The Radio Tower Down the Street
A story of Francophone survival in mid-century Edmonton
I have been interested in the history of the neighbourhood I live in for a long while. This subdivision, called “Meyonohk” (which means “an ideal spot” in Cree), is part of the much larger subdivision within Edmonton called Mill Woods. The history of Mill Woods is fascinating and certainly merits a post all to itself, particularly given that it represents one of the most significant urban planning experiments in Edmonton’s history. Meyonohk forms a part of that experiment.
What I’ve been particularly interested in, though, is the time before the development. What was here before, I wonder, as I look out from my door, on to the street, at the cul-de-sac across from me, at the homes of my neighbours? (I discussed this persistent question in an article I published elsewhere.)
What was here before they flattened it all, before they installed the sewer lines and the transmission lines and the roads and alleyways?
155,000 feet of copper wire
Mill Wood’s 1971 Development Concept Plan contains an interesting line describing:
a private radio transmitting station situated on eighty acres of land located at 86 Street and 25 Avenue in the central portion of the planning area. The actual development consists of three steel towers, each two hundred and thirty-three feet in height and a small equipment building. Fifty-five acres of the site is traversed by a net of underground wiring.
This jumped out at me, given that I live maybe 15 minutes from the site described. Currently, there is an elementary school located there. My children and I use its playground. We use the hill nearby for tobogganing in the winter. But as far as I can tell, there isn’t any radio transmitting station.
I took this question to the fine folks at the Historic Edmonton and Northern Alberta Facebook group to see if anyone had any ideas. They got to work immediately. Perhaps it was an army transmission tower. Someone suggested reaching out to the Sunwapta Broadcasting History / CFRN Facebook Group. They weren’t sure either.
Finally, though, a solution — and a clear reference to that net of underground wiring — appeared in the form of this newspaper clipping from the Edmonton Journal, published November 18, 1949:
Le projet de Radio-Edmonton
Just over 75 years ago, a group of French-speaking residents of this region worked together to construct three steel radio transmission towers in a farmer’s field southeast of Edmonton and establish a radio station for the Francophone community. The process for getting permission and approvals to do so took several years. The project cost $75,000 dollars, which equals nearly a million dollars in today’s values. They had to fundraise all of it. The location — down the street from my house — had been selected by a Montreal engineer, Frederick C. Howes of McGill University, and built by a Toronto firm with the help of several enthusiastic volunteers from the nearby French community of Beaumont. When they were finished, the three towers stretched over 200 feet into the air.
As the article above describes, the towers were intended to be used for transmitting a radio station called CHFA. The construction of these towers was the culmination of extensive lobbying by the French community in Alberta to get its own radio station.
In my review of newspapers, I couldn’t at first understand why this was so difficult. Pretty quickly, though, I realized that I was actually getting a window into the strong anti-French sentiment in mid-century Alberta. As one article noted, the government itself had been pushing back against the French community’s self-advocacy.
In 1945, the Association Canadienne-Française de l’Alberta (A.C.F.A) attempted to get a bill passed to make itself incorporated so that it would be possible for it to own property. (This may have been to enable it to purchase land for the transmission towers as this society ultimately did own the land and build the towers.) The proposal of this bill, though, which occurred just before the end of World War II in Europe, provoked massive pushback from the English-speaking public, so much so that the A.C.F.A. requested that the bill be withdrawn.
In their letter written in response to the vitriol of the public against them, they noted:
The attitude of the press and the inflammatory tenor of some of the editorials indicates that there is a danger of this bill becoming a political football on the eve of an election. The French-Canadian Association of Alberta is and always has been non-political.
The article goes on to comment that “since the bill has been introduced, there have been strong protests from different parts of the province. Several church and other organizations sent protests to members of the legislative assembly.”
A June 30, 1948 issue of La Survivance (the paper for the A.C.F.A.) describes further the religious character of this struggle (pardon my rough translation):
For the last year, we had thought that the Baptists were furiously opposed to the use of French in Alberta. Their numerous declarations, their petitions, their wishes, their steps to effectively entangle the establishment of a French radio station in Edmonton, seem provide demonstrative evidence.
The editorial goes on to say that the Baptists had recently changed their tune and become supportive of the transmission towers; the author is suspicious, though, and believes that this pivot is actually part of their “grand projet” to “faire de nous de bons, d’ardents, de fanatiques Baptistes” (i.e., to make us good, passionate, fanatical Baptists).
This suspicion was probably well founded — after all, then-Alberta Premier, Ernest Manning, was famously using the radio for exactly such evangelistic purposes right at this time in Alberta history. Nevertheless, I don’t know whether the Baptists were ever given air time on CHFA or whether their change in support played any part in facilitating the French-speaking community’s ability to get the license, which they finally did in May 1948.
Aftermath
I was interested to know how long those towers were left standing or in use. Were they still there when my house was built in 1976? Could my neighbour, who moved here the same year the houses on our street went up half a century ago, see the lofty metal structures in the distance?
There are aerial photos from 1965 where you can see them. They appear as tiny white dots in a field of grey, but their shadows stretch outwards, betraying their vast height. Based on the urban planning report cited above, the towers were still standing in 1971.
The land remained in the hands of the A.C.F.A. until 1977, a year after my house was built and by which time the Mill Woods experiment was already well underway. Whether the towers were still standing at that point isn’t something I could track down. CHFA was sold to Radio-Canada in 1973, which took over its operations.
As for the A.C.F.A., they are still going strong nearly 100 years after they were first established in the province.
Je me souviendrai
Even though I’ve always known about the tension between English and French communities in Alberta, I was shocked to read about just how much resistance French-speaking people have faced. In my home growing up, French language and French culture was always something we valued. My siblings and I were enrolled in French immersion from Kindergarten to Grade 9. I loved the fact that we had so many towns and cities scattered through the province with strong French roots: St. Albert, Beaumont, Legal, Morinville, St. Paul, etc. I’ve been grateful for the many francophone friends I’ve had over the years.
Of course, this all just reminds me of the blinders that I wear. It also reminds me just how much work people who are part of marginalized communities have to do to make space. I’m grateful to them for making this place better.1
Literally as I was finishing this piece, I came across a book that is actually all about the history of CHFA: Écoutez, vous verrez : en souvenir du 50e anniversaire de CHFA Radio-Canada by France Levasseur-Ouimet (published by Éditions Félix in 1999). It has several beautiful photos in it and hundreds of pages of history for anyone who might be interested in learning more about this compelling achievement in the history of this province.