Yellowknife (Aug 25/06) - Almost a decade ago, David Plumridge was rooting through a second-hand shop in Bristol, England when he came across a series of worn reel-to-reel tapes.

He bought the recordings for 30 pounds - about $60 Canadian - and filed them in a closet in the home he shares with his son, about 185 kilometres west of London.

For the next several years, the tapes gathered dust while Plumridge scoured the Internet for more information about their origins.

It wasn't until this summer that the retiree discovered the tapes were among the earliest recordings in the history of Northern public radio - some dating back to 1959 - and valuable pieces of Yellowknife memorabilia.

"I was interested in the North," Plumridge said last week from his home. "I've never been there but the area was captivating."

The recordings feature interviews with everyone from cowboys to Arctic adventurers to federal bureaucrats. Likely produced by volunteers or the earliest CBC journalists in the North, they harken back to the frontier days of Yellowknife, which was then a rough-and-tumble mining town.

Harold Glick moved to Yellowknife in 1946, just months after ending a tour with the Canadian Armed Forces. At the time, about 3,500 people - mostly prospectors and miners - called the town home.

Glick, 80 and now retired in Westbank B.C., used to own a radio repair, electronics and furniture shop on 50th Street. He remembers the hard-scrabble times, when miners could drink 24-hours straight in bars with sawdust floors.

"In Yellowknife, you could buy five or 10 beers at a time. In Edmonton, you could get one. It was wild," he said.

Amid the hard-edged mining culture of the early 1950s, a group of volunteers, with the help of military communications experts, started Yellowknife's first community radio station, CFYK. Radio had been brought to Yellowknife about 10 years earlier when army specialists from the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals hauled a transmitter, and an outhouse, about 100 km from the Rae-Edzo area. That was part of a federal government push to open up the resource-rich North to prospectors, according to former signaler Michael Martin, who has compiled a history of the corps.

With little more than an apple crate, a record player and a few microphones, amateur DJs broadcast from the basement of an office building near the corner of 50th Street and 50th Avenue.

"Eventually we got a desk," Glick said.

Volunteers like Glick and his wife Zelda culled news snippets and turned military-issue programs and the latest big-band records. Their signal was relayed to a transmitter outside Yellowknife and beamed to radios in Old Town and the recently built New Town.

"It was lots of fun. And it was the only thing around," recalled Glick.

In 1959, CFYK was turned over to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which was expanding its presence in the North, according to Martin.

For almost a decade, the genesis of tapes, some of which had dates between 1959 and 1960, remained a mystery for the Englishman Plumridge.

There were 21 in all, running from 15 to 35 minutes. Despite their age, most were in excellent shape - save for one entitled "The Mackenzie District" that crumbled in Plumridge's hands. He bought several reel-to-reel recorders - the tapes had different playback speeds - and listened to recordings he described as "remarkable."

There was an interview with adventurers who canoed from Fort Smith to the Atlantic Ocean. Discussions with "Indian" chiefs and recordings of traditional aboriginal chants. A profile on the first cowboy and cowgirl in Fort Smith. And talk of bison hunts and airplane landings.

"They are very interesting. It seemed like a whole other world," said Plumridge, who has never been to the Canadian North.

The letters "CBC" are printed on the worn cardboard boxes housing some of the tapes. But others are undated, making it difficult to figure out if they came from the national broadcaster or the community-radio era of the early 1950s.

How the tapes ended up an ocean away is another puzzle that may never be solved.

"The only thing I can think of, is that the DJs from Yellowknife came to England and sold them or gave them away," said Plumridge, who is in the process of digitizing the recordings. (He appeared on the CBC last week and played some of first computerized cuts.) "But I don't know if we'll ever know for sure."

Meanwhile, Glick, who spent 40 years in Yellowknife before leaving for southern B.C. in 1986, also wouldn't mind knowing how the tapes reached England.

"Isn't that amazing. What are the chances they would end up over there?"