Marville France

I arrived in Marville on Wednesday November 2, 1955 at 14 years of age.

I volunteered to work at the radio station as a DJ on Friday nights between 1957 and 1959. I started my volunteer work shortly after the radio station first became operational. I seem to recall that the radio station functioned out of a barrack block, that was for the most part, unoccupied during my time at Marville. It was located on the first street on the left after the guardhouse, one or two buildings down from the high school barracks and on the same side of the street.

The station ran from 6:00 PM to midnite in the early days. Programs made the rounds from the other wings that had radio stations and directly from the CBC. The odd time we were able to get programs from AFN. The radio station was run by about 10 people- mostly military with the exception of Judy Donovan who I'm sure was drawing some sort pay as manager, programmer and "girl Friday". Judy had finished high school and lived with her parents in PMQ's. It was a part time job for her but the other people were volunteers.

As a teenager, I DJd the latest Rock & Roll from 8:00 until 9:00 on Friday nights. I did the announcing and Pete Hill spun the records. We did the entire Friday evening and at 10:00 PM one of us would run over to the airman's mess hall to pick up a late lunch that was prepared for people who worked late on the base. As growing teenagers we always looked forward to the food.

We also used to receive radio programs on huge vinyl records that required a special turntable to play them. Reel to reel tapes were also used. Programs such as Wayne & Shuster and others would arrive on a semi-regular basis. The station was funded by the CAdO who at the time was Wing Commander Skeene.

F/O Bob Benedetti was a volunteer and after his air force career ended up in radio in Montreal. W/C Skeene's son Chris also started working at the station and he went on to radio and TV as a career with CBC. As I recall, Skeene had to fight "Blackie Williams" for everything cent that went into the station.

In the beginning, we had a lot of transformer break downs and we were off the air more often than not. But that was not the biggest technical problem. Our frequency was 1640 and most radios at time only went as high as 1600 or so. People had to bring their radios in to the station to have their bands adjusted which was done by adjusting two screws on the tuner. Needless to say I saw the insides of several Grundigs, Telefunkens and Phillips radios.

Reception on the station was good but only fair at the PMQ's. Radio Luxembourg and AFN were a lot clearer but these were commercial stations with a tremendous output.

I eventually departed Marville for Canada on Friday June 13, 1959 - at age 18.

Dick Dinelle