production
studios had already been transferred from Building K into the William Penn
Hotel at 530 William Penn
Place in downtown Pittsburgh.
In his memorable volume on the early
history of shortwave broadcasting in the United States, Michael K. Sidel tells
the story of how the historic medium wave station KDKA in Pittsburgh began the
world’s first truly international shortwave
service. It was in the summer of the
year 1923 when KDKA itself was not quite three years old at the time, that
George A. Wendt of the Canadian Westinghouse Company in Hamilton Ontario
suggested that KDKA should introduce a program service for residents in the
Canadian far north.
During the Summer of 1923, the
northern posts of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been issued with shortwave
receivers that could tune in to the program service from shortwave KDKA-8XS in
Pittsburgh. The Westinghouse Far
Northern Service was introduced during that same 1923 Summer, and it was on the
air medium wave and shortwave each Saturday evening.
The programming for the new Far
Northern Service was compiled with readings from listener letters, news and
entertainment music and it was beamed to the Canadian Arctic areas which
included police outposts, personnel in service with the Hudson Bay trading company,
the extensive French
Revillon
Freres fur trading company, and isolated Catholic mission stations. It is reported that KDKA received a flood of
appreciative letters from northern listeners after the harsh northern winter
was over and the mails had begun to flow again during the Spring of the
following year 1924.
Brief radio histories covering the
development of the Far Northern Service state that station KDKA-8XS broadcast a special message
to a Hudson Bay trapper in northern Canada on January 17 during the harsh
northern winter of 1924, stating that his wife was recovering satisfactorily
after a
successful
emergency operation. However, there is
much more to this interesting story than just a simple one sentence historical report. This is what happened.
During the year 1906, 22 year old James S. C. Watt migrated from
the Scottish Highlands to Canada East, where he soon afterwards accepted an
appointment with the Hudson Bay Company.
Around that same time a high school girl, Maud Maloney, caught his
attention. Maud, born on the Gaspe
Peninsula on the southern coast of the St Lawrence Estuary in Canada in 1894,
was the tenth child in a blended family of Irish-French background with 16
children. She was fluent in both French
and English, and she subsequently became familiar with the northern Algonquin
language at a conversational level.
As time went by, James Watt accepted
a transfer with the Hudson Bay Company to Fort McKenzie in Province Quebec; and
Maud accepted employment in the early part of World War 1 as a telegraphiste at
Clarke City PQ, a little west of the north entrance to the Gulf St. Lawrence
Estuary. Subsequently in a simple
ceremony, Presbyterian James Watt in his late twenties and the very practical
eighteen year old Catholic girl Maud Maloney were married, and they took up a
long term residence in Fort McKenzie.
Although the small trading post
settlement of Fort McKenzie was located in the north of
Province
Quebec, yet it was accessible only after an arduous ship voyage along the coast
of Labrador followed by a long inland walk of 200 miles due west. The Watt family lived much of their life in
Rupert House at Fort McKenzie.
On one occasion, it became necessary
for Maud to undergo an emergency operation and she traveled to a hospital in
North Bay, some 175 miles due north of Toronto in Ontario, for the
occasion. The operation was a success,
and practical Maud wanted to inform her husband, still way up at Fort McKenzie,
that all was well.
She had some friends make contact
with station KDKA, “way
down south of the border”, and Frank E. Mullen included this good will message
into his evening Farm Service broadcast.
It was known that James Watt would listen on shortwave to KDKA-8XS each
evening for news, information and entertainment. The grateful and lonely northern resident
subsequently thanked KDKA by mail,
stating
that yes, he did indeed hear the welcome information about his wife.
Three and a half years later, Maud
was on another voyage along the Labrador coast, on the
return
journey to Rupert House Fort McKenzie.
Traveling with her were their two children, two and half year old Hugo
and six months old Jacqueline, together with a nine year old orphan girl Alice
McDonald.
On July 22, 1927, the new ship
Bayrupert, on only its second voyage north, struck the
underwater
Clinker’s Rock and it was split open.
The wireless operator tapped out an SOS in Morse Code, and in response a
steam tugboat came out, took all aboard, and dropped them off on nearby Farm
Yard Islands. Soon afterwards, Maud and
her three fellow travelers were taken by the ship Kyle back to Newfoundland,
where they waited out the season until shipping began to move along the mainland
coast once again during the Spring of the following year.
Both Maud and James befriended the
local peoples of the north, and their service to them has become
legendary. Maud herself is honored with
the informal title, the Angel of Hudson Bay; books have chronicled her
exploits, adventures and service; and movie films have catalogued in dramatic
style her endeavors in the Canadian Arctic.
Let’s go back to the year 1924 again; and on August 4, the
Canadian government asked KDKA to maintain radio contact with the Canadian
Coast Guard supply ship CGS Arctic during its annual cruise to isolated
outposts in the Canadian north. New
radio equipment was installed on the CGS
Arctic
in Quebec before she set sail for the frozen north, with William Choat Toronto
amateur operator 3CO, as the ship’s radio operator. The ship CGS Arctic was actually registered
in Newfoundland which was not yet a part of Canada at the time, and its radio
equipment was licensed with the callsign VDM.
As requested, shortwave 8XS at the
KDKA facility in Pittsburgh did maintain regular
communication
in Morse Code during the nearly three 3 month long 1924 voyage of the CGS
Arctic VDM from Quebec, up to the northern outposts and then the return to
Quebec. One of the amateur radio stations contacted by William Choats at VDM during this voyage was the pioneer English amateur radio operator Gerald Marcuse G2NM. It will be remembered that Marcuse began the transmission of his now historic program broadcasts on shortwave three years later, and that was the beginning of international shortwave radio programming from England.
Back during that era, the KDKA-8XS
Far Northern Service was presented usually in English, though on occasions
Bishop Turquetil spoke to the northern Canadians in one of the Eskimo
languages. By the year 1938, the KDKA Far Northern
Service was on the air in five languages: English, French, Danish, Icelandic and Eskimo. The broadcast of the KDKA Far Northern Service for the 1939 Winter season began and by that time their shortwave service had undergone a double
callsign change, from W8XS to W8XK and then to the regularized WPIT.
Interestingly in December 1933, the
Canadian Radio Broadcasting Corporation CRBC
introduced
their own northern service under the title Canadian Northern Messenger which
was based upon the successful American Far Northern Service from KDKA which was
by that time now ten years old. But that’s
a story for another occasion.