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14 The Radio Inspectors

Just for the archives: is there a person alive who has actually seen a radio inspector? This isn’t a question for anyone born after World War II. Before the war, radios were considered luxuries to be taxed. I believe it was $2 a year, and it was hated as much as today’s GST.

Everyone but the Mennonites had a radio, so you had to cough up for at least one licence. It was the fees for the second and third radios that people tried to avoid.

Our one declared radio stood like a little veneer cathedral in the living room. The unlicensed ones were in my parents’ bedroom, the bathroom, and Pop’s dilapidated greenhouse. I remember Pop telling Mom with alarm in his voice, “Alec Rouse just called to say the radio licence inspector has been spotted on Lincoln Avenue.” One block away!

Alec Rouse had a radio repair business in Rouse’s Music Store, which he shared with his brother, Gordon, who repaired washing machines and later became mayor of Galt. On Saturday night when the Salvation Army Band played right outside their front door, customers in the store had to shout.

Alec lived just three doors north of us on Lowrey Avenue and took upon himself the responsibility of warning the whole block of the radio inspector’s approach. My dad reacted to the alert the way people in Germany were reacting to the Gestapo. “Hide the bedroom radio in the hall closet!” he would holler to Mom. “And stick the bathroom radio under the straw in the fruit cellar!” Then he would run out and hide the greenhouse radio under some fish flats in a coldframe.

The alert touched off quite a flurry of housecleaning on the block. Everybody seemed to have a carton of trash for the garage. The telephone operators, who listened in all the time and knew everything, passed the alert to the whole town. In some houses disconnected aerial and ground wires dangled in every room. After a couple of days, Alec Rouse, mysteriously informed, would sound the all-clear and the radios would come out of hiding.

Oddly enough, no one ever saw a radio licence inspector. A boy might say that his aunt had talked to one on Pollock Avenue and that he was knocking on doors, but by the time we ran over there the street was empty. I asked my dad how a person could recognize a radio inspector, and he said they looked like bailiffs and walked through the Legion Hall without taking their hats off.