Looking Ahead to Television

He was thinking far ahead, twenty-five years or more, to the time when television would become a reality. One of the first television sets to arrive on Prince Edward Island was won in a Canada-wide contest for salesmanship in 1953 by Art Arsenault and my father eagerly knocked on his door and asked to see it. The television screen was in a large polished mahogany cabinet and there was a record-player and radio as well, a good thing as these were the only usable items. There was nothing on the screen except the usual “snow”. Art was a musician and hoped one day to see some famous orchestras and artists. He had played the piano on CFCY in the early thirties when times were hard and it was sometimes so cold in the studio that Art would put on a tight- fitting pair of gloves when he played. I remember Art and his wife Claire playing duets and also when he played for Ken Cameron of Amherst who sang “Those Little White Lies”. It was a song everyone requested. Art had studied under the legendary Professor S.N. Earle and with Father Theodore Gallant, a gifted organist. He tried his best to get something—anything—on that television screen. Dad would come every Sunday and they would try to find some faint image. For a long time there was nothing. Then suddenly one Sunday a hazy black and white picture leaped into life. It was a little man swinging back and forth on a trapeze. The three of them, Claire, Art and Dad huddled in excit- ment close to the screen as that little fellow swung back and forth. After that Dad ordered a television set from Chicago, although he would only get intermittent reception from distant stations at that time. Reception was best in the summer and my brother Bill remembers the first singer he saw and heard was Kate Smith, a picture received from Kansas City.

When Dad saw a demonstration of television at the World’s Fair back in 1939 he realized that he would somehow have to raise a considerable amount of money if he wanted to build a television station in Prince Edward Island. All of the odds were against it. The population wasn’t large enough to make it a viable enterprise. He sought the advice of friends in the industry and they told him “to invest the money and forget about television”. As usual, this admonition only made him more determined.

I remember that he had an old atlas of Prince Edward Island that he had carefully marked to show the highest spots from which he would be able to send strong signals throughout the Island and into the neigh- bouring counties of Nova Scotia. One day we drove out to see the land

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