I’m starting to think that my Dad has the world’s largest audio archive. At least of sounds emitted by his family. Latest to turn up in his collection: “lost” episodes of the 1994 Island Morning summer series I produced for CBC Radio here in Charlottetown.
Back in those days, Island Morning was hosted by Wayne Collins (now MLA for District 15, Winsloe-West Royalty). Working with Wayne on the other side of the desk was all a cub reporter could ask for: he was curious, personable, and able to lift my words off the page and give them a life of their own.
As I mentioned earlier in the week, I owe most of the credit for my brief career as a broadcaster to Ann Thurlow. Ann recruited me, edited me, and goaded me along.
Only eleven years has passed since the summer of 1994, and yet it’s amazing to me how the vocabulary we used to talk about technology. Here’s my favourite quote:
When you hear people talking about actually using the information highway today, what they’re usually talking about is using something call the Internet. The Internet is an experimental information highway that you use with a computer.
I wasn’t trying to simplify things for the “common person” — that’s the way we used to talk back then.
Dad unearthed three episodes of A Users Guide to the Future, and you’ll find them as audio attachments to the next three posts here.
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I also typed all the intros and backgrounds for those pieces on a typewriter….with carbon copies for Wayne.
About that time, we got a cellphone for the radio newsroom. It weighed about 4 pounds. I remember taking it to the Charlottetown Conference (the big one — about the future of the country) and being embarassed because the damned thing rang and I had no idea how to answer it. Chantel Hebert taught me how to use it.
God bless Ann! She interviewed me at the height of my worst stress period in the early days of ISN. There was something very different about how she approached an interview; she delivered the present me to the real me and spoke only to the best of both of them.
In the end she made me sound human at a time that was anything but human for me. A soothing instrumental “Ann-ie Get Me Down” came off my guitar a few years later and I’ll record it soon — it was inspired by that interview. Hugs to Ann-ie.