Posted on 22 December 2018

This originally appeared as a series of Tweets on Oct. 27, 2018. 

I’ve modified it some to work as a blog post. 

I also ran it as a radio piece which you can listen to below.

This past weekend, I attended a memorial service for Drew Schemenauer where I said a few words, and I’d like to share them here.

For over thirty years, Drew Schemenauer was the transmitter tech for CBC Radio in Prince George and the central interior– a huge area covering hundreds of kilometers.

I only met him a handful of times– he had his own, separate office in town and spent much of his time on the road, climbing up mountains and 200 ft towers to do repairs

I only met him a handful of times– he had his own, separate office in town and spent much of his time on the road, climbing up mountains and 200 ft towers to do repairs.

When a radio station people spend their days with goes off the air, you get a lot of phone calls. Which is why Drew’s work was important.

As much as my job is done digitally– I record interviews on an iPhone, write and read scripts from a computer– most people’s interaction with radio is still very much rooted in the analogue world.

And in order for that to work, you need people like Drew scrambling up mountains and towers in the snow and cold to figure out why the signal in Horsefly or Mackenzie has gone out.

The irony of this is that in order to keep us connected, Drew had to spend most of his time working alone. And his is one of those jobs where if you do it well, people don’t even know you’re there.

And so people like me get emails and letters of thanks for broadcasting during floods and fires but the reality is if a signal goes down, there’s nothing I can do. We need people like Drew.

And so people like me get emails and letters of thanks for broadcasting during floods and fires but the reality is if a signal goes down, there’s nothing I can do. We need people like Drew.

The first time I met Drew was actually when I ran @CFURadio at the University of Northern B.C. We needed to put a new tower up, and I got in touch with him.

He spent a weekend afternoon doing this even though we didn’t have the money to pay him at the time. And later when I had saved it up, he never came to get his cheque. Eventually I had to look up his home address and drive it out there.

Today his son told me that there’s a pile of uncashed cheques in his dad’s house from doing stuff like this, and ours was probably in there.

Anyways, the point is this: that university station is a community, it’s been a social gathering and launching point and line of help to so many people. And Drew helped it survive even though most people involved with the station have probably never heard of him– nor he of them.

And all across this piece of land the size of some European countries, Drew was out there connecting Prince George to Quesnel to Chetwynd through the magic of this thing called radio. He was an essential part of our community.

They played this song at the memorial. Drew preferred the old stuff. So I’ll be putting it on the playlist for Monday’s episode of @daybreaknorth. And then listening to it over the FM dial. Thanks for everything, Drew.

Filed under: CBC