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RADIO BROADCAST
Bimini is now the famous "Booze Port." I well remember landing in the primitive days of 191 7. Few yachts stopped at the Biminis, and it was a great day when a stranger came. The whole village (about twenty people) squatted under the "Welcome Tree" and the news of the world outside was revealed to the natives. Where this kindly "Welcome Tree" was, now is a huge club-house dedicated to rum in its various forms.
No more delightful experience could be found than introducing the radio telephone to these simple people. One evening we had a crowd listening to W J Z, the aerial being run from a flagstaff put up at almost a minute's notice. When we told them that W J Z meant Newark, N. J., they accepted it with entire trustfulness, if we had said that the people they heard talking and singing were in the moon, 1 have no doubt that that, too, would have been accepted.
One thinks of the tropical islands of the world as delightful places where the weather is always fine, food easy to come by, as it grows without attention, and occupied by a people of contented minds enjoying an easy life.
The real thing is quite different. These islands of the Atlantic, as well as the Pacific, are often stormbound for weeks and travelling in small boats, the only means available, is uncomfortable and dangerous. The number
LISTENING TO AMERICAN MUSIC On board the Sea Scamp in Harbour Island, the Bahamas
THE RADIO STATION AT NASSAU Not equipped for radio telephone broadcasting which is practically unknown in the Bahamas
of lives lost among these island people is by no means small. Money, clothes, and food are for the most part scarce; and, almost worse than all, the pleasures of life, the occupations after the day's work is finished, are few and far between. To such people a simple and cheap radio telephone will revolutionize their life. From Nassau, where they have a good radio plant, they could broadcast to a thousand islands, giving not only amusement, but information of the utmost value, including, most important of all, storm signals which might easily save hundreds of lives.
To such a region as this — lonely, starved for a touch of the pulsing life of the great world — radio will come as more than a convenience or another form of pleasure. To the people here it will be literally a godsend.