Vancouver's CBC.

One of the guest conductors for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra that year was Sir Thomas Beecham. Travelling with the great conductor was the English pianist, Miss Betty Humby. She was the soloist in a concerto to be broadcast by CBC from the stage of the Orpheum Theatre. The problem which arose over finding the right dress for Miss Humby's appearance has been amply described in Ada McGeer's book of personal memoirs which she has entitled Oh Call Back Yesterday, Bid Time Return, wherein she describes fully her frantic but successful efforts to secure Miss Humby's dress from a Vancouver shop.

For the programme pick-up, Basil Hilton and Tony Geluch were using a single condenser microphone suspended centre stage and only a few feet above the conductor's podium. Our problem with Sir Thomas Beecham was that he usually kept talking to the orchestra while he conducted, and his words of encouragement or complaint came through loudly, especially in the pianissimo passages. Everyone who has worked with him describes it as an unforgettable experience, and there is usually a Beecham story. In the circumstances this chronicle can be no exception.

During the Saturday morning rehearsal, with Beecham conducting the Vancouver Symphony, the players arranged in tiers from the podium to the back of the stage, a disquieting incident occurred: in the midst of a quiet passage in a Mozart divertimento the tympany player, one George W. Ball, accidentally dropped the cymbal, which rolled down with clanging crashes to rest at the conductor's feet. Beecham stopped the orchestra with a tap of his baton, fixed his eye on the red-faced tympany man and asked What is your name ? in icy tones. Ball, came the reply. I beg your pardon! Beecham snapped. Ball, the man repeated. Sir Thomas tapped his stand, How singular! he said, Let us continue!

Vancouver had its share of unusual characters one of these being Professor Francis, a tall rather unkempt and unshaven man who spent many hours in the CBC studio lobby watching the rehearsals or broadcasts through the plate glass windows. He was a cheery chap who wore a frock coat and a soiled black felt hat which had seen better days. By the frequency of his visits he came to know most of the artists and was fond of addressing them in a loud voice by their first names as they came out of the studio. Well done, Percy, old boy! he would call out to Percy Harvey, who would grin and pass quickly up the stairs to the Music Library with his scores. Prof. Francis was tolerated because he was so amiable; he had let it be known that he had taught piano in an unnamed music conservatory somewhere, hence the professorship. On occasions, after a programme, he would slip into the empty studio, seat himself at the grand piano and play mostly chords and nothing recognizable. We had many chats and on several occasions I had him join me for a sandwich and coffee at the Georgia Grill. Prof Francis always turned up at celebrity concerts and was often able to slip into an empty seat at intermission. Rumour had it that although he made his home in an unoccupied derelict house near the CPR docks, he was really very wealthy, having buried his family fortune long ago and quite forgotten where he had left it.

Mention of celebrity concerts brings to mind another Vancouver personality, Miss Lily Laverock, who was the city's first real impresario, bringing in many international artists on concert tours over the years. I well remember Miss Laverock's staging of the last appearance of Amelita Galli-Curci, the world famous coloratura soprano, and of how thrilled we all were by that amazing and beautiful voice. Miss Laverock would often drop into my office to tell us of her next celebrity concert, and she was generous with her courtesy passes. She operated her business from a large and lonely house just off the south end of Burrard Bridge, but she seemed to keep most of her correspondence and reference material in a large knitted reticule which she carried with her, everywhere. Ada McGeer, who knew her well, pays fine tribute to Lily Laverock in her autobiography. Miss Laverock's opposition in the celebrity concert field in Vancouver was the Gordon Hilker Organization, father and son. In the early 40s I remember being at the Hilker house off South Granville Street when Yehudi Menuhin was in town for a concert. The exact circumstances are forgotten, but I do remember serving as baby-sitter for the Menuhin infant while Papa Yehudi took his violin off to the concert, and I recall walking up and down with the child in my arms to keep it from crying. Never was I so glad to see anyone as I was to welcome the return of Gordon Hilker and Yehudi Menuhin later that evening after the concert.

From time to time a local film producer, Leon Shelly, head of Vancouver Motion Pictures, would request the voice of one of our CBC announcers, particularly Gordon Ingles, to read the background commentary on one of his films. Walking through the lobby of Hotel Vancouver one day I happened to see Shelly talking to a smart looking young lady and when I joined them he introduced his assistant, Hellen Semmens. She wore a dark two-piece suit and a pert little hat with a feather that set it off well and I immediately was drawn to her. We agreed on the use of Gordon Ingles for another commercial film and Leon suggested I could make any necessary further contact on such matters directly with Hellen who was apparently designing film sets, writing scripts and sometimes directing Shelly productions. I was more than mildly impressed with Miss Semmens and decided I would certainly have to see her again and soon.

To make use of experimental scripts we had sold an idea to the national programme moguls in Toronto for a weekly Producers Workshop. It was to be broadcast over the national network every Saturday. Andrew Allan and I did most of the production, and I wrote many of the scripts, including a melodramatic parody entitled No Mother To Guide Her. We also used scripts by Doug Nixon and others, and produced features like Scotland Forever on Burns ' Night, Bernie Braden playing Robert Burns exceedingly well.

Meanwhile the Great War raged on in Europe, and America joined the Allies after the bombing of Pearl Harbour in December of 1941. Our war efforts over the air were strengthened and increased: I wrote and produced a series of dramatic features to bring home to listeners the horrors of the Nazi blitz on London, and to build up and emphasize the importance of Winston Churchill's leadership. Some of these features were Salute to Russia, China Is Courage, Remember These Days The Double Seven, and others. We promoted the sale of Canadian War Savings Bonds with productions using guest-star appearances of many Hollywood personalities. For instance, Jack Benny and his wife Mary Livingstone, Rochester, and the entire company of the NBC Jello programme arrived in Vancouver and practically took over our studios for days. It was great fun, Jack Benny being one of the most astute performers anyone could meet. He was always kindly, patient and considerate of all concerned, while Mary was a dear. The show, of course, was a great success.

Other Hollywood stars with whom I had the pleasure of working in the war effort included Fred MacMurray, Herbert Marshall, Edgar Bergen(with Charlie McCarthy) and Barbara Stanwyck, among others. Fred MacMurray was easy-going and a pleasure to work with; Herbert Marshall was, as usual, his British self and a great actor; Edgar Bergen and his dummy made great fun of everything they encountered, and it was an experience to see the manipulation and ventriloquism involved in the Bergen-McCarthy act. I was much impressed with the professional work of Barbara Stanwyck and her quick response when I suggested a slight change of emphasis in her radio lines; she later told Ira Dilworth that I was a capable director. She has been one of my favourite golden-oldies ever since.

Miss Gracie Fields was the visiting star whose War Bond show made the greatest impression on Canadian listeners. She had just come from London and she told us all about the great spirit of British resistance to the Nazi air attacks. We'll never give in! said Our Gracie, and led the auditorium audience of 10,000 in several rousing verses of Land of Hope and Glory and There'll Always Be An England. Gracie Fields had a tremendous faculty of projection, perhaps stemming from her old Music Hall days, and she never needed a microphone for her ringing voice; either belting out Its the Biggest Aspidistra in the World, or singing gently Sally, each syllable was heard in every corner of the huge auditorium. Ira Dilworth had arranged a small party for Gracie on the Hotel Vancouver's mezzanine floor after the coast to coast broadcast, which went off amazingly well. Despite a long day of rehearsals, and a long tiring performance, Gracie was the life of the party, and her homey Lancashire friendliness made everyone love her. Just before the party ended Our Gracie was presented with a silver cigarette box suitably engraved with the occasion and date. Accepting the gift, Gracie said, Ooooh! Isn't it lovely! But you know, she turned to Ira Dilworth, I don't smoke, but me'usband does, so I'll just keep it for him! hope you don't mind. Thank you, luv!

In spite of a very busy life at CBC Vancouver, my interest in China and Chinese matters had not diminished. It was my joy to find old Chinese stories and transcribe them into dramatic radio productions such as The Good Luck Horse, The Luck of Shao Nien, The Poet and the Peony and many others. My first Chinese contact in Vancouver was with Seto More, who held a senior position with the CPR's Asiatic passenger service. His work was to supervise the extensive traffic of Chinese between Canada and the Orient on the CPR's great Empress liners which plied the Pacific between Vancouver and Shanghai every month. It was at Seto More's house on Jervis Street that I experienced Chinese hospitality at first hand. After a delicious Chinese dinner, tea and brandy, I was on the point of leaving, but stopped to admire a small framed painting on the wall. The picture, which showed a high ranking Mandarin on his balcony bidding farewell to his pet, a white heron, which was flying away, was immediately taken from the wall, wrapped in red paper and presented to me, much to my embarrassment. Seto explained quite seriously that when one admired something in a friend's house it customarily became his. That little Chinese painting in its neat black and gold frame and with Seto More's inscription and chop on the back has hung on our walls in many parts of the world ever since and it is still admired here in England.

My broadcasts for the war effort brought me into contact with the Chinese Ambassador to Canada, Dr Liu Shih Shen, who was, we learned later, a personal friend of Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek. Vancouver boasted the largest Chinese community in the country, and I had made scores of Chinese-Canadian friends. By arrangement with the Chinese Consul-General in Vancouver, Li Chao, I edited a weekly NewsLetter dealing with the war in the Pacific, to build up greater interest in, and support for, our war effort against the Japanese invaders of southeast Asia. In addition I organized a body of prominent citizens into what we called China-Canada Incorporated, and I was able to get my friend Dr Norman Larry MacKenzie, President of the University of British Columbia, to serve as its Chairman. In creating this ambitious organization and in writing its constitution, I envisaged a powerful group of Sinophiles and business men working together to promote a greater measure of trade between Canada and China. We hoped for a continuous flow of information and exchange of art and culture between the two countries. Well-launched as it was, I regret to report that the organization of China-Canada Inc. seemed to die of inactivity after its founder left for China in 1946; it was, after all, very much of a one-man show and the big names on all the committees were more or less honorary only.

Most of the CBC staff took their lunch at the hotel cafeteria, with Emile and Margaret presiding, and I often joined Ira Dilworth at his table when he waved me over. It was on one of these occasions I made the acquaintance of Lawren Harris, the Canadian painter whose family fortune came from the Massey-Harris farm implement organisation. Lawren was therefore well off and able to indulge in his favourite pastime of painting. We became good friends and I remember his comments one day when we were discussing the ever-rising cost of living; Lawren said, wrinkling that high forehead under the white mane of hair, This high cost of living worries me; one of these days, if it continues to rise, I'll have to dip into capital! Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, as they say, his worries were on a much higher financial plane than those of us who worried about making the pay packet last to the end of the month.

But Lawren, and his charming wife Bess, were splendid people to know. Their beautiful home on Belmont Avenue was open house to a score or so of young friends on Saturday evenings, when Lawren and Bess entertained with concerts of symphonic recordings, serving coffee and biscuits. Lawren was in his abstract period then, which did not have the same appeal as his earlier cold, stark paintings of mountain and woodland. He was one of the original Group of Seven Canadian painters, and Emily Carr, whom I came to know later, was another. In 1967 the Canadian government paid tribute to Lawren Harris by reproducing his oil painting of Bylot Island in Ontario for the 15 cent denomination postage stamp, now listed in the Stanley Gibbons ' commonwealth catalogue as No 586 Canada. Because Lawren and Bess had an enviable collection of classical LPs I took it as an accomplishment to present them with one work they had not yet discovered but came to enjoy it was the Eight Little Symphonies by William Boyce(17101779) recorded in London by the Boyd Neel Chamber Orchestra a delightful work in the manner of George Frederick Handel.

Having an excellent harbour, Vancouver was a sportsman's paradise so far as swimming, fishing, and boating were concerned, and while I have never claimed prowess in the water or in angling I have found pleasure on a boat, provided that boat was big enough big enough that is, for me to sit comfortably on deck, preferably with a drink in hand, and watch the world go by. This was just the type of craft possessed by Jack Williamson, the percussion sideman with most of the CBR orchestras, and one Sunday he invited the Windrush crowd for a cruise up Howe Sound and Squamish Inlet to Bowen Island. Kunio and Judith prepared a large picnic hamper of chicken legs, dill pickles and assorted sandwiches, the rest of us arranging for an ample supply of lager and other liquid refreshment. We enjoyed a lovely day in the sun and set sail on the return trip in time to be back in harbour before dark. With Williamson at the wheel the boat chugged along merrily while the rest of us lolled on deck-chairs with plenty of laughter and good cheer. As we approached Prospect Point before the Narrows and Lions Gate Bridge, we were hailed by another craft closer to the shore. At a fair distance, and without being able to see them clearly in the encroaching dusk, they seemed a friendly lot and we yelled back. After a few more minutes of ribald banter on our part we were startled by a flash to starboard and an explosion as a six-pound shell whizzed across our bows. From then on the proceedings became extremely sober; Jack stopped the boat and the friendly craft came alongside. Two officers of the Canadian Customs and Excise Department came aboard. We explained that we had not realized their boat was part of the Coast Guard and that we had not heard them aright in their orders to stop. After checking identities, the Customs ' men departed, letting us off with a warning at least, we thought they had. Ten days later Jack Williamson, as the owner of the boat, received a bill from the Canadian government requesting immediate payment of $15. as the cost of one six-pound shell fired across our bows that evening. We all chipped in to help Jack pay the bill.

One of the intellectuals whose company I greatly enjoyed was Albert Rhys Williams, an erudite Russophile of the first order. With the great republic of Russia as our gallant ally, I was spending many hours in the hotel cafeteria with Rhys where he extolled the virtues of the Russian peoples. I argued that one could never trust the Russian leaders. Rhys was a tall heavy-set man with greying hair and gentle eyes. He talked and wrote about Russia because he knew that land and loved it for its enduring cultural and academic qualities, which no one could deny. He was a strange amalgam an American who loved Russia and the Russians. Rhys was a close personal friend of Corliss Lamont, that great champion of free speech in America who contributed in large measure to the ultimate defeat of Senator McCarthy's witch-hunting. With an introduction from Rhys I enjoyed several interesting meetings with Corliss Lamont in New York, where he presented me with a copy of his book You Might Like Socialism. Rhys Williams was very convincing and his books did much to whet my appetite to visit the vast Soviet empire. Already I loved the music of Tchaikowsky, Moussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff and the modern composers. I had read Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgeniev,Dostioevsky and others. Despite all I had learned of Russian pogroms from my Jewish friends, I was left with an abiding admiration for Russia. In the copy of his book The Soviets published in 1942, Albert Rhy Williams had written: To my friend Roy Dunlop. Glad of our meeting in Vancouver and hope for a reunion in New York, Moscow, Samarkand or the Volga.

For some reason or other, ever since the last meeting with Leon Shelly in the hotel lobby, and my introduction to Hellen Semmens, my interest in Shelly Films seemed to increase and I found several occasions on which to ring Hellen about arrangements for the further use of CBC announcers. Given the will and serious intent, it did not take long for me to become acquainted with Hellen's colleagues, Wally Hamilton and Oscar Burritt. From time to time Shelly Films held evening previews of certain feature films, either for clients, or to screen them for the local parent company. Hellen was good enough to invite me along to some of them. I well remember watching from the projection room the first showing in Vancouver of Knickerbocker Holiday, with Charles Coburn singing that fine old ballad September Song. Hellen, Wally and Oscar were producing films all over Canada and while I was enjoying the hospitality of Shelly Films I was also enjoying the pleasant company of Hellen Semmens. CHEERIO, TOVARICH

Andrew Allan was a very sensitive chap, extremely well-read and innately proud of his Scottish ancestry. His round face, blue eyes and fair hair, plus a serious mien most of the time, gave one the impression of a junior Cambridge don, and he used his long facile fingers like a Frenchman, when explaining a point. Andrew and I spent many hours on the Windrush porch discussing almost everything under the sun from party politics to mystic transcendentalism. He liked on occasion to talk of his earlier days at his parents ' cottage in Scotland, and it amused him to remember that his sensitive mother could never bring herself to pronounce or write the word toilet paper which was always, either in speech or on shopping lists, abbreviated simply to T.P.

I never completely fathomed the relationship between Andrew and Judith Evelyn, both creatures of considerable intellect and high temperament, to say nothing of dramatic talent. They were regarded as betrothed, but while Judith regularly took on the air of proprietorship, Andrew never seemed to be much interested. In fact Andrew showed considerably more affection for our mutual and pretty little friend Mary McLeod, and he was often in the company of a blond and beautiful girl, the glamorous Gloria, who looked better in a bikini on the Windrush verandah, it must be confessed, than many another. Without giving it much thought, we all assumed that after the present infatuations had cooled down, Andrew would marry Judith, but it never happened, although he did marry twice during his later years in Toronto. We must have been closer friends than I recall, for as I go through my library 40 years later, I find quite a number of splendid books inscribed in friendship from Andrew in his scrawling hand, including Henrik van Loon's Book of Lives, One Men's Meat by E.B. White, Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence, The House With the Echo, by T.F. Powys and others. I gave him books in return, but I do not remember the titles.

I know that as the younger by a year or two I looked up to Andrew; after all I was an inexperienced young man from a small prairie town, while Andrew had been to Europe! I feel sure I was a slow developer for I thought Andrew a sophisticated and experienced person. We often discussed our work, our so-called careers and our philosophies of life, such as they were. Andrew's ideas were the practical kind. He liked producing plays because he enjoyed creative work, and he was good as a leader and director. With all respect to my old friend, I believe my aims and basic purposes may have gone a mite deeper. While enjoying the pleasure of writing, directing and producing good plays and musical shows, I had honestly kept in mind my Tuxis training to think of T.O.F.(the other fellow). In radio productions I was constantly aware of our listeners ' reactions; in the consideration of any idea for a show, my first concern was how it would be received in the homes of listeners, nationwide and, say what you will, I still believe this is the first requisite of Good Showmanship.

I felt I was fortunate in being in a position to brighten the lives of radio listeners. There was some measure of idealism and even altruism in this personal concept of my life work. The idea of devoting one's career to helping the other fellow on his way, rejoicing, may be ennobling but it is sometimes more evident in theory than in practice. One of Aunt Janie's favourite sayings was Give them their roses now, not wait till they are lying on their bier, although she did not always practise what she preached. But that great American film producer, Walt Disney, apart from commercial considerations, has brought enjoyment and happiness to millions with his cartoon films and amusement parks at Disneyland, Disneyworld and now at Epcott. Just before his death in 1966, Disney was quoted as saying: I do not believe there are any heights that can not be scaled by a man who knows the secret of making dreams come true.

Out there in peaceful Vancouver, going about our ordinary daily tasks, even though they did make sizeable contributions to the war effort, there were some of us who felt we were not doing enough, and some of us who wanted to get into the action. Bill Herbert was fortunate to be sent overseas as a war correspondent. Fletcher Markle joined the R.C.A.F., while I continued to write war plays and documentary salutes to our allies, as well as helping with War Bond shows.

In the good old days before the mechanization of almost everything, the fire-engines used by the Fire Fighting Departments of Canadian cities were manned, if that is not the wrong word, by horses. So trained were these beautiful animals that they would trot from their stalls whenever they heard the fire alarm bell. There is a story that Old Dobbin, even after he had been retired from active fire service, would still, by force of habit and for the excitement of it, try to get out of his stable to find his place between the fire-engine shafts whenever the alarm rang. It was somewhat similar with me; the war was on, albeit far away, and I was missing it; patriotism and duty did enter into the picture but I was chafing at the bit like Old Dobbin who could not bear to stay away from a fire!

By the summer of 1943 the Americans were getting into their stride so far as the war in the Pacific was concerned. I understood that there was considerable air traffic from the U.S.A. across Canada to Alaska, and thence over the tundra of the Siberian wastes to the land of our great Russian allies. My Old Dobbin syndrome, aided and abetted by friendship with Albert Rhys Williams, was the basic incentive for hitch-hiking about 12,000 miles to and from the interior of Russia during the holidays that summer. Ira Dilworth applauded the idea and gave me an official To Whom It May Concern letter of introduction, which opened a number of official doors, got me as far as Edmonton, and served as an invaluable introduction to some high ranking officers of the R.C.A.F.

To improve their image by good public relations, the RCAF had no objection to carrying a civilian passenger over the North-West Staging Route: from Edmonton across the Northwest Territories and the Yukon to Fairbanks, Alaska. On the first stage of this 1,500 mile flight we flew over Ft. St John and Ft. Nelson, historic landmarks from the early days of the fur-trader, the gold miner and the explorer. The northwest, before the days of air travel, was not as easy of access as it is today.

For hour after hour the RCAF aircraft flew over miles of bright green forest interspersed with many lakes and rivers. One long green stretch had been named by airmen familiar with this route The Million Dollar Valley. There on the green plateau, glistening in the sunshine, was a collection of various types of aircraft, mainly in what appeared to be first class condition. It was explained to me that over the years all the planes on the green sward had landed by mistake, assuming that it would be solid enough to allow a take-off. But this was not so; no one landing there had ever been able to get out and the nearest airport was 600 miles away. The pilots and crew had, in some instances, been able to trek overland to safety but the aircraft, valued at many millions, would remain there imprisoned forever.

Late that afternoon we made a perfect three-point landing at the RCAF airstrip in Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon Territory, where I found shelter for the night in a bare but adequate room at the Whitehorse Hotel. Not far away a turgid and fast moving river rushed southward in narrow gorges. Beached there were old weather-worn skeletons of the side-wheeler paddle boats formerly used for passenger service between Whitehorse and Dawson City. The latter was now a veritable ghost town with its derelict buildings holding up false-front facades in the fashion of Hollywood sets.

But times had changed since 1898; wartime regulations had rationed liquor purchases to one bottle per month per customer. I was not particularly thirsty but mine was a minority view, apparently. On Saturday morning it was discovered as Scotch whiskey was concerned there was a very definite drought, and stocks at the several bars were down to zero a situation which no self-respecting Whitehorse citizen could tolerate for long. One enterprising young man gathered 60 ration books into his brief-case and persuaded an RCAF pilot, due for a recognizance flight that day, to fly him several hundred miles across the provincial border to Atlin, B.C. At the friendly invitation of those concerned I went along for the ride and helped my energetic friends load five cases of Johnny Walker, which we transported back to Whitehorse well in time for a Saturday night party.

Although crowded with prospectors and pan-handlers looking for gold when that English bank-clerk, Robert W. Service, was writing his Songs of a Sourdough and The Cremation of Dan McGrew, Whitehorse and Dawson City were now drowsing away the years as forgotten towns. The only sign of progress was in the construction of a new cinema in Whitehorse. But there was a feeling of peace and quiet in those old towns, a silence that was almost tangible, and it was impressive to stand alone beside the fast flowing river and know that one was surrounded by deep forest for hundreds of miles in all directions.

Although his work may not be rated as true poetry by the purists, no one else has ever caught the spell of the Yukon as well as Robert W. Service. Having known him for many months in Vancouver, and relishing his word-pictures of Yukon characters like dangerous Dan McGrew and the lady known as Lou, I tried to see in Service's eyes the modern Yukon nearly half a century after the gold rush. Under the circumstances, it was disappointing. In The Spell of the Yukon he had written: I wanted the gold, and I sought it; I scrabbled and mucked like a slave. Was it famine or scurvy I fought it; I hurled my youth into a grave. I wanted the gold, and I got it Came out with a fortune last fall, Yet somehow life's not what I thought it, And somehow the gold isn't all. There's gold and it's haunting and haunting Its luring me on as of old; Yet it isn't the wealth that I'm wanting So much as just finding the gold. Its the great big, broad land way up yonder, It's the forests where silence has lease; Its the beauty that thrills me with wonder, It's the stillness that fills me with peace.

He may have looked like a bank-clerk but he had the heart of a poet, whether he wrote in iambic pentameters or the plain but effective doggerel of the common man. The writer of those lines and I enjoyed many a lunch time snack in the Hotel Vancouver cafeteria, and more often a glass of lager in the upstairs lounge. Robert Service may not have struck it rich in finding Yukon gold, but he made a fortune from his books of verse, which sold into millions of copies. Earlier in the century, while still a young man, he returned to England, disapproved of the climate, and finally bought a chalet in the south of France. When the Vichy government confiscated his property early in the war, Service brought his French wife and their daughter to Vancouver for the duration. They rented a flat on the top floor of Sylvia Court at English Bay, and often came along to the Hotel Vancouver for lunch. The wife and daughter were usually silent, but Service and I made up for that.

Robert W. Service was an average man in most respects of medium height, with a plain honest face, he dressed like an ordinary white-collar working man, spoke gently and smiled often. He was not vain, but he was quietly proud of his literary achievements and that pride sometimes showed at the edges. When he gave me a copy of his complete works in September of 1943 inscribed from a sincere friend, I noted the four lines opposite the title page: I have no doubt at all the Devil grins As seas of ink I spatter. Ye gods, forgive my literary sins The other kind don't matter.

It was only natural that my thoughts should be on the life and work of my friend Robert W. Service as I walked the untidy streets of Whitehorse four decades after the roaring pandemonium of the gold rush days. No one I met in the Yukon had known Service, but there was still a highly commercial bar bearing the name the Malamute Saloon.

In Whitehorse the RCAF personnel maintained close relations with the USAF base there, and I was soon on speaking terms with the Americans, most of whom were engaged in flying or servicing aircraft operating between the States and Fairbanks, Alaska. They were happy to fly me to the land of the midnight sun at any time. Indeed they were good enough to assign a USAF Public Relations Officer, the very friendly Major Hal Brubaker, as my guide and mentor.

When we landed in Fairbanks, I was accommodated comfortably in a room with private shower at B.O.Q.(Bachelors ' Officers Quarters). The leisure rooms were spacious, with one-armed bandits and fruit machines and juke-boxes in abundance, plus a well stocked PBX or retail shop for all residents. On my first day in Alaska I made a bee-line for the local radio station KFAR where I met the manager, Augie Hiebert and we spent the rest of the day talking shop. He disabused my mind of the impression that Alaska was the frozen north and even showed me strawberries grown in Fairbanks that week.

In retrospect, Fairbanks was very much like a mid-western American city, with a Main Street and High Street crossing in the middle and a population of about 13,000. After a radio interview with Augie I hurried back to B.O.Q. for drinks and dinner at the U.S.A.F. base with Major Brubaker. He had arranged a meeting with a group of Russian pilots, some 40 of whom had arrived the day before in an Ilyushin III transport plane from Siberia. The visiting pilots had come to ferry back a score of U.S. fighter aircraft flown up from the States as part of the American lend-lease programme. In three days time, after acclimatization training, the Russian lads were to take delivery of the aircraft and fly them back to Irkutsk by way of Yakutsk.

The Russian pilots, all of them young and resplendent in their dark uniforms with epaulettes of red and gold, spoke little English but they were friendly and sociable. They spent hours pulling the handles of the fruit machines and appeared unusually lucky in their winnings, which they immediately spent buying souvenirs at the PBX shop. It was fun to watch these grown-up men behaving like happy children on their first exposure to the American way of life. Major Hal and I watched the Russians while we sat with drinks in the B.O.Q. Lounge. As two young officers strolled near our table Hal waved them to join us and asked a one-word question Vodka ? to which they smiled happily in agreement. One of the officers spoke English with a delightful Russian accent which reminded us of Mischa Auer's motion picture roles. His name was Captain Dimitri Oshenko and his friend called him Deemy for short. Both had made previous flights to Fairbanks on the Irkutsk-Fairbanks ferry run and hoped one day to see more of America than the tundra regions of Alaska. Deemy was interested in Canada, and asked many questions, but there was nothing probing or suspicious in his natural curiosity and quest for knowledge. He was happy to know how much I enjoyed Russian literature. We both agreed that Dostoievsky's short-story First Love was one of the most poignant of short fiction pieces ever written. We spoke of Russian music, and Major Hal declared that Tschaikowsky's 1812 Overture was just great, while I preferred Rimsky-Korsakoff and the modern Russian composers, Khachaturian and Rachmaninoff. The evening was one of international good will, ending with another round of vodkas for the road.

During the next few days I saw a lot of Deemy and it was he who suggested that Major Hal could clear the decks for me to accompany him on his next flight back to Siberia. He said if Hal would get the American clearance, he would look after Russian permission to carry a Canadian journalist and radio man into his country and back. The red tape always seems less voluminous the farther away from headquarters you are, and Fairbanks was apparently far enough away from both U.S., and U.S.S.R. officialdom to make the approval possible. In short order I was to fly with Deemy on Friday morning and we were to cover the 4,300 miles from Fairbanks to Irkutsk via Yakutsk in one day about the same flying distance as from New York to London.

The light of dawn was beginning to brighten the Alaska sky as I settled into the cockpit of the U.S. fighter aircraft; Deemy was in the pilot-seat as we took off into, as our American hosts would say, the wild blue yonder! The small plane flew smoothly to an altitude of about 15,000 feet and Deemy handled her like the expert airman he was. Our single stop en route was Yakutsk which lay west south-west about 2,400 miles from Fairbanks. Crossing the Bering Sea we spotted white hulks of icebergs in the straits between North America and Asia. Several hours later after flying over what seemed endless tracts of grey-green Siberian tundra we descended over the great expanse of the Lena River. It is some ten miles wide at Yakutsk, where we landed for re-fuelling. The attendants who took charge of the plane seemed indifferent to us. Perhaps this was because of the dull routine nature of their job, servicing and re-fuelling incoming aircraft at the rate of about one flight every hour that day. Yakutsk was a town of about 12,000 souls. The alluvial soil on which the city stood was frozen all year round but thawed a few feet down during the summer. At this time of year the unpaved streets were practically quagmires. Most of the buildings seen from the airport appeared to be no more than mud huts, although there were some larger buildings of brick and rough stone. Some of the houses were built on high platforms to protect them from the June floods. I was told that there were winter sledge tracks from the town to the Sea of Okhotsk, to Vilyuisk, the Kolyma river and to Irkutsk, some 1,200 miles away. It seems that a military fort was established at Yakutsk in 1632 by the ruling Czar and the town became a centre for the fur trade. After a cup of coffee at a rough lunch-counter, Deemy reported in to the Commandant, and shortly we were airborne again on the last dozen hundred miles to Irkutsk. The splendid packed lunch arranged for me by Major Hal that morning plus the thermos of American coffee made a welcome lunch as Deemy and I winged our solitary way over the continuous stretches of grasslands, lakes and rivers of Siberia to make a smooth landing at the Russian Air Force base at Irkutsk early that evening.

As we circled over the city the expanse of Lake Baikal was plainly visible some 45 miles away with the Yenisci River stretching from the lake to its tributary on which the old city of Irkutsk was located. We soon saw the lengthy pontoon bridge spanning the Angara River. The lights were on over the airfield when we landed and Deemy showed me to the Russian equivalent of the American B.O.Q. adjoining a very handsome and well-furnished Officers ' Lounge and Recreation Room. There were no juke-boxes or Coke machines, but there were many shelves of books around the room and a selection of magazines and newspapers; there were also at least a dozen chess-boards.

After a hot shower, for the Siberian night air was chilly even in summer, we joined groups of pilot officers in the lounge. They could have been the same young Russians we had met 4,000 miles away in Fairbanks only the day before. Light beer and vodka were followed by a simple but nourishing meal of stewed meat and boiled potatoes, preceded by borscht. We finished with an ice-cream sweet and mugs of hot tea from the samovar on the table. Everyone retired early that night and I, for one, slept like a log.

Next day Deemy took me to meet the Commandant. He was a tall, heavy-built almost surly type who spoke no English; all I could do was listen patiently, smile, and offer a small but polite salute on departure. Deemy took me around the town in a Russian jeep. Apparently the town grew some centuries ago out of the winter quarters of Ivan Pokhabov who established a post at Irkutsk to collect a fur tax from the Buriats, the fur-trapping natives. Deemy estimated the population of Irkutsk at about 175,000. Since the town was close to the Lena gold-fields and on the route to China and the Amur region, it was important. It looked pretty dull to me, although I did not say so. The streets were muddy and wet, but quite neat. I learned that the rivers of the area are frozen up from January to April when the temperature sinks to minus 10F, although the summer temperature while we were in Irkutsk was a sweltering 65F! We visited the Workers ' Scientific Institute, the Russian Geographic Society's headquarters and museum, and the St Innocent's monastery, just outside the town. It was in caves near Irkutsk that the Russian imperial treasure of gold was buried after the 1917 revolution, then handed over to the Bolsheviks in 1920. That was the same year in which Admiral Kolchak was executed in the main public square.

Sightseeing was a fascinating way to spend my last afternoon in Irkutsk. Although a senior transport pilot of the Russian Air Force at the age of 28, Deemy was not altogether at home in the eastern regions of Siberia. Ferrying American aircraft to Russia had kept him far away from his own village a few kilometres outside Moscow. Nevertheless I felt his efforts to provide a visiting Canadian friend with as much colourful information as possible about a rather dull and isolated town was admirable.

That night a farewell banquet had been arranged by Deemy and his airforce colleagues in my honour. There was considerable vodka flowing freely, and we all made speeches supporting the allied cause, toasting the mutual bond of friendship between us. It was surprising to see how sentimental some of my Russian pals could be, aided and abetted by the national drink. The party continued long into the night, further cementing, as we all hoped and expected, East-West relations. Not surprisingly I have never heard from any of them since, although I felt that I had made a number of new and lasting Russian friendships that night.

Deemy was on hand next morning at sunrise to see me off aboard one of the transport planes carrying some 40 young pilots en route to Fairbanks. They were to bring back a score of fighter aircraft in the same way that Deemy and his colleagues had done earlier that week. The return journey was made without stopping at Yakutsk; it proved a dull uneventful day with nothing to do but watch the undulating Siberian tundra drift past beneath us. Much as I had enjoyed my Soviet adventure it was good to be back in an English-speaking land again. Major Hal, who met us on arrival, insisted that I had qualified for membership in the Short-Snorters Club. He produced a U.S. dollar bill, took a Canadian dollar from me and a Russian five-rouble note, stuck them together end to end, had the group sign them, and dubbed me a short-snorter. I still carry my short-snorter in my wallet!

On the return journey from Fairbanks to Edmonton I enjoyed a two-day stopover in Whitehorse where the manager of the new cinema, whom I had met on the way north, looked me up. He had heard that I knew Robert W. Service and felt it would be a good idea if they could get Service to fly up and formally open the new building. He wanted me to put the proposition to Service in Vancouver, and this I promised to do. The fee offered was $500. plus all expenses.

The day after returning to Vancouver I was called to Ira Dilworth's office at five o'clock. When I knocked and entered, Ira, with a broad smile on his face, reached down and produced two glasses and a bottle of Okanagan wine which we were soon sipping. Word had just come from Ottawa, he told me, confirming his suggestion that I be promoted to the post of Production Manager for the CBC, as from the end of the month. He was evidently pleased, and I was equally surprised and flattered. We finished the wine and adjourned to the cafeteria to celebrate with a good dinner.

Six months after this promotion he again called me to his office to suggest, in his gentle diplomatic way, that while the CBC was happy with my work as Production Manager, it had been observed that I was still producing almost as many shows as before. He pointed out that, as Production Manager, my work should be supervisory and that I should encourage younger producers by dividing all my shows between them. It made sense, of course, but to give up direct production of national network features, which I had originated and perfected, was a wrench; it was like putting out one's own child for adoption. If I had developed some measure of showmanship over the years, I felt it was not much use to me or anyone else while I sat in my office and let junior producers have all the fun. However I had to learn to delegate responsibility and realize that in climbing the executive ladder one had to give up the basic satisfaction of creative production. The hierarchy of the CBC demanded its pound of flesh. My ploy of leading our little group of producers with programme instruction by example was a compromise that was not going to work. So I gave up the production of all but Leicester Square to Broadway and began to wonder if I would not be happier producing shows for the BBC in London or in another country perhaps China. Little did I imagine that such a move was destined for me within the next two years.

When I rang Robert Service and invited him to the hotel for a drink he accepted gladly and wanted to hear all about my flying visit to his old stamping grounds. When I told him about the Whitehorse Cinema manager offering him $500. to fly up to open the new building, he laughed loud and long. Roy, my friend, he said I wouldn't fly to Whitehorse for $10,000 or for any amount. I have never flown in an aeroplane, and I never will! Please thank our friend for the thought, but I prefer to stay on the ground. To make a long story short, I finally arranged for Service to record a brief message on tape which was flown to the Yukon and broadcast over loud-speakers during the cinema's opening ceremonies. Service suggested to the manager that the cash fee be paid over to a charity, and this was done.

In Andrew Allan's book of memoirs he relates how he was standing in the lobby of the New York Hotel Algonquin in the summer of 1947 when a man came up to him and said I'm Robert Service and I think I recognise you. Are you not a friend of Roy Dunlop's and were we not all together once in Vancouver? Andrew agreed, and told Service that I had gone to China and was engaged in broadcasting work there. Service, still refusing to fly, was en route back to his French chalet on the next sailing of the Queen Mary. Years later I learned that he died in 1981 at his chateau near Grasse. My last memory of Robert W. Service was his staunch refusal when I offered to write the story of his life. Thank you, he said but don't forget, I'm a writer of sorts myself.

Perhaps it is because of a hearty dislike of chauvinism and exaggerated nationalism that I have not become an intense patriot. If one believes, as Confucius said, that All Men Are Brothers, such feelings become both meaningless and futile. While I have not been a wildly flag-waving Canadian I am proud of my birthplace and continue to admire Canada and Canadians immensely, which sentiments must not be taken as damning with faint praise.

My friend Bruce Hutchison was a far greater Canadian patriot than I will ever be. Many an evening Bruce and I-have sat in his garden north of Victoria, B.C. and thrashed out our opinions of Canadian(and world) problems far into the night. Bruce Hutchison has one of the sharpest minds I know, and his role as political reporter and interpreter has not been fully appreciated in Canada or abroad. His keen perspicacity was shown in his book The Unknown Country, a Canadian panorama which deserved a wider circulation. I also remember discussing with Bruce the plot of his first full-length novel, The Hollow Men a wartime story of the Cariboo Valley in British Columbia.

There were five friends I loved to visit on Vancouver Island. Every few weeks I would get one or two days off duty to catch the ferry to Nanaimo and motor down the scenic Malahat Drive to Victoria. After visiting Bruce Hutchison, the next stop would be at the home of Mrs Nellie McClung whose books Clearing in the West and The Stream Runs Fast had impressed me as a youth. Nellie McClung was a character a Canadian Lydia Pankhurst. Until I came to know and admire Nellie McClung, I had never encountered feminists, and believed them to be aggressive. But Mrs McClung was the mild and gentle sort. Perhaps she was more fiery in the days of her youth, when her agitation and organized campaigns resulted in Manitoba becoming the first Canadian province to grant the franchise to women. She later fought for women's rights and social reform in the Alberta legislature at Edmonton, and represented Canada at the League of Nations. She was a staunch Methodist and a great admirer of our mutual friend Edna Jacques, of whom we often spoke. Nellie McClung served as a member of the Board of Governors of the CBC and died in 1951. In 1973, to observe the centenary of her birth, the Canadian Post Office issued an 8 commemorative stamp(SG Cat. No. Canada 761) bearing a portrait of Nellie McClung. She was a national leader in the W.C.T.U.(Women's Christian Temperance Union) but in spite of her reputation for being austere, dogmatic and old-fashioned, I considered myself fortunate to have been a personal friend of Nellie McClung. I would also try to visit, on my island trips, Sir Robert Holland, Sir Charles Bell, and later my good friend Emily Carr.

Meanwhile I was developing a liking for the motion picture business with Miss Hellen Semmens as a central point of interest. I had enjoyed meeting her brother Harold N. Semmens, one of Canada's leading architects, and appreciated his quiet and gentle manner. On a visit to their home in West Point Grey, I enjoyed meeting Hellen and Harold's mother, who despite her nickname Sarge, was the soul of kindness and hospitality. Frank Semmens, father of the family, was the essence of gentlemanly courtesy; he was of medium height, grey haired and looked trim and fit. Soft-spoken and pipe-smoking, Frank was a genuinely friendly sort. It was not long before I found I liked the Semmens family very much. It was at their home that I met Vene Graham who was the mother of Hellen's best friend Shirley(now Buchanan). Vene was as fond of whodunits as I was.

Although my work as CBC Production Manager kept me at a desk rather than on the production floor, I was occasionally able to produce plays. The Master of the Inn, and Little Father of the Wilderness were two of these. My method of writing and producing a play was as follows: being a little lazy and a great procrastinator, I would leave the writing of the Saturday night play until the day before, meanwhile working out the plot and sequence of scenes in my head. Anytime after nine o'clock on the Friday evening I would lock myself into the office with typewriter, plenty of paper and a full bottle of Teacher's Highland Cream. Seven or eight hours later the 20-page script would be finished and the Teacher's depleted. I found that if I imbibed the medicinal stimulant too quickly, the pace of creative work(and the typing) slowed down, and it took me some weeks of careful experimentation to find the most efficacious ration. Finishing the script, I would leave it for the typist and go home for a few hours ' nap until rehearsal time at two o'clock. Prior to writing the script, I had made a list of the cast, designated local actors for the various roles and had them called for the 2pm woodshed run-through. After reading the play there were now stencilled copies for all concerned I would discuss it and its interpretation with the cast, then take a break until the dress rehearsal at five o'clock with accompanying music and sound effects. This was followed by final production advice and then the national network broadcast at 6 o'clock.

When we moved out of Windrush, with reluctance, in the autumn of 1940, I found a large flat in an old house near Stanley Park. After only a few months there I located an even better one on the ground floor of a house at the corner of Jervis and Georgia Streets, not far from the CBC studios. There was one rather large living-room, and a small bedroom, the door to which was covered by a curtain. On the opposite side there was a small bathroom and kitchen. I could never cook myself a meal, even with such complete mod. cons, and Hellen, who helped me arrange the furniture, pictures and scrolls, would tease me as the eternal bachelor who could not fry an egg or boil water without burning it. She frequently took pity on me and brought along a few choice dishes from home for my delectation. Hellen has remained my favourite gourmet cook ever since, by which I mean the last 38 years.

Vancouver, as a Pacific coast city, boasted a large Chinatown, second only to San Francisco. It was said there were some 40,000 Chinese in Chinatown, and I gravitated there to indulge my long-time love of the Orient. One of my first contacts there was Frank Mah, who with his clever wife Mary, became close personal and family friends for many years. Frank was Cantonese and had become a highly successful business man. I am not sure how many different concerns Frank either owned or controlled, but I know Mary managed the Quon On Travel Agency. They were lavish with their frequent presents as only Chinese friends can be, and we enjoyed many delectable feasts of Chinese food at their favourite restaurants on Pender Street. Both Frank and Mary Mah were leaders in the Vancouver Chinese community and used their influence to establish and cement friendly relations between East and West.

The B.C. Electric Co. sponsored a broadcast series of symphony concerts making use of famous conductors who visited Vancouver from time to time. One such was Leonard Bernstein, and I recall that John Avison and I were tremendously impressed by the personality, flair and general panache of the great Bernstein, as we sat watching him rehearse our orchestra. I did all I could to encourage Bernstein to chat with John, who seemed even then to be developing into one of Canada's most versatile and brilliant conductors. Bernstein, during our talks, confirmed this prognostication.

I was even more impressed by the great German conductor Dr Otto Klemperer, whose understanding heart and musicianship won him friends all over the world. After a dress rehearsal for a Symphony Hour show, I suggested, as producer, that in the adagio movement of the main symphonic item the violins had been taking the tempo slightly too fast. Dr Klemperer who had joined Jimmy Gilmour and me in Studio A Control Room, smiled. Ja, Ja he said, you are right. But you know something? These are good musicians, they also know that they play the adagio too quickly. Instead of blaming them for a small error, I praise them for being 99 percent perfect. Don't worry, my friend, when the performance comes, all will be well. His big hulking frame-leaned over me as he patted my shoulder. The performance went off without a hitch and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, with Dr Otto Klemperer conducting, played brilliantly. When I joined others congratulating him after the performance, he beamed at me, What did I tell you? Let's go and have a drink!

My father loved old time Music Hall songs and hits from the Gay Nineties like Good-bye, Dolly Grey, and Soldiers of the Queen, and one of his favourites was Burlington Bertie. When I saw from the papers that Miss Ella Shields, the original Burlington Bertie from Bow, was to appear for a week at the Pantages Theatre on Hastings Street, I made it a point of seeing the show. Miss Shields ' act was perfection itself. Impeccably dressed in white tie, top hat and tails, she sand and danced through her repertoire of songs, including Burlington Bertie and Adeline, and her audience loved it. As part of the media I went back-stage, met Miss Shields, and immediately fell under the spell of her personality and gracious charm. So impressed was I that I took Hellen to meet her at a later performance the same week. As the saying goes we clicked and thus began a friendship and correspondence between Ella Shields and me over a period of years until her death in 1952. During those years we met for reunions in New York and London and it was always wonderful to see her. MORE SALAD DAYS

The new Chinese Consul-General in Vancouver was Li Chao, a middle-aged, learned man of dignified bearing. My interest in China-Canada relations prompted me to spend several spare hours each week helping his staff re-write news and information despatches from Nanking, the current capital of China. It was Li Chao who first suggested I should have a Chinese name and I was both grateful and honoured when in the course of time he gave me the three-character name of Tdong Lao Fu which meant, literally, Portrait of Happy Man Climbing Mountain. This is the Chinese name by which I have been known ever since and which is my personal chop. It can be found in most of the books in my library. Some years later, when Hellen and I had settled down to a busy and happily married life in China, we had a Chinese name worked out for her. It was Tse Mun Tse which is translated as Guardian of the Western Gate. Both these names were designed for us as being extremely auspicious. They appear in the form of a pair of vermilion chops on our family note-paper and on quite a number of original Chinese paintings inscribed to us by the artists.

The ability to select propitious characters in Chinese is a fine art and it takes a student of great learning to transpose an English name into Chinese syllables which convey beauty both in the pictogram character and in meaning, and yet bear some semblance in sound to the original name. Most Chinese names have three characters, often for the sake of euphony, as with my own Chinese name where the final Fu meaning, man, husband, teacher, leader or father, is added to the characters for climbing(Tdong) a family name, and happy(lao) to round out and complete the name. In the choice of these names the trick was to find characters whose pronunciation in English resembled somewhat the spoken sounds of Dunlop and Semmens. The success of these names is shown by the fact that they have been admired by Chinese scholars such as Dr Lin Yutang, Dr Cheng Te-K'un, Dr Hollington Tong and others.

Apart from ice-skating and hockey in my youth, I was not keen on participating in sport, but the sight of skiers gliding over the unmarked hills of newly fallen snow was enticing; so when the actor Jack Bowdry invited me to have a go at the ski-run atop Grouse Mountain, across the inlet from Vancouver, I agreed with alacrity. We arrived at the ski chalet just about dusk one Sunday evening and the scene was indeed a happy one, with scores of city folk having a gay old time, well wrapped in woollen jumpers and cardigans, and equipped with the necessary skis and poles. Jack had borrowed boots and skis for me and I stumbled out into the great outdoors and enjoyed a few hasty lessons down the snow-covered slopes of the mountain.

Someone had mentioned that the ski-jump was off to the right, but visibility was only 50 yards and it could not be seen. There was a slight flurry of falling snow, but the weather was good and a wintry moon was trying to break through the clouds. Suddenly I found myself moving forward and I crouched a little as I had seen the experts do in films. Faster and faster I went as the slope fell away. Just as the moonlight broke through I could distinguish, about 50 yards ahead of me, the edge of the ski-jump. I was speeding toward it as fast as gravity could take me. I do not recall being frightened, although I should have been. Gripping the ski-poles I tried to keep myself steady as the velocity increased and then, all of a sudden I sailed over the edge and felt myself going head over heels towards a white mass of snow far below. If I had landed on the ski-track, which was hard-packed and icy, I'd have probably broken my neck, but I seemed to swerve off centre and thus landed in a soft snow-bank and lay panting, stunned and breathless, for a few minutes. Jack and two others who had witnessed the performance, found me and piloted me back to the warmth and safety of the ski-cabin. Although I was grateful to Jack Bowdry for the experience, I never tried the sport of skiing again even during visits to Switzerland in later years. I had no wish to have another go.

It was fortuitous that my slackening off in actual programme production at CBC coincided with an increasing social activity, mainly with the Semmens family, whose house I had almost begun to regard as home. During the war years Harold had risen to the rank of major in the Canadian Army and he looked very smart in his uniform. On happy weekend occasions he and his fiance Audrey Dilworth would make a foursome with Hellen and me at the Saturday night dinner dance in the Hotel Vancouver ballroom. On another occasion I took Hellen to meet two English ladies, Dorothea and Olive Kerr, who had retired from secretarial work in Hollywood and had taken a flat on Jervis Street not far from my own. I had first met Olive Kerr on a visit to Los Angeles in 1938; she and her sister moved freely within the circle of the British colony in Hollywood. Olive had worked as personal secretary for a succession of movie stars including C. Aubrey Smith, Francis X. Bushman, Warner Baxter, David Niven, Ronald Coleman and Clive Brooks. She had also worked with P.G. Wodehouse. I was able to arrange a series of CBC talks by Olive Kerr at the start of a long and valued friendship.

The more I became involved in the executive work of CBC the less I liked it, but the more I worked with Ira Dilworth the more I liked him. He was a great man and I never ceased to admire him, either discussing critically the quality of a poem or composition, analysing the contents or production of a programme, dealing with the political aspects of CBC policy from Head Office or just enjoying himself in a piano duet with Arthur Benjamin. At work he made a point of answering every letter that crossed his desk; he told me, If people take the trouble to write, then the least we can do, as a courtesy, if nothing else, is to give them as complete an answer as possible. He was meticulous in his use of words and had little patience with careless speech or syntax. In fact, he was a purist, and he kept to the discipline of the purist without hesitation, vacillation or wavering. I had developed an admiration for the works of Ogden Nash, whose newest verse appeared almost weekly in The New Yorker. Although I never pointed it out to Ira Dilworth, I rather felt that certain Ogden Nash lines entitled The Purist might also apply, on occasion, to him. The lines in question were as follows: We give you now Professor Twist, A conscientious scientist; The trustees said, He never bungles, And sent him off to distant jungles. Beside a tropic riverside One day he missed his charming bride; She had, the guides informed him later, Been eaten by an alligator. Professor Twist could not but smile; He said, You mean a crocodile!

But the ideals of the purist must always come to grief in the devastating vortex of national politics. Ira Dilworth was being worn down by the picayune squabbling of party politicians who were attempting, and with some success, to make a French/Canadian political football of the CBC. This was distressing and frustrating to those devoted to creating Canadian programmes for the information, education and entertainment of the majority of listeners. It is true that by reason of its distance from the epicentre, the Vancouver region of CBC was outside the main force of the troubles that beset our colleagues in eastern Canada, but we certainly suffered from the backlash, including political staff changes, cuts in programme budgets and overall policy alterations and counter-changes. In 1945 Ottawa wrote to Ira Dilworth suggesting that I be transferred to the general production staff in Toronto and the strength of his opposition and mine resulted in the postponement of such a move. When the idea was broached I had told Ira Dilworth that I would sooner resign than transfer to Toronto and he agreed entirely. A year later I did resign, but for other reasons, as well. The war in Europe seemed to be ending and so were my salad days of radio with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Old-time radio fans will remember the Commonwealth Christmas broadcasts when each hour-length programme was a complex amalgam of Commonwealth contributions, ending with the annual Christmas message from H.M. the King, usually speaking from the royal study at Sandringham. Laurence Gilliam of the BBC in London arranged and produced these impressive programmes and it was my pleasure and privilege to work with him for the Vancouver region for several years running. The show might include the voice of a shepherd alone with his flock on an Australian sheep-ranch, fishermen hauling in their catch off the Faroe Islands, a ceremonial native dance from Fiji, a Maori song from New Zealand, an item from Chicoutimi, Quebec. On one occasion the voice of Jack Peach, one of our versatile announcers, described Christmas on the Canadian west coast, including the cries of sea-gulls wheeling over the docks. The coordinating of the various world pick-ups did try the patience of all concerned and the long waits at 5am on a chilly Christmas morning were no laughing matter. Jack Peach had a sense of humour peculiar to himself. On rehearsal, when our cue came through, we heard him say I am a sea-gull at the Port of Vancouver instead of the Fitzpatrick Travelogue script agreed on for this part of the show. Fortunately Jack's humour was heard only on rehearsal although listeners might have liked it even if Laurence Gilliam did not.

If I can ever claim association with genius it will be because of my friendship with Emily Carr. She has been acclaimed as the greatest Canadian painter of the century, while her four books are said to have reached new heights of perception and understanding in the annals of Canadian literature. Emily Carr's introduction to the Canadian and world public was largely due to the encouragement and promotion of her talents by Ira Dilworth. I was fortunate to have been associated with him in this development over the first half of the 1940s.

It all began with the discovery of some pencilled jottings she had made during her painting trips in the wilds of northern British Columbia. Ira brought them from Victoria after one of his visits with Emily. We considered them exemplary material for a series of CBC radio talks, edited and read by him, and produced by me. The first series proved extremely popular and the Oxford University Press, from its Toronto office, suggested publication in book form. Emily's first book, Klee Wyck(Laughing One) went into three editions and was followed by The Book of Small and The House of All Sorts(Emily's experiences with a rare assortment of characters while managing a guest-house). Her autobiography, Growing Pains, followed, detailing her early life in Victoria, her art studies in San Francisco, London and Paris, her love of the Canadian forests and the Haida Indians. It also described her frustration, poverty and despair when the critics rejected her new style of painting, and the final recognition of her work, both in painting and in literature.

It was my good fortune to see a lot of Emily Carr and to be counted as a friend, for she claimed she had only a few. At first our association was concerned with her scripts for the CBC broadcasts, and I found her most amenable to work with. Change anything you want, Roy dear. If you don't, Ira will! she added with a wide and knowing grin. I took great pleasure in travelling across the straits to Victoria to spend most of an afternoon with Emily at the old family house at 215 St Andrew Street.

On the jacket cover of Emily Carr's last book the following tribute to her life and work is paid in these words: Emily Carr is regarded throughout Europe and America as Canada's greatest painter. More than a dozen of her pictures hang in the National Gallery of Canada; other pictures are in galleries all across Canada, and in the homes of art lovers in Europe and America. She was possessed of a fine and original mind; she had the artist's eye for subject, scene and colour. These natural gifts she submitted to a vigorous discipline. It was not handling the paints, she tells us, but handling of thoughts which overwhelmed me. To teach herself to handle thought, she made it a practise never to permit herself to touch a brush until she could answer these questions, in writing, in the fewest possible words: What attracted me to this subject ?'Why do I want to paint it ?'What is the thing I am trying to express? When she turned from painting to writing, she added to these gifts and to this training, two principles which might well be carved above the entrance door of every School of Journalism. They were about the same, she writes, as the principles used in painting get to the point as directly as you can; never use a big word if a little one will do. In writing, as in painting, Emily Carr was a master craftsman. Practitioners of both crafts could find worse text-books for their trade than the formula of this master.

After one long and stimulating chat with Emily on her small front porch she suddenly announced I'm going to call you Bobbie! and Bobbie it remained in all our conversations and letters from her, from then on. This may have seemed an odd way of treating a friend, but if one knew Emily it would perhaps have caused no surprise. For some years Emily had kept a number of English sheep dogs or bobtails and her favourite was a small one which she called Bobbie. She loved Bobbie for his devotion and loyalty to her in the days when she had few friends and was struggling for recognition. I reminded her of Bobbie and would I mind if she called me by that dear nickname? I had developed a fondness for Emily and the aberrations of her strong personality; I was almost flattered to be given the name of a past friend by an eccentric of Emily Carr's stature.

Some weeks after returning from my exploits in Alaska and Siberia, I was invited to give a lecture on the trip to the Overseas League meeting in the Empress Hotel, Victoria. I called the talk North to Eldorado, for some reason, and it was well received. Sir Robert Holland was in the chair. After the lecture there were tea and refreshments and it was not until fairly late that I rang Emily just to say Hello, and how sorry I was to be too busy to get over to the house to see her this trip. (I planned to return to Vancouver on the midnight ferry). Emily was furious. What do you mean, Bobbie, by coming to Victoria and not coming to see me? She almost raised her voice. I know! You had to talk to those dear old folk at the Empress and I don't blame you. But listen, Bobbie, and let me tell you this: if you ever come to Victoria again without visiting me, you'll never be a pall-bearer at my funeral! Of course I stayed overnight at the hotel and spent a good part of the following day placating the ruffled Emily, even though I felt sure she was not as disturbed as she made out.

Emily Carr died peacefully in her sleep in March of 1945. Ira Dilworth, Lawren Harris and I journeyed together to Victoria for the funeral and none of us were pall-bearers, such details having been arranged by local friends and neighbours. The brief church service and the burial at Oak Bay Cemetery were not impressive, and Emily's three Vancouver friends ate a doleful dinner in the Empress Hotel that evening, although Lawren tried to cheer us up in his own inimitable way, and we were grateful. Both Ira and Lawren shared my feelings that the all-too-brief tribute to Emily Carr at the service was inadequate and insufficient, but then we were prejudiced.

Emily left me one of her large paintings of the green B.C. forests in her will; she had previously given me two of her books. I also cherish, by way of remembering my friend Emily Carr, at least a dozen of her charming letters, all addressed to Dear Bobbie and written in pencil on thin paper. Many letters from friends have gone by the wayside but I have kept those from Emily Carr.

Like Ira Dilworth I have sometimes used the words of a poet to express a specific sentiment and I would therefore like to quote Ira in his Foreword to Emily's autobiography Growing Pains:

What can I say? Nothing that can possibly matter much. I know how courageous your life has been, how dauntless your purpose, how unshaken and unshakeable your faith that this is not all, that we go on. I know too how intensely you have felt the influence of nature its loveliness, its deep solemnity, its mystic, overwhelming power to strike awe and sometimes terror in our hearts. You have told us of your reactions to those forces in your paintings and your writing. The world will be grateful.

You will understand when I say that I should like a poem to stand as preface to your book, a poem which we have both admired so much, Thomas Hardy's Afterwards. I know and you know that Hardy did not think it a sad poem just a comment and a summing up. So, Emily, I shirk my task and set as foreword to your autobiography these lines: When the present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say, He was a man who used to notice such things? If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink, The dew-fall hawk comes crossing the shades to alight Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think To him this must have been a familiar sight If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm, When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, One may say, He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, But he could do little for them; and now he is gone. If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last they stand at the door, Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees, Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more, He was one who had an eye for such mysteries? And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom, And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings, Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom, He hears it not now, but used to notice such things?

There is a change somewhere in the east. In my western garden this evening grosbeaks are paying their annual visit, a brief pause in our elm tree during their migration; and high in the Canadian sky wild geese, great flocks of them, are shouting their mysterious cry. They are all going on as you and I must, Emily. Life will not stand still. So, fare foreword, dear soul. Ira Dilworth.

Thus it was that Ira Dilworth paid tribute and bade farewell to Emily Carr with the borrowed lines from Thomas Hardy, and I am certain that none would object if I borrow them as my tribute to both.

Meanwhile my interest in the film industry through Hellen Semmens was not the only reason for becoming an active member of the Vancouver Film Society I have always been interested in films for their own sake. Hellen and I attended several of the society's Sunday afternoon showings of classics of foreign films, two of which made lasting impressions: one was the famous Italian masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and the other was that delightful French film entitled Generals Sans Boutons. The latter was the simple story of two villages a few kilometres apart, one of which was well-known for its beautiful cabbages while the other was famous for its grapes and wine. On a certain summer day, processions from both villages met en route to the same holy shrine, the procession from one village to pray for rain to make the cabbages grow bigger, and the other procession from the second village to pray for sunshine to ripen the grapes. The two groups of villagers engage in a rough and tumble battle, and a peaceful settlement was only arrived at by the intervention of the schoolmasters from both villages. I thought this an excellent illustration of how differing good intentions can lead to conflict.

As the weeks and months went by and the war seemed turning in favour of the Allies, I became more and more attached to the Semmens household, even to the point of getting to know some of the family friends such as Mrs Helen Margo and her sister, who owned and managed a shop of Oriental goods on Howe Street. Hellen's brother, Major Harold Semmens, had returned from war service in Europe looking as handsome and debonair as ever. He had married Audrey, and had been sent off to the Aleutian Islands for an anti-Jap campaign before being demobbed. Early in the summer of 1946 Hellen had been transferred to Toronto and I was becoming more and more disenchanted with the CBC.

Ira Dilworth, Dick Halhed and Jim Gilmore had all visited the northern B.C. port of Prince Rupert and spoken highly of it, so I decided to go north on a Pacific coast steamer. En route we spent an hour or two at a salmon cannery near Campbell River. The stench and the bloody process we watched put me off tinned fish for many months. From Prince Rupert I took the ferry to the Queen Charlotte Islands to see some of the Haida tribe of Indians in their native region. On the way across I enjoyed a long and interesting talk with the young son of a Haida chief. He was embittered, as could be expected, at the government's neglect of the Canadian Indian, and he resented the laws that made it an offence to sell liquor to an Indian and which confined the original Canadian population to reservations. We got along well because I was sympathetic to his cause, and I understood why he was so disturbed by the obvious discrimination by the white man. He was a sensitive and intelligent young man and a student at the University of British Columbia, studying law with the purpose of fighting in the courts to secure a more liberal and fair treatment for his people.

I was so impressed by this young man that immediately on my return to Vancouver I wrote a long and detailed letter to my parliamentary friend at the House of Commons in Ottawa, A.M. Sandy Nicholson, M.P., urging more federal action for the case of the Indian. By coincidence, a few days later, I was introduced by Ira Dilworth to the Rt Hon. William Lyon MacKenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada. He was attending a Liberal rally in the city. We three travelled up in the lift of the Hotel Vancouver together and perhaps just to make conversation I mentioned my trip to the Haida reservation and my feelings about the neglect of our Indians. The little man who has been regarded as one of the most astute politicians of his day, smiled at me. A very good point, he said and I am glad to say that we have the whole matter under constant study. As the lift stopped at our floor Ira Dilworth gave me a dark look, admonishing my temerity.

On a visit to New York that summer I was stopped short by an elaborate poster on 47th Street welcoming all to Danny's Den for drinks and food, and to see the appearance of the one and only Miss Ella Shields(from London, England), the Original Burlington Bertie. Accordingly I was at a front row table for the show when the lights went down. We were entertained first by a pair of talented young men playing two grand pianos. Then came Ella Shields, as dapper as ever, and the applause nearly raised the roof. I think she spotted me, in spite of the glare of the footlights for when I called at her dressing room back-stage after the show she did not seem surprised to see me. We had dinner at a good restaurant round the corner and then I took her to Sammy's Bowery Follies, a popular nostalgic show in lower Manhatten. What with her neat black suit, white blouse, rimless spectacles and greying hair, Ella Shields looked more like a school teacher than a vaudeville and music hall celebrity, toast of two continents. Many of the rather frowsy old biddies who made their living by singing Gay Nineties songs and cadging drinks from the customers, recognized Ella, and several came to sit at our table to have their pictures taken by the resident camera man. We all had a grand time, and I saw Ella home to the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel. Ella told me, that evening, of how she had lost her husband in a London blitz, when her house and all her personal possessions had been destroyed by a Nazi bomb. Fortunately she had been out. In parting we arranged to meet again, next time in London, and I promised to take her to dinner at her favourite restaurant, the Trocadero on Shaftesbury Avenue, just a stone's throw from Piccadilly Circus.

When Hellen was transferred to Toronto to continue her documentary film-making career, I found that I missed her cheery presence more than I had expected, despite many activities. More and more I was enjoying my evenings with Frank and Sarge, and it was great to be accepted warmly into such a compatible family. It was about this time that I received a letter from Dr Liu Shih-Shun, Chinese Ambassador in Ottawa, who informed me that, with the imminent cessation of hostilities in Asia, the Chinese government would move back from the wartime capital of Chungking to the south central city of Nanking. He stated that the many foreigners who had worked with the impressive radio facilities of The Voice of China in or near Chungking would shortly be leaving; Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was in need of an experienced professional broadcasting executive to assist in continuing broadcasts from China on medium-wave internally, and on short-wave to the world. Was I interested? After a discussion with Ira Dilworth I telegraphed Dr Liu requesting him to inform Chiang Kai-Shek that I could be available to go to China on a month's notice.