Moisie, QC

When I completed my FCO training at Clinton (Course 154 – November 1953), most of the males on my course were told we were posted to Moisie. Nobody at Clinton was quite sure where the place was. We were told it was "an isolated base, about 200 miles north of Seven Islands, Quebec". The place was not on any of the maps we could find. We were also told it was a six-month posting and that we would receive isolation pay and isolation leave – an extra two weeks per year. Well, as it turned out, the isolation pay was cut off after about eight months – and I spent nineteen months at the place!

We were issued Arctic clothing (no kidding) and travel warrants – rail to Quebec City, then CP Air to Seven Islands. (Shortly after that, Quebecair took over the route from CPA) We all wondered how we were to make the remaining "two hundred miles" to Moisie. We were told we would be looked after when we arrived at Seven Islands. I took some leave and hitch-hiked home to Victoria, BC before traveling to Moisie. I would arrive there between Christmas and New Year of 1953.

I was the only Air Force type on my flight, which landed at the airport outside of Seven Islands – and this kid from Victoria just about turned around to catch the next flight out! I had never seen so much snow. When I explored outside the little terminal building, I found that the snow was so deep, walking the sidewalk was like being in a corridor. The snow had been shoveled vertically, forming "walls" on each side. I didn’t see any sign of Air Force outside, so I went in and asked a guy at a DOT desk if he knew how I could reach the base. He said I could phone them and pointed to a phone on a wall. I asked the operator to put me through to RCAF Station Moisie, she said "Oh, the radar." And I heard the phone ring – somewhere. A voice came on, saying, "Moisie." I asked if it was the station and the voice confirmed it was. I told him where I was and he said there was a vehicle in Seven Islands and they "sometimes – more often than not" stopped at the airport to check for arriving personnel. I asked him what I was to do if they didn’t stop and he said relax, if they showed up without me he would send them back. Remember, I was envisioning a 200 mile trip. I asked the clown, just what kind of a *%^&$#^@@&* Air Force Station was this anyway? He told me to calm down and call back in an hour if no vehicle showed. After an hour of waiting I was angrier than ever. The little terminal didn’t even have a snack bar. I called again and this time the same voice said, "Moisie, Madill here". I asked him if anybody at that place did anything right. He said, "Well, AC2 Turner, I’m the CO here. So if things aren’t being done right, I guess I’m to blame!" My manners immediately showed remarkable improvement.

When I got to the base (relieved to find it only about a 45-minute drive), I headed for the wets to find some of the guys that had got there ahead of me. A little after my arrival, F/L Bert Madill, the C.O., came into the club and welcomed me aboard.

I seem to remember that I was the eleventh FCO at Moisie. Harold Hopkins, Ralph Morell, Bill Dragamir, Jack Coles, Jack Schroeder and Bill Cartwright were some that were already there. Arriving from Clinton at about the same time as I, were Bill Church, Bill Lewis, Norm Raven, Moe Grezell and Al Burns.

The Senior Controller was F/O Ed Cott, who called himself an "East London Jew." I think there was only one other Controller, F/O George Young. The headquarters building was an old H-hut from the construction of the base. There was no switchboard yet on the base. As I recall, there was just one line in from the outside world and the phone was in the HQ building – maybe even in the COs office. There were some internal lines around the station. Fern Giroux tells me he was the first PBX operator, because he spoke French. Fern was my first roommate – an "honor" later bestowed on Jack Ward.

The GCI was not yet operational. (Here I must express polite exception to that May, 1953 operational date, shown on the Moisie cover page, as about one year early.) We "fired up" two or three times that winter of 1954 – for tests and exercises – but didn’t even have crews set up till late April. I don’t know if you could call it "fully operational," but at first we operated for eight-hour day shifts only. There was, to say the least, a shortage of experienced FCOs – two of the first Crew Chiefs at Moisie were Group Ones, fresh from Clinton! Bill Lewis and Norm Raven were given those dubious tasks. (I believe that was because they had started to shave!) Any LAC with his Group 3 drew Orderly Corporal duty, because otherwise, I guess the few Corporals we had would have drawn it about three times a month. And – of course – the FtrCops were the only ones to get Fire Picket!

Before we went Operational, some of us FtrCops were given various jobs. I was the "Postmaster" for a month – making runs into Sept Isles with ME drivers, sorting the mail and then handing-out personal mail to the guys. Often the driver and I would do a "refueling stop" before returning to the base. After that I worked at the Rec. Centre in the evenings. "Hoppy" Hopkins worked at the officers’ bar for a while. There was still equipment arriving on ships and barges at Sept Isles and we sometimes had to work at unloading supplies and equipment.

The Rec. Centre was an old Quonset building, with lines painted on the concrete floor and nets for badminton, volleyball and basketball. I remember we had a volleyball league that was especially competitive. (I think it was Ralph "Cuffer" Morell that tried to introduce body checking.) We had an FCO who had been the BC junior badminton champion – I think I beat him twice in about 100 games. I can’t remember his name.

Under all that snow, the entire station, including the roads, was loose sand. One of the supply shipments included a number of lawnmowers – one for each PMQ! When summer came, some wag made up a bunch of "keep off the grass" signs and posted them around. Later, using topsoil from God knows where, they actually got grass to grow by the PMQs. The road into Seven Islands was not paved. In the spring it would be impassable for weeks at a time. I have heard that the road was shortened later. The only other "highway," also unpaved, went to Clarke City – a few miles down the North Shore – where it ended.

When we went fully operational, with three shifts, I was on Lewis’ crew, with Jack Schroeder, Bill Church, Ralph Morell and, I think, Al Burns. When Jack Ward arrived in the summer of 1954, he took over as Crew Chief. (We were big time now, we had a Group. 3 LAC!) At about that same time, Ron "RJ" Long and Gus Gleason arrived from St. Margarets. I personally learned more about the trade from shooting the breeze with Jack, Gus and RJ than any course at Clinton could ever have taught me. (Three years later, I beat my head against a brick wall of complacency, trying to tell my superiors at Clinton exactly that!) Jack was my roommate. We celebrated his hooks in the spring of 1955.

There were no Controllers on afternoon and graveyard shifts – they were on call. We "forward told" all tracks to the GCI at St. Margarets for identification. I recall there was quite a lot of traffic, mainly on ENE and WSW headings – transatlantic flights. We all had a ball, learning how to write backwards for the vertical plotting board. I seem to recall that our very first call-sign, before "Crowbar" was "Greenhorn." Perhaps someone can verify that? It would have been fitting!

The food in the Mess was the worst I ever experienced. There was an old civilian "cook" who thought everything had to be floating in grease. We called him "Mr. Mazolla." The only milk we had was powdered – sometimes not very carefully mixed by some disgruntled GD type! It was better, but still not great, when they made it into chocolate milk. Apparently there wasn’t a dairy in the area that Air Force health inspectors would approve. Now and then we ran out of eggs and had to have powdered eggs, too. Speaking of eggs, one night at work we opened the lunch boxes from the mess, to find the guy had fried eggs and put them – yokes intact – between slices of bread. You can imagine what we saw when we unwrapped those masterpieces! The "cook" later said, "Don’t blame me. Look, it says right ‘ere – egg sandwiches!" The NCO i/c the Mess Hall was transferred out and later convicted of pilfering and selling our food – or so we were told.

When all the snow finally melted – in June 1954 – we built a ball field. The infield was clay (I think trucked in from Clarke City?) but the outfield was the usual deep sand. Left field was a real adventure – if you went too deep for a long fly, you were in danger of running off a ten-foot cliff, into some kind of brambles.

I remember the village of Moisie as a string of unpainted wooden homes – no more than thirty in all – with a dirt roadway meandering through. Many of the buildings were owned by one man, whose name I can’t recall, but I believe he was the Mayor. There was one small store, which was the only place we could get ice cream cones. I’m told it is one of the oldest settlements in Canada – going back some 400 years. There was a pasture with a few scrawny cattle. It was weird for me to meet a French-Canadian civilian worker on the base, named Armand Turner. He knew only a few words of English and I just about zero French. There was a man in the village we called "Jean-Paul the Hunchback." The village had a "Constable" who was a very, very large woman.

An ex-wrestler from Montreal opened a so-called "restaurant" in the village. You could get bootleg liquor there. After he beat-up an Airman, a bunch of the guys, mostly FCOs, went to the village and totally trashed the place. The next day, the SPs were looking for yours truly, but I was on the evening shift and arrived after the fact. (The proprietor of the establishment – and certain SPs -- did not like me.) Twenty or so guys showed up the next day to say they were "present" when the trashing took place. Madill had us lined up in the HQ building. He informed us that, starting that day, the place was out-of-bounds. Also, the building belonged to the Mayor and there was extensive damage to be repaid – we were each docked two dollars and change from our next pay. Before he dismissed us, the CO said, "Nice job fellas – the place deserved it."

Seven Islands (I seem to remember we rarely called it Sept Isles) had a population of about 2,500 when I first arrived. They didn’t start paving the roads till the summer of 1955. There were three or four hotels, but we mostly frequented the Sept Isles and the Santerre. There was a huge bouncer named Henri at the Sept Isles, who liked to throw Air Force types down the stairs when they acted up. I worked very hard at making friends with Henri.

One entrepreneur built a lean-to out of packing crates at the side of a restaurant and made all kinds of money selling deli items. At the restaurant, we would order, "Une ‘ambairgair, avec on-yon et mootard, silvooplay." After one try, I never again asked for relish when I almost got a hamburger with strawberry jam. (I said "comfiture" for relish.) When I left in September of 1955 the population was already more than 5,000 – and growing. It was the terminus for the Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway – the QNS&L – built by the Iron Ore Company to haul ore from new mines in Labrador.

Our crew was working the night the height-finder antenna shredded the radome. I think a Radar Tech was in some trouble over that. We called down to the Officers’ Mess for the crew of the Sikorsky helicopter, to tell them it had been blown over, snapping a blade and the rear rotor.

Some other crazy happenings I remember were:

One night some of us put a scrawny, half grown cow in the Orderly Corporal’s room in the barracks. He woke up to a hell of a mess – seems the cow had very nervous bowels!

Another night, we carried one of the two civilian cars on the base, a little Austin, up to the second story of one of the search towers. It belonged to a FS Stoneman, who wasn’t fond of FtrCops. This act didn’t endear him to us. (There is a picture on the web site, which purports to be from 1954 – there are far too many civilian cars for that year. Vehicles had to be barged in – there were no roads. A close look will reveal the tail fins of 1957 or 1958 cars!)

Don English, on Orderly Corporal, drank with us in barracks all night. At sunrise, he went to raise the flag only to find we had earlier hung a Coca Cola sign on the pole. (Don’t ask me where we found it!) As he was trying to figure out what to do, the CO drove up. Don’s luck the Old Man would be up early that day. The CO said, "English – at least put the damn sign right-side-up – and be in my office at eight o’clock!"

We had a mascot name Tattoo – a Malamute that was one-quarter wolf. The CO had bought him from a native, but he grew too large, so he was "donated" to the Airmen’s Club. The OR staff used to post announcements about him in DROs – "AC2 Tattoo promoted to ACI"… "AC1 Tattoo issued seven days leave"… "LAC Tattoo upgraded to Sled Dog, Group 2"…etc.

I believe it was Jack Schroeder that tracked Anticosti Island at "180 Knots, heading 280…" It was after an hour too long at the scope on a graveyard shift. St Margarets Ident had a hell of a time with that one. Jack Ward told them it was "atmospheric interference."

Another memorable moment was the grand opening of the QNS&L Railway. They threw a party in a huge warehouse, with entertainers from Montreal, free booze and food for all. Station personnel were invited. What a party!

Then there was Armistice Day, 1954. Fifty or so of us were "nailed" to march in the Seven Islands parade. After a very swift ceremony, we were all invited into the Legion for free drinks. Without getting into details – the sight, many, many hours later, of fifty very inebriated Airmen – falling out of the bus – was something to see. (Or so the SPs told us!)

In the summer of 1955, five postings came in, for Metz. There were eight or nine of us who had been there for more than eighteen months and therefore eligible to leave. The CO was to decide which five would go overseas – a duty he handed over to Ed Cott. We drew straws. To this day I still haven’t set foot on European soil!

We were, however, given our preferred postings (radar bases only -- excluding Metz). I got Comox and left Moisie early in September, 1955.

That’s how I remember Moisie.