In our history feature this week, we continue to follow J. Conrad Lavigne as he builds his French-language radio station in Timmins.
Local historian Karen Bachmann tells us he found a suitable site to build a transmission town. It was about five kilometres out of town and needed to be cleared.
“They had a small army of people doing it,” she says, “including school age boys who went along beside the tractors and they started to clear the land and they did all of those things.”
That’s when Lavigne hit a snag. He needed steel to build the tower, but it was still being rationed – a holdover from the Second World War.
“Thanks to the intervention of C.D. Howe, the federal minister of commerce, Lavigne was able to purchase enough steel to construct a 300-foot transmission tower, which was pretty awesome.”
Next week: the first studio and the people Lavigne hired to staff it.
