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chamber orchestra, the Montreal Baroque Trio. On cue, we opened the mike with the strings still resonating in the background and shouted in unison, “Fuck off!” No one called or ever remarked on the incident.
    Frequently the network lines, which snaked their way over the coastal mountains from Vancouver, broke down—always a welcome event. Rupert was then allowed to fill the time with its own music, including a Top Ten Hits show. I was introduced, complete with echo-chamber sound effects and theme music, as “your host with the most on the coast.” Elvis, the Big Bopper, Jim Reeves, Johnny Mathis, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis were given free rein.
    The handling of news was equally amateurish. We had no dedicated reporters to cover local happenings, nor did we have access to wire services such as Canadian Press for world events. Our source was the local rag, the Prince Rupert Daily News , an operation widely acknowledged to be in the pockets of the town’s leading industrialists at the pulp mill and the fish plant. We clipped the top local news and sports stories out of the paper, pasted them to a blank sheet, and read them on air, unchanged and unedited but for the correction of the odd obvious error. Weather reports were gleaned from a study of the skies through the station window. A natural curiosity led me to pursue interviews with local worthies, thus providing some homegrown public affairs content.
    Station manager “Hank” Hankinson was a brilliant but eccentric former producer with the CBC International Service in Montreal, banished to the far reaches of the empire for some obscure offence. The station was his personal fiefdom. He appointed his secretary, with whom he had been having an affair for many years, to the post of assistant station manager. At the same time, lowlier staff members were made to clean the toilets twice a week and take out the garbage. During my first turn on the garbage detail, the senior announcer, UncleMerlin Gutensohn, offered a comforting insight. While flies buzzed around us, he explained that this was actually part of our training, ensuring that “our powerful and important positions will not make us too proud.”
    Hankinson was rightly regarded as one of Rupert’s few intellectuals. In my first week at the station, he invited me to enrol in the weekly adult French classes he gave at the local school. He also suggested I join the Canadian Institute of Speech, an institution of his own creation with only one instructor. It specialized in public speaking and vocabulary classes, in person or by correspondence, and offered various levels of graduate and undergraduate diplomas. I declined both. Months passed before I realized why I wasn’t being moved off late-night and weekend shifts. I signed up for French lessons and joined the august ranks of the institute. When the next shift schedule was posted, I found myself on days.
    Both of these enterprises, especially the speaking and vocabulary training, involved serious study, and Hank had the university degrees to prove his qualifications as an instructor. Despite my resentment at the time, he gave me my first exposure to the serious discipline of effective writing and speaking. Content and style were equally emphasized and tested. Hank drove into us the idea that every word is a building block of thought, a “crystallized idea,” as he put it. A few years later, when we were unionized, the bosses in Vancouver learned of Hank’s management practices and invited him to resign. He was a mean old cuss but the first person of real learning I had ever encountered, and I owed him a great deal. I will never forget his delight when I phoned him in Rupert from my Washington, D.C., office on the thirtieth anniversary ofthe day he hired me. We laughed over those days and lamented they were no more.
    My position at CFPR was intended to be a summer job only but, as so often happened in my life,