Moisie, QC

The Truth

I (Major HB McCaw) am interviewing Major Al Blezard who was the first officer to arrive in Moisie. Note - it is assumed that this interview occurred in 1978 - some 25 years after Al Blezard first arrived in Moisie on 25 May, 1953.

How did I get here? I lost the toss. No kidding, we came out of TCO 9 in Clinton and there were 18 of us on course.

That’s the Telecommunications Officers’ Course and we’re talking blue now. Out of 18 of us on course there were two of us single, the other 16 got their choice of postings. And the two single guys, they said you guys are not married, you can have Gander or Moisie. What the devil is a Moisie? Well I didn’t know what, except that it was up there in the middle of nowhere. So it was either Patarelli or me.

No I can’t. He’s a Lt. Colonel somewhere in NDHQ now. Before we came up (we all went in as REO Resident Engineering Officers), we all went to Ottawa for a briefing with what was then Air Material Command who were running the program. We were there two weeks, I guess. We got the usual big briefing and they told us absolutely nothing, other than, "this is the form and you fill this out, we’ll see it once a week". So that was the 24^th of May weekend and the first or second working day after that. I can’t remember exactly, we flew in on the Overseas North Star run that came out of Dorval, out of Lachine, and we are now talking about RCAF Station Lachine.

It landed here. There was an airport here and on the airplane were a number of people going overseas and there were also a number of people coming here but I didn’t know how many until I got off the airplane. And what did we have? We had the Supply Sgt., Sgt. Leroux, and he was scared stiff of airplanes. He just sat beside me absolutely rigid all the way up. There was Flight Sgt. Allen, who was the Orderly Room man, and I’m sure it was a Cpl. Gendron who was the Fire Chief, or who ended up as the Fire Chief here. And a half dozen other people but I can’t remember who they were.

No, they didn’t come in until months later. We are now talking May, we didn’t see the families until late July or early August when the first ones started coming in and it was late that Fall before they all came in.

The only way you could come in was either fly in from Montreal or fly in from the South Shore or you could drive up the South Shore to Matane and put your car on a boat and come across by boat.

Yes. So we got here and when I come in the other day we came down the runway, and there’s a lot of buildings along the side of those runways. Boy, it sure has been built up. God, when we came in 25 years ago it was just like coming into a tunnel of trees, there was absolutely nothing. And the terminal looked like a railroad station out west in the middle of nowhere. There was one large room and there was a radio room and that was the whole damn thing. It was painted that railroad rusty red. So we all got off and there we stood, we didn’t know which end was up. Someone apparently told the CMHC man that we were on our way in. A few days earlier the Service vehicles had been shipped in and he was looking after them. So he drove those out and we drove them back. When we got here, the contractor was still building, there were a fair number of buildings up but nothing was finished. The contractors were still living on the site in temporary buildings so what happened was that I sent all the other fellows into town. They were on TD more or less.

Oh gosh, it was just a crossroads, but you know there was 4 or 5,000 people then.

Oh there was a number of hotels, all kinds of them, oh jeepers, IOC were still building the railroad. It wasn’t finished. I stayed out here, there was room enough for one or two of us out here, and the rest stayed in town. Now what did we have? We had a station with a lot of buildings on it and nothing in those buildings but floors and walls. There was no furniture, nothing had arrived. We didn’t know when it was going to arrive. The CO didn’t arrive for another two days, I think it was. Yeah, by the way I was a pilot officer at the time and the CO coming in was Madill, Bert Madill, and he was a Flight Lieutenant.

No sir, he was a Flight Lieutenant and it was only about six or eight months later that he finally got his Acting Squadron Leader. He and I were here and we didn’t see any officers for …

Yeah, M-a-d-i-l-l, now where was I?

Oh yeah, that was it, the contractor was still finishing off. So we got here in May, sometime in June, it must have been 2 or 3 weeks after we got here, the first shipload of supplies for the station came in. Now we’re talking office furniture, beds, mattresses, mops and brooms, and all that sort of jazz. Now there was nobody here but us, so the CO hops in the 2 ½ and puts the rest of the guys in the back. He drives into town, and I have pictures of the CO climbing all over that damn ship helping unload it. So that was the first ship. As a result we could have people stay out here since we now had the beds for them to sleep in. But you know we didn’t have very much of anything. I’m pretty sure I’m living in the same room now as when I got here. I was given a bed and I had to have a chest of drawers and a desk made up of plywood in the workshops. I’ve still got the desk. I think my son has got the chest of drawers but I’m not sure.

Well, we didn’t have any. We didn’t get any radar equipment until we saw a trickle come in in July and it was the middle of August before it really started to come in and the installation contractors showed up. They were RCA and they knew even less about the radar than I did, and I knew nothing. I’d never seen it before. When we ended up, there was an FPS-3 on the search and an FPS-502 height finder which was a smaller version of the 6. It was what the Americans referred to as a TPS-10D. And late that Fall, oh gosh no, it would be the next spring we got the back-up search which was an FPS-502 and the FPS-502 was an Army Gun-laying radar that had been updated to a search function. Oh you just wouldn’t believe it! It looked just like a big bulldozer blade sitting up there and it was just as heavy. What a monster! When the Army used it, it was quite low off the ground, it was very small, very high frequency, but after lowering the frequency, the sail was about 30 feet long and must have been twelve feet high. And it was solid, it wasn’t netted, it was solid. You had great big H-cons that sat on top of the deck. It was just a monster, and when you turned them on you had a main beam and then 30 degrees behind it you had the most perfect ghost you have ever seen. We never got rid of it. I don’t know how they fixed it but they must have done something in the end. Fantastic, and that radar was situated where your 27 is now.

But I would like to go back to the stuff that was coming in. There were truckloads. We had a real ball unpacking it. There were some real wags in the Supply system at that time because we received some very large, heavy boxes and all the boxes were crated very nicely. There were signs such as "Handle like Eggs", "Fragile", "Delicate Instruments", all over the place. We had a relatively conscientious supply guy who was careful about taking all this apart. First the wooden crate was opened and then we lifted out the cardboard box and very carefully cut the tape --- and there it was. A large box of steel wool. Then he had another box and it was about 6" deep by about 4’ long and maybe a foot wide. God it was built like a brick backhouse. And he carefully tore the top off that and there he had 3 broom handles. And they were all stuck in holders, 2 x 4 holders with proper cutouts and screwed down on top.

Oh yeah, it was a ball sometimes. What else did we do?

Well, more like an Outport, I guess. I never really got to visit it that often or got too involved with its day-to-day life.

Oh no. Not at the time we were here.

Oh God, that goes back before my time then, because Moisie at that time couldn’t have had more than 20 or 30 houses, if that. It started at the point of land…

Oh well then it has grown since I was here.

Yes, now it’s gone. The houses in Moisie were quite rudimentary. I remember one that had one light bulb on a long extension cord and it would be hanging up in the middle of a room and then the people would move it from room to room. It was a pretty poor place, but the people were nice. God, no it wasn’t as big as you’re saying. Not when I was here.

By God, I still don’t recall that many houses when I was here. But at that time Seven Islands was 4 or 5,000 people, when we got here in ’53 and the railroad was about half way up and they were still working on the railroad bridge over the Moisie River further…

No, we had a transmitter and receiver sites, individual sites, that were down the road from us, and that’s another interesting thing.

They were all above ground, eh. The drawings for Sydney and here are exactly the same, except the contractors or DND or the USAF got the drawings mixed up and they buried all of Sydney'’ utilities in rock and had to blast the holes and here we’ve hung everything above ground that we could have dug with a teaspoon.

Sydney had to blast holes for their antenna masts and we just sort of dug holes. But they got the drawings mixed up anyway!! That’s how we understood it.

The radar equipment started to come in in July and the contractor had just started to install it. I can remember we had a 50’ rubber radome for the big set and they stored all the stuff over in one of the Quonset huts until they were ready to use it. But when it comes in, it’s all packed in a crate and the crate was about 3’ high, I guess, and it must have been 15’ square. We didn’t have extremely conscientious storemen with the installing contractor and they brought this radome in and put it in the Quonset hut and turned it upside down. All the arrows were pointing down instead of up. The supervisor really had a fit. I think he went through all the gyrations that he could think of until he finally sorted it out and had it put upright. I don’t think it made a damn bit of difference, I just don’t see how it could. And they then started doing the installation, oh boy, in fact they were at it from the better portion of July and I don’t think they finished until October and that only put up the Height and the Search in. I can remember one thing, when they started to do their initial checkouts and it was Northern Electric who made the search equipment, they sent up an engineer two or three weeks after the equipment was installed to do the acceptance trials. And I can remember during the acceptance trials they had the UPX-6 IFF that used to sit up on the sail, and for the longest time they couldn’t get the IFF to work --- couldn’t get any signal, couldn’t get anything. Checked everything out and everything appeared right. They finally solved the problem. They had taken the output COAX and connected it to the input. So they were just going around in circles. It took them approximately 10 days to figure that one out. Generally speaking though, the installation went fairly well – no real problems.

Oh I was here from May 1953 to August 1955.

Oh yes, I went to Resident Engineering Officer from Station Telecom Officer.

I don’t think we had more than you have now. In fact, I don’t think we had as many.

I’m guessing now – I can’t really recall – I guess about 8 or 10. 8 or 10 ADTechs, and we had 2 controllers and the CO was a controller. We had a small Ops room that sat up where your operations site offices are now. We used a vertical plotting board, and ……

In any event, where you have got the main frame up there now is where the old equipment maintenance section used to be. The SSTO’s office is my old message center. And that closet that’s off the end there, was the old Crypto center where you put one Typex machine in, and a table and one operator and closed the door, and he couldn't move.

The garage by the Power Plant used to be the Fire Hall and it was the MSE Section as well. What you’re now using for the Cpls. Club was originally supposed to be the CO’s office and the Supply function as it was the only office building on the camp.

But the contractor had a temporary building over towards the St. Lawrence. They looked like temporary H-huts. They used those for the CO’s office, the CAdO and the offices for administrative purposes. The CTechO settled over there as well. The building that was originally designed for all those people became the Supply section itself.

The mess was a combined mess with a kitchen in one wing, officer’s mess in one, the airman’s mess in the other and the Sgts.’ In the third wing.

PMQ’s were only Steelox. That’s all we had. The entrance to the station, of course, was not where it is today. The entrance was right straight down the road from the Ops Site.

That’s right. The original PMQ area started where the Steelox houses start today, and you had a straight line right out to the main gate. Then you had two crescents on either side of them and that was it. I’ve forgotten how many houses we had. Forty seems to ring a bell, but I’m not sure. All the Steelox are the original ones. All were duplexes except for two of them over on the river side. One of those was the CO’s and the other was the CAdO’s.

Well I don’t know. Most of the wives flew in, with their families. The PMQ’s at that time were in isolation. We were 10, 12 miles above the line and we were getting isolation allowance.

Yes, you could drive to Sept-Iles but the road wasn’t paved. The road between here and Sept-Iles was beach sand. It just used to snap back and forth and go up over blind hills. It was soft, you never knew whether you were going to make it or not. It got better as time went on.

Not bad, it was frozen. We got snowed in a couple of times.

Remind me to tell you about the height finder. The thing is in those days, we just took it as a matter of course. Some of the wives got a little up tight but not very much. We were here and that was it. They had nothing – no fancy Rec. Hall, no church. They used one of the two schools for a church. We used one of those Quonset huts that you’ve got the ME equipment in now, as a Rec. Hall. A couple of years after I left, they put the new Rec. Hall up. We didn’t have grass. What had happened was that the contractor had the bulldozer come in; the whole site was originally all trees, little short trees, and he took the bulldozer on the St. Lawrence side, and dropped the blade and just walked right across to the Moisie side and cleaned every darn thing off. There was just one mass of beach sand full of iron filings. Then they built on top of that. And you know the houses and buildings were just sitting on pure sand, just like a kid’s play box. That spring and early summer they had to truck in topsoil; actually I guess, it was brought in by boat from the South Shore, to put grass on the PMQ’s. And then they paved a little bit of the road out from town. I can’t remember but I’ve got a nagging suspicion that they might have as well paved the roads on the base just after I left. Anyway while I was here the station roads were gravel, no question about that, and spring was a bad time. You were never quite sure if you were going to make it to work.

Oh I guess it was about the same as it is today. Some did. George Young was single, one of the few single officers we had. He would go out the back door of the mess and fish in the Moisie River. He liked to fish. The fishing was just as good then as it is now.

They organized box socials, down in one of the schools and they had square-dancing and they had a grand time. There was bound to be some women who weren’t too happy to be here at first but most of the families were like that until we took to a place anyway. I don’t remember anyone really going off the deep end. They were fairly stable people.

The personnel? Oh about 95% of the officers and I suppose 60 or 70% of the men. At the time when we were here we had something like 9 officers, 9 or 10. I can’t remember. There was only 1 captain and the nursing sister living in quarters. The rest were all living down in PMQ’s. Which is about the same ratio you have now, isn’t it?

That’s right. That was the lunch. The men bid on the boxes and you ate the lunch with the lady who had packed it. Yes, that was what it was. A very good time, a good time was had by all. Square-dancing, I guess we must have had somebody who could call. I’m trying to think who did but I can’t remember. But everybody had a good time.

It must have been the winter of 54 or 55 but I can’t be sure. I think it must have been after New Year. Anyway, we got snowed in, but prior to that we have relatively reasonable weather and we hadn’t got much snow and up over night came a terrible blizzard. Roaring wind. When they had installed the height finder we had air-supported radomes. Not the rigid kind that you do now. They had mis-calibrated the pressurizing system so that it was always low. If you had a 100 mile an hour wind outside the thing was only set up for about 60 or 70. So the winds were getting up and the dome wasn’t doing anything. It was still soft and the wind came up and dented the dome and the height finder slewed around and rocked itself right through the dome. The dome came right down over it KABOOM. It would be 7 or 8 o’clock, I think. And for some reason or other I was in the mess and the snow was as high as you’ve got it now on the sides of the roads except it was solid. The wind was blowing like mad and I can remember going up the road to see what was wrong. I couldn’t walk up the road, I had to walk on the shoulders because I would have disappeared in the snow. But I finally got there. You could see it. The sail was just sticking up there through the dome, the dome was just hanging around it nothing holding it up. So we had to get a new dome and that had to be supplied from Toronto and very conveniently got lost in the railroad yards in Montreal for about 3 or 4 days. We had to get a new sail also since the one that was here was now broken. That came in all right with no problem but we couldn’t do anything until we got the dome because they had to weld it on one side of the floor and then put a whole lot of glue on it. At the same time, I think at the same time, the forces were doing a survey for the Mid-Canada line and there was a chopper in here. They parked the chopper up by the FPS-3 tower and a wind came up overnight. Next morning there was the chopper, it had been picked up, completely turned around, and the rotors had been torn off. So we had the chopper here for a week or 10 days and had to clear the road and carry the chopper down and put it in a Quonset until a new transmission and new rotors arrived.

Gosh, I don’t know. We seemed to get along all right. They had the Rec. Hall which was one of the Quonset huts. We had functions in the schools. The messes were pretty active. We had movies in the schools for the kids on Saturday afternoons. We had movies in the messes. We did a lot of fishing though not a heck of a lot of swimming in the summer. It never really got that warm and the bugs would kill you anyway. We had corn roasts and wienie roasts on the shore of the river. I remember those and there was a lot of house parties. Usually the sort of thing where people had to make their own and since we had nothing available we made our own and everyone was happy enough about it.

They were furnished. We had a real good Supply Officer. Norm Young, that’s another one I forgot about. He was a supply officer who didn’t want to be here, he didn’t want to be in supply, he wanted to be in Public Relations. When he was shipped in he had two trunks. He had one small trunk and he had a larger trunk which he had had crated for him to be put on the incoming airplane. He came up in late summer, and he was court martialled and on his way out the next spring. In that whole time he never took the crating off that trunk. He had no intention of staying. But Norm was pretty good. The stuff for furnishing the PMQs would come in in bits and pieces, you know. You would get a boatload of chesterfields, then you’d get a boatload of refrigerators and a boatload of beds without the ends. I remember Gerald Young who was the Operations type and Norm Young who was the supply type. I had the springs but no ends for the bed for the house and Norm says "Don’t worry George and I’ll look after you". But Norm was a real acrd. We had the AOC up for an inspection sometime that spring. Norm was just showing him around.

Yes, it was James, and Norm couldn’t care less, he wasn’t going to stay, he was going to go by hook or by crook. So he was showing the AOC around and the AOC looked down and said "what the hell". And Norm’s shoes looked like he’d been working in a garage. They were dull and greasy looking and without shoelaces. Here we’ve got an officer walking around like this and the AOC says "what’s going on" and Norm says, "Well, Sir, as a Flying Officer I can’t afford shoelaces". So that was the beginning. Sometime later that spring, one Wednesday afternoon, Norm sat down and wrote a memorandum to the CO. Anyway, the memo said, "As of Friday noon I’m no longer working". Well, all hell broke loose and come Friday noon, he just stopped. And the CO called down to Command, Command was in St. Hubert’s at the time, and they were a little flabbergasted. They didn’t really know what to do. But they ended up court martialling him. Really he got what he wanted out of it, because out of the court martial he was fined $1000, I think, lost all his seniority and a few weeks later he was shipped out to a depot in BC. It wasn’t too long after that they rescinded the fine so all he really lost was his seniority and he didn’t have much anyway so he didn’t really care. And about a year, maybe 8 months later, the deport was closed and he was out of the service, which was all he wanted. The way he looked at it he wanted to come into the Public Relations Branch because there was theatre, entertainment and that sort of thing. And what they had sold him was supply now, Public Relations later and he had said OK, fine. But the military hadn’t lived up to their part of the bargain. Oh I must talk to you about the CO. Madill. He went into town and it was snowing and it was cold and he was going to buy a car. He didn’t really need one, you know, because he had a staff car. So he’s looking at the used cars and there’s a used Cadillac in town and it had all these push button up and down windows on it. It was just great. So he brings it out to show the wife and he’s showing her the windows and all that jazz. The windows came down but they never went up on account of the system breaking down. Well it was 15 miles from town and he damn near froze himself to death getting the car back there. That was the end of the Cadillac. He also insisted on trying out all the pieces of equipment that the ME had – all the heavy equipment and what have you. We had snow on the ground and he decided he was going to take the bulldozer and clean his driveway out. We had duckwalks then for sidewalks. So he charges in with this bulldozer and cleaned the walk out, the whole bit. Was he mad. As I mentioned we had air-supported domes and they were a problem. We had twin diesels, one was operating and the other was down on maintenance. So we are just sitting there crossing our fingers just hoping to God that the one diesel would keep going. Anyway, the CO goes home at night around 5 o’clock or so and it’s getting fairly dark. He was in the house and at that time the domestic site was on diesel power as well. So all the lights in the house go out. The CO comes flying out of there because he figured since all the power has gone, he was going to lose those domes, again. So he goes charging up the road and he just sort of stops half way up the road, dead. Because everybody else’s lights were on but his. Another time it was raining like mad, but there was no wind as it happened, and the diesels did go down. We shut off the radars and the domes just sort of settled in like an accordion at the side. It didn’t cause any damage and they got the diesels back up before the wind came up. So after that what we did was to take an industrial type vacuum cleaner for pressurizing. When the diesels stopped and the blowers stopped we turned on this great massive APU to drive the vacuum cleaner to keep the dome up. And by God it worked. We had more fun than you could shake a stick at. You’ve got your pressurization room underneath your dome now? We had the room, we didn’t have the pressurization doors and we didn’t have the pressurization hatch on top, so all we had was a plywood cover over the top. Nothing on the bottom and it kept up, it leaked like made, but it stayed up. And when you went up top, you just got underneath this hatch, pushed it with all your might and the air would come roaring down and you got up there just as fast as you could.

It was late after winter before we actually got the doors in. It didn’t seem to make a heck of a lot of difference with them or without them.

Well, of course, at that time I didn’t have any children so I wasn’t involved with the school that much. We had two teachers. We had a French school but I don’t think we had any French airmen so there was more or less an empty school most of the time. The two girls that we had taught in the English school.

Yes, there weren’t all that many. We only had 40 families, there weren’t that many kids.

Well I guess at that time they had a lot of young kids. Certainly anybody with high school children couldn’t come in here.

Pretty much as it does now. We had 8 or 9 officers and on your tour here you’d go through every office in the Mess’, PMC, Vice-PMC, Barman, Entertainment, Secretary. It was a continuous cycle, you’d get out of one job and into the next.

We did all our shopping in town. When I first came here we didn’t have a car. How the heck did we get into town? I guess the CO drove us in. I think we had a bus at the same time, a small bus; and you’d go in on Saturdays and do your shopping. I can’t really remember but we didn’t starve, that’s for sure. We had those blinking propane stoves, are you still using them? And you had those two 100 lb. tanks that used to sit outside the house. And it was nothing in the morning in the wintertime to get up and if you didn’t have an electric kettle, you were out of luck because you had to boil the water, then rush outdoors and pour it over the regulator so the gas would tun on. In the Steelox when they built them, they brought all the water utilities in underneath one area and they’d go up the wall and then they’d go over the ceiling and then down to wherever they were going. I don’t know why they did it that way but they laid them all on top of the insulation so that winter, just about everybody’s pipes froze. They fixed that by next spring by cutting the insulation out from under them and putting a covering over top.

No TV, and radio was pretty much what you have now. I’m pretty sure we used to listen to mostly American stations, and then at night. There wasn’t much in the way of radio during the day, that’s for sure. Unless you could understand French, and at that time, I guess there was only a half dozen people on the station who could.

There must be something else, but I can’t think of anything at the moment. Oh yes, the cruiser, "Quebec" I think it was. Now this is going back a long way. It was making a courtesy trip up and down the St. Lawrence and they stopped in here and we had them in the mess for a while. This admiral, gosh, he wasn’t an admiral then – he was a captain, I was going to say Landymore but I don’t think it was him. Anyway, he played the piano for us and played jazz. He had all his officers out here. We had a wing ding. Anyhow, the next night they had an open house on the ship and we all took our wives and went aboard the ship. That was quite an experience. That was some summer.

This detail was obtained from Section Two of the 1953-1978 Moisie Anniversary - 25 Years of Service Book. A copy of the 1953-1978 Moisie book was loaned to us by Deanna Gilbert and the material has been typed for use on the Pinetree Line web site in December 1998.