Star-Phoenix from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada • 72

4 Saturday, July 21, 1979 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Star-Phoenix Continued from Page 3. of Canada, hangs on one wall; and the heavy linoleum floor, a map of Canada with the call letters of all radio stations operating in 1939 set into it, remains. The linoleum is, however, partly covered by a new transmission unit which started operating in 1975, after the old mercury vapor tube transmitter had served 37 years of continuous service quite a record, McIntosh says. This transmitter McIntosh indicates the red wall fronting the old equipment, with its curved lines, porthole-like windows, and RCA symbol needed someone to start it up, put it on the air, and turn it off. The new equipment, compact, gray, rectangular and bearing the name of Continental Electric, is monitored and controlled through a Sask-Tel cable connecting it with Regina studios.

Technical changes have, in fact, made some jobs obsolete. The transmitter no longer needs to be monitored around the clock, and there are tw men in Watrous now only because the transmitter is so far from Regina. Technical advances have also transformed the art of broadcasting as it was known in 1939 by CBKs first crew. Ted North, CBC director of radio in Regina today, says and the tape recorder have opened up whole areas that didnt exist in those golden days of radio. S-P Photos by Peter Blashill Romance was part of pioneer radio days contracted with private radio stations for air time and broadcast to passenger trains as they sped across the countryside.

Rookie Roberts first assignment was a royal broadcast. From the ballroom of the Fort Garry Hotel, his voice and the sounds of a 10-piece orchestra buzzed across the miles to the tram carrying His Royal Highness, the 30-year-old Prince of Wales who would become King Edward VIII, to the royal familys ranch in Alberta. Twelves years would abdicate to marry the twice-divorced American, Mrs. Simpson. It was an auspicious or a suspicious start for his radio career, Roberts says, "seeing what happened to him later.

Those were days when radio possessed its own sense of aristocracy. Roberts served double duty during broadcasts, as radio announcer and emcee for the musical variety show in the plush dining room or ballroom of the Fort Garry, and naturally he always wore a tuxedo. Herb Roberts face shines as he describes a radio program he broadcast from Winnipeg in the 1930s called Ballads and Poems. I had a theory in those days. I had just one audience I read poetry to my mother, and other people could listen in if they wanted to.

Roberts, now 80, was in Saskatoon for a Shrmers convention last month. A woman catering the convention banquet approached him and introduced herself. She had been a schoolteacher in Manitoba, and she wanted to tell me that 30 or 40 years ago she encouraged her students to listen to my readings of poems, Robert says. Isnt it amazing that that woman, out of all the people in Saskatoon, should remember and say. "Theres the guv! It's fantastic.

its corny but true. Memories of what Roberts, who went on to act as CBC station manager in Regina from i954 to 1965, recalls as "'the romantic years of radio. ere dredged up June 29 hen the Canadian Broadcasting Corporations 59 000-wratf transmitter in Watrous. CBK. celebrated its 40th anniversary.

Roberts says, There was a romance to radio those days, a personal touch between listener and broadcaster" in the summer months of 1939 when the CBCs first Saskatchewan transmitter was raised over the prairie and salt marsh of Watrous At the time. Roberts was program director for CKY, a Winnipeg radio station then owned by the Manitoba go eminent, in 1948 taken oer by the CBC. His career on the airwaves had started 1924 with CNRW. a Canadian National Railway ghost station Winnipeg. The CNR in those Delisle Thompson was wearing a tuxedo and bow tie when his voice was the first to announce for the CRC in Saskatchewan in about 1933.

(The Canadian Radio Commission, CRC, was the predecessor of the CBC, which was created by Parliament in 1936.) Women participating in those early broadcasts from Saskatoon, which went on for several years before CBK was built, used to wear long dresses and corsages to complement the mens formal wear, even though the studio in use then as not a hotel ballroom but a room about the size of a one-car garage borrowed from CFQC radio. Occasionally, Thompsons broadcasts would emulate the opulence of those Roberts remembers at the Fort Garry: they w'ould originate from the Capitol Theatre, where local talent would line up, from an Andrew Sis-ters-like trio to a cello, violin and piano combo, for the thrill of being heard on the air. Everybody in that day wanted to get on the radio, Thompson, 75, recalls. They would write a lot of letters hoping I would read their names on the air. There was a Vancouver girl who wTote a whole series of the gushiest letters and signed them Happy.

I wrote her a letter or two. but I never followed it up, he says. You w-ere kind of, a sort of a way. a celebrity. The novelty of radio in the 1930s gave broadcasters instant acclaim, and there was an excitement.

Thompson says, about being right there on the ground floor of a growing entertainment and news industry. But there was also risk and uncertainty about the enterprise, and rudimentary equipment and resources were often the price of being a pioneer t. ---fee Orr rf '-4 S-P Photo by Linda Holoboff Veten)roadcaster Delisle Thompson distinguished him-seu for his pronunciation of the word 'merinque in a vie recipe..