Wednesday 12 August 2015

The 1957 ARRL Convention - Toronto

A register of participants in Canadian ARRL Conventions (and some other meetings) was given to me last year. As part of my historical research into YRARC I've searched the pages for callsigns that I recognize. Some of them, like P.D. (Phil) Balmer VE3BAL, have a familiar callsign but are now in someone else's possession, which is no surprise some 58 years later. Also Al, VE3UT is not the VE3UT we all know.

Cross referencing is made all the more difficult by the hand-written entries, often with signatures rather than printed names, despite having "Please Print" at the top of the page . Here's page 1. You can click through if you want to examine it in more detail.


The pages are so long they don't fit on my scanner. The first column denotes ARRL membership. Unfortunately there is no date other than 1957 in the register and Google has provided no joy in finding out anything further about the event.

The second last line of this page shows the signature of Alex Reid, VE3BE, who was the Canadian Director of the ARRL at the time.

The club connection I found (on a subsequent page of the register) was that of Ron Cronk, VE3EBD. He hosted the first meeting of the York North Amateur Radio Club of 1963 but did not attend any other meetings and did not identify himself as a member of the club in the meeting register.

There are probably some other people of note at this meeting and I've found some familiar names in the subsequent meetings but I will save that for a later date.

2 comments:

  1. After starting a little database to correlate some of these lists another call was found. Jim Spence, VE3BBX, attended a club meeting on February 26, 1964 and was also at the 1957 convention. That was the only club meeting in that his name appears in that book which runs from 1963 to 1969, although the last meeting on record was January 12th, 1966.

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