Louis' Place: The Story of Louis Potvin, From Bonnyville to Lillooet Lake via Tokyo and Havana as told to Ron Rose »

You've heard about self-made men but you never met one like Louis Potvin.

A French-Canadian from an Alberta homestead, he learned radio technology to get into the RCAF during the Second World War, and his nimble fingers danced from the dit-dah of the Morse Code into the developing world of radio communications.

A salesman's salesman, he went to Japan after the war, and found markets in Latin America and Cuba for Canadian electronics, then gave it all up to transform a rugged wilderness acreage into a recreational community.

He still works the world by ham radio, call sign VE7CHN, from his idyll on Lillooet Lake, a little-known getaway in a bowl of snow-capped mountains near Pemberton, British Columbia.

Co-author Ron Rose began an unlikely association with Louis Potvin 30 years ago and this book has been incubating since then. A reporter and editor with the Vancouver Sun in its heyday of chronicling the vagaries of B.C., he covered the Legislature from the time of W.A.C. Bennett through Dave Barrett, Bill Bennett, and Bill Vander Zalm.

He created The Sun's Indian beat - making it the first paper in Western Canada to take a serious look at aboriginal hopes and problems.

The life and times of Lillooet Lake resident Louis Potvin, a quintessential Canadian and British Columbian folk hero.