Autobiography - just a start
A Tale of Two Lamps - a non-fiction autobiographical short story
My passion for radio began on Friday afternoon, February 9, 1962, as Dave McCormick was counting down the C-FUNtastic 50 (seen here). I was 9 years old and at home sick from school for the day, but what I heard appealed to me immensely.
Not that radio had escaped my attention previously. I remember listening to the Suez Canal crisis unfolding in 1956 and hearing a CJOR news bulletin in 1958 reporting the collapse of the still-under-construction Second Narrows Bridge.
The highlight for my father was the birth of CHQM in 1959. Simulcast CHQM-FM followed a year later, and my father bought an Eico FM tuner kit in the U.S. not long after to hear the greater fidelity and less background noise. The '60s would be almost over before he invested in a stereo receiver -- Canadian-built with germanium transistors.
For fans of coincidences, CHQM would become the first radio station to hire me (on July 1, 1971) and the songs that week in 1962 on CFUN's chart almost spelled out my name. #1 was "Duke of Earl" and my middle name is Earl. #2 was "Johnny Angel" and my first name is Jon. And #21 was "Percolator Twist" and Percolator was my nickname in school at the time.
From then on, at home or in the car, it was rare to see me without a radio tuned to 14-10 C-FUN. At the Seattle Worlds Fair, Century 21 was the theme and handheld radios were just arriving from Japan. My parents let me buy an 8 transistor model for $19.95 and I discovered KJR before returning to Vancouver. CFUN was still my preferred choice, but if things ever got boring, such as Sunday morning's religious programming, KJR was a slightly noisy alternative.
It was not long before I discovered that radio signals could travel great distances at night. Pretty soon my farthest catch was WWL in New Orleans, then, one memorable winter evening in 1964, I heard WCBS, WNBC and WABC from New York City. Not long after, I heard WBZ in Boston, still further away. When I could, I listened to WBZ for pleasure while doing my homework. I remember them playing "The Name Game" by Shirley Ellis a full month before any station in Vancouver or Seattle debuted it.
In the Fall of 1964, my father showed me the current issue of Popular Science and its article on long distance radio reception (DX'ing). The big piece of news was that most radio stations would verify your reception if you sent them details of what you heard that could be checked against the station's broadcast logs. KFBK in Sacramento was my first tentative step in that direction. As soon as they responded, I began trying to verify everything that I heard.
In the summer of 1966, I joined the International Radio Club of America (IRCA), after trying to vain to check it out with the Better Business Bureau. I learned a lot about DX'ing, enabling me to hear stations outside of North America and gain enough of an ear for languages that I could pinpoint most foreign stations from the sound of the language. But, I also gave a lot back, contributing regularly to the IRCA bulletin's columns, even editing my own "Province of the Month" feature, and coordinating the 1970 convention in Vancouver, attended by 105 members.
Somewhere along the way, I collected record surveys, coverage maps and bumper strips. Much has been lost from those years, either given away, thrown away or misplaced. Fortunately, a few airchecks survived and have recently been digitally mastered.
After working with Bill Drake in Fresno, in early 1965, Dave McCormick declined Bill's offer to work with him at KHJ in Los Angeles, instead trying his own hand at turning around 5KW KOL-1300 in Seattle. Despite co-channel interference from CHQM-1320 (10KW then later 50KW) on my parents' 1957 Philips portable transistor radio, I listened to KOL and nothing else, with Dave doing mornings and great DJs like Dex Allen heard through the rest of the day.
Within two years, Dave was gone, but the Drake approach continued despite frequent changes in announcers, management and even ownership. By the later half of 1968, ex-KJR announcer Dick Curtis had become KOL General Manager, and finally decided to take the opposite approach against KJR's style of personality radio: why not outpersonality them? Robert O. Smith had recently left KJR and was at KSND, one of the first rock oldies station. He did not need much persuasion to do afternoon drive time on KOL.
I was still with KOL through this change, and Robert O. immediately caught my ear. I had already heard of him from Eric Floden, a friend who had listened to "this guy who can do great Wolfman imitations" evenings on KJR, but this was my first first-hand taste. And it stuck. He was and still is my favourite DJ of all time.
But, more than that, he taught me a lot about radio and even helped me form some important approaches to life, most notably humour and racial equality. Until the exodus of some Americans to Vancouver because of the 1967 Portland Riots, I had never seen a black person in Canada other than on television. But, in 1980, as a manager in an engineering consulting firm, I had to have the race of the computer programmer I had just hired pointed out to me -- I really had not noticed.
As for radio, Robert O. taught me that I did not have to develop a huge ego to be an announcer. That you could be a top DJ in a major market without losing your respect for the music you played. And without giving up your social conscience or your openness with people in general.
At the beginning of 1969, several friends told me about a pirate radio station that had opened up in Surrey, a nearby suburb of Vancouver. Sure enough, there it was at home in Burnaby, faint but there on my powerful Lafayette HA-230 communications receiver with home-made directional loop antenna. It was only 5 watts on 1357.25KHz, the frequency stamped on the crystal used to control the transmitter's frequency.
I phoned teenage owner Eldon Luoma and arranged to meet him at his parents' home. The backyard was the C-FAY transmitter site. The long wire antenna would make any ham radio operator proud, the transmitter was fairly good quality, but the studio and equipment were makeshift, at best. The studio was an old shack and the microphone was a small square handheld model connected to a small portable tape recorder. When the slide switch on the side of the mic. was turned on, the spindle on the tape recorder rotated.
Given the distance and the need to borrow my mother's car to get there, we agreed that I would work one shift a week. Like the tape recorder, the turntables and tone arms belonged more in a children's playroom than a radio station. So, I did not bring my own records, but relied on those at the station. Eldon had been fortunate to get on Elektra's and Chess's mailing lists for radio station promo copies of singles. I occasionally would bring my 1958 Seabreeze tape recorder to add a little of my own music.
Although CFAY had at least two visits from the Canadian Department of Communications, they were never shut down. Partly because Eldon got premonitions of their arrival and would shut down the station. Partly also, I suspect, because the transmitter was of good enough quality not to bother anyone with RF interference.
Given all of this, I used the name "George Walker" on the air -- the only time that I did not use my own name on the air. Admittedly, my vision of ego-less broadcasting meant rarely mentioning my name on the air, and I followed through on that in future on-air work. Wish I had been smart enough to think of it in those days, but I should have combined a line I coined for a nightly late night show at UBC Radio, CYVR -- "My name is Irrelevant" -- with a blank in the program intro script of several daily shows I did at CJAT-FM in Trail: "My name is ____ and this is (insert Program Name here)...".
By summer, I had decided I had other priorities, having learned about as much as CFAY was going to teach me about radio. Sadly, my last show in July 1969 was aired to no one but my tape recorder. The transmitter was not working that day and I am still checking with aircheck collectors to see if the tape still exists.
On Hallowe'en, I substituted for Frank Barnhouse at CKSF, Simon Fraser University's closed-circuit radio station. I befriended Frank that year in high school, and was amazed to see, but never touch, a great control room assembled in his basement from radio station throwaways, mostly from CKWX.
Two weeks later, I met with CKSF station management, and agreed on two shifts a week on Thursday and Sunday afternoons. The Hallowe'en show is on the same missing tape as CFAY, but the January airing of the Top 30+100 of 1969 has survived, thanks to my junior high school French teacher.
That year-end countdown was spread over four hours and several weekly shows. It is pretty bad radio, mostly because I was uncomfortable trying to do Top 40 radio, leaning instead to FM and album cuts like many of the announcers at the station, but also because I was not controlling the order in which the music was played. I was not used to the abrupt changes in mood from one song to the next, preferring instead to choose the music so that it flowed, and matching my announcing to the mood of the music. Still, listening to it 30 years later, it has its moments where qualities that would emerge later can be heard.
September 1970 marked the beginning of university, where I planned to major in Physics. On my first visit to campus, even before classes started, I asked to be, and was accepted as, Librarian for the Record Library at UBC Radio, CYVR, both closed circuit and carrier current on 650KHz. Not knowing what lay before me academically, I delayed making any commitments for air shifts.
Unfortunately, I did not end up with any of the control over what music was played on the air that I had expected as Librarian, but I did manage to quickly get current on a two year backlog of singles to be catalogued, thanks to a lot of work and high typing speed. I also made a lot of friends, including soul enthusiast and Vancouver DJ, Bill Reiter, by giving away a huge number of singles that no one at the station wanted. I even convinced Polydor Records to give the station more than a hundred copies of an excellent sampler LP then being given away at Woolworths. Every station staff member was given a copy and the rest were awarded as prizes to listeners.
Although the Program and Music Directors preferred to keep new singles and LPs locked up until they knew they would be hits, I wanted the station to get a jump on other stations, so I contacted several U.S. record companies, asking them to send us LPs ahead of their Canadian release. Several agreed, but Canada Customs made it too costly and too much of a hassle to continue.
It was not long before I was doing on-air shifts to fill in for tardy or missing staff, or unassigned shifts. The studios and most of the equipment were state of the art, only a year old, built at a cost of $250,000 by Stan Davis, who was and still is a legend in Vancouver broadcast engineering circles. Turntables were controlled by a small red button that powered the turntable off and on, a switch that turned the audio on and off, and a pot with indents for easy grip. As well as two control rooms, there were two studios, both with cut switches for the microphone. One was a small booth with a window to the on-air control room, used for News and Sports. The other was fairly large and visible from the production control room. Its acoustics were the best I have ever seen. Clap your hands and you would hear no echo. Not used much, it was the perfect place to relax, a desk lamp with low voltage bulb giving it quiet ambience. I was greatly saddened to see it again in early 1987, not just from the wear and tear from students over the years, but with notices over the acoustic tile that had made it so "perfect" when it was new.
It was here at CYVR that I developed a mic. technique that garnered a lot of well deserved criticism. Unfortunately, it took me nearly 30 years to connect the two together. Stations use unidirectional microphones in control rooms to reduce the background noise from the equipment, especially the sound of the announcer operating the board. Wherever I worked, I always wore headphones when I was announcing. At CYVR, I discovered that twisting the microphone at right angles and speaking across the mouth of the mic. gave my voice a very pronounced bass sound to it, in reality, something it already had enough of. A complement from one of the engineers convinced me that I had found the secret to success as an announcer, little realizing what I was really doing.
In 1972, at CJAT and CFPR, I received numerous complaints that I was talking too quietly and could not be heard well on the air. The VU meters always looked fine, and I was never really that interested in finding the answer, having listened to my father's complaints in the '60s that announcers and commercials on FM were always louder than the music, and hearing Tim Burge finally solve that problem at CKLG-FM by airing his voice and commercials a lot lower than the music. LG-FM was one of the few stations without a compressor, so it actually worked.
In 1999, I listened to the only surviving aircheck of me on CJAT or CFPR, made from Seattle with heavy interference from other stations. CJAT-AM's compressor is fooled by the highly accentuated bass component from the microphone, and reduces the intelligible portion of my voice to almost inaudible.
Why? Because directional microphones accentuate different frequencies differently. From the sides and behind, high frequencies are reduced the most, quite a bit is cut from mid-range and high bass, but low bass is almost untouched. The funny thing, of course, is that I learned all of this in Grade 12 Electronics, which should have come more easily to mind a year or two later than it does 30 years after.
By the time that midterm exam marks were in, it was early November and it was clear that I had to work harder at university. I resigned my Librarian position at CYVR, but kept the weekly on-air hour I had asked for. Only one course suffered -- the only one that ended at Christmas. I was able to score a high enough mark that I could rewrite the final exam in August and completed the course successfully that way.
It also became clear that Physics was not the degree I was looking for. At UBC, their Physics speciality was the creation of nuclear weapons, a far cry from my main Physics interest: Astronomy.
On a whim, I had taken an extra Mathematics course above and beyond the standard course load. It began after Christmas and I was the only first year student in the class. I easily passed the course, but it was my first hands-on experience with computers that really mattered. I changed my major to Computer Science, but it did not cost me anything. At that time, you had to be in second year before you could take either of the introductory computer courses. I have never looked back since.
Knowing that I had no marketable skills from university, I applied for a summer job at every radio station in town. Not hearing from any of them, I answered an ad for a telemarketer, but failed my audition. I confounded my potential employer by being perfect at the announcing part of the job, but not pushy enough to actually sell any newspaper subscriptions.
Having nothing else up my sleeve, I gratefully accepted my father's offer of work making artificial ice. I had worked for him part-time in the summers in the past, bagging wallpaper paste, being part of the assembly line for school paste, filling ink bottles, answering the phone and cleaning up around the lab and warehouse.
Around June 10, I was totally shocked to receive a phone call from my manager-to-be at CHQM. I cover this in detail in the only part of my autobiography that I have actually written, but suffice it to say with a little deceit on his part, he tricked me into working full-time for free for the last half of June as an Operator at CHQM AM & FM. It was expected to take a full month of full-time training to make me competent. Dave Horne, the senior part-time operator who was assigned to teach me, was satisfied with my work before two weeks had passed.
I loved my work, especially shows that involved LPs instead of prerecorded sets on tape, a trend that was expanding at the station. I quickly become known for my segues. No one could do it as well as I could, because no one could figure out how I did it. I would have told them, but they never asked. They wowed the start of records trying to sound as tight as I did.
My secret was simple. I had a mental clock that knew exactly how long it took for an LP to come up to speed when backcued a half turn. A little arithmetic showed me that 45s backcued two thirds of a turn take precisely the same amount of time, not that CHQM played that many singles, though there were a few.
I either already knew or took the time to listen to the start and end of every cut I wanted to segue between. As I cued the next cut, I could tell by the loudness of the sound on the cue monitor exactly how far the pot needed to be turned up to play the cut at the appropriate level for airing.
Given these three factors, I would start the next cut at just the right time, immediately set to its full audio level with the pot, so that the two cuts could be played together without fading either cut in or out. The previous cut would be played out right into the LP cut separation where the pot would be very quickly faded down just before the turntable was switched off to prevent any unwanted noise.
For voice tracks, I would write down the last few words of the announcer so that I would know exactly when to start the turntable so that the music would start the exact millisecond the last audible sound of the last word was uttered. That was my version of tight. Everyone else played the music under the announcer, but my father hated the practise, and I could not argue with his logic: on a music station, the music is more important than the announcer.
Even at the end of the newscast, when there is a great desire to get to music immediately, I would start the voice track just after the newsman uttered his last word with the music starting just as the announcer ended his short intro to the hour. Even on the automation machine, where most FM programming originated, I continued that practise. Admittedly, my preferred use for the automation machine, believed to be the earliest model International Good Music (IGM) in Bellingham, Washington, ever made, was as the target of a wrecking ball.
After a year at CHQM, when it was clear that the end of Second Year UBC would not see me increase my hours from the current eight per week, I applied to work for the summer at CJAT in Trail, B.C. I had found a friend his first Canadian radio job at CJDC in Dawson Creek, B.C., and he was now at CJAT-AM and returned the favour by telling me about the job and giving me a good reference.
CJAT-AM was a well-run Top 40 station with a young, very independent Music Director who read Billboard, but still picked his own chart each week. Obscure songs like "Superbird" by [Neil] Sedaka sometimes ended up as the most requested song by listeners calling the station.
CJAT-FM, on the other hand, was a money-losing station with a tired sound. Most of its 12 non-simulcast hours each day were spent playing 15 minute blocks of music alternated between two LPs of background music. As likely as not, those breaks would not have commercials, even though the rate was $1.50 per spot -- less if advertisers bought more than one. It made me feel overpriced being paid $1.75 per hour, even though it was the legal minimum wage.
It felt like a year, because I was on the air 39 hours a week, but I was only at CJAT for six weeks, before I was fired because of my CHQM approach to things -- if things don't sound perfect on the air, yell and scream until they get fixed, and the type of music played on FM. QM-FM rarely played anything older than 3 years old, and the music really moved during the business day and drive times.
Since I only had one shift a week on AM, Sunday nights from 6 p.m. to 1:15 a.m., the other five days of the weeks became pretty dreary in FM. To keep interested, I became fascinated with News, initially learning how to make great newscasts on FM, but then arranging to program long album cuts or full sides whenever a willing AM announcer would let me do one of his long newscasts that otherwise would have been rip and read.
As well as following the approach of the real Newsmen, and putting all the unusual stories on a special peg in the Newsroom, I started using this material for my last newscast on Sunday nights, simulcast on AM and FM. At 1:00 a.m., I would begin with the usual top news items, but after the few minutes it took to exhaust them, I would do 10 or 15 minutes of the most interesting items from the Weird News department. Like the proposal for a magnetically powered/levitated subway from Los Angeles to New York. The operating costs were almost zero, but the capital costs to build it were astronomical, mainly to dig that long a tunnel and lay the track. Or the black box that President Nixon's aides always carried with him. From its contents, the victim of Watergate could have initiated nuclear war at any moment he chose.
When I was given my two weeks notice, I applied to Cominco for summer computer work. They owned the huge lead smelter in Trail. Of course, they did not want another second year computing student for the summer, since they already had a UBC classmate of mine, whose father worked there.
Not daunted, I returned home to Vancouver, wrote to every radio station in town and the few computer data centres I knew of. Much to my surprise, a Manager in CBC Radio in Vancouver called, not to offer work in Vancouver, but to get me to meet the CFPR Prince Rupert station manager who would be in town in two days. Within a few minutes of the start of our meeting, he offered me the job, we haggled about money and I was off to Prince Rupert in about a week. Total time from my last day in Trail to my first day in Prince Rupert = two and a half weeks.
By the way, to set the record straight, our discussion about money was me asking for less and him offering me more. His original offer was $7,500 a year and my flight to Prince Rupert. I told him the flight was my responsibility, so he countered with $8,600 a year! Because I worked some overtime, I actually came out way ahead. I had been working for $1.75 an hour in Trail, and this was $4.25 an hour, which really irked my mother, who was managing a sales desk for a few cents less per hour. But, both my parents appreciated the fact that their tax dollars that funded the CBC were finally coming back into the family.
Gerry Bavington, the CFPR manager was one of the best managers I ever worked for in any profession. My musical tastes, especially my knowledge of such a variety of genres, fit in well with the staff of the station. The listeners would have preferred country music, but with the only other choice in town automated rock, the station maintained a 52 share. As you might have guessed, not one of the station staff could tolerate country music. Actually, Laurie Mills did love the stuff, but he left for CBC Edmonton each summer.
For the first six weeks that I was there, I never played the same song twice. Eventually, I realized that I was running out of decent current material to play.
I took the approach that I had developed during simulcasting AM & FM from midnight to 1:00 a.m. each Sunday night at CJAT-AM & FM and applied it to all my work at CFPR. Inspired by CHQM, music was organized into sets of three pieces that fit together, often the first and last by the same artist, sometimes all three. The music for each hour would be preselected and the entire hour planned to the second, using cut lengths and experience doing feature items like the Marine Weather Forecast, so that the last note of the last song ended just as the network announcer said "Here is the CBC News". One Saturday morning I ran a little late but, ironically, there was a pause in the last song right as the network announcer spoke. The small last segment of the song began in the announcer's pause that followed and was faded into a background bed for the beginning of the news.
I introduced several new promotions to the station. Less than three weeks after I arrived, I was handed the Saturday and Sunday morning shows. Actually, I had already done the Saturday show a week earlier when Cam Lane phoned in sick. With a little more notice on my first real weekend, I created 30 second promos announcing my Saturday morning show and previewing many of the songs I was going to play. Other announcers were happy to air them on their shows. At the next staff meeting, the station manager applauded the idea and suggested that other announcers cross-plug their programs.
Having been a great fan of CHQM's 25 second station IDs, done over a bed of the best, most catchy instrumentals currently being aired on the station, I took the concept and turned it into a way to give greater exposure to the dozen or so 40 watt repeater stations scattered all the way to Prince George. Officially they each had their own call letters and were known as Low Powered Relay Transmitters (LPRTs). I had Cam Lane voice a generic ID for the entire network of stations, including 10KW CFPR in Prince Rupert, then he voiced about ten separate IDs ("If you're in Fort St. James, we can be heard at 1330 on your dial") covering the dozen LPRTs, lumping any on the same frequency together. A instrumental was selected for each of the ten, the generic ID was run first over the intro of the music so that it ended just as the melody began, much as a Top 40 DJ stops talking right when the vocal starts. The music was faded after a few seconds and the specific ID for an LPRT played. All ten promos were loaded on to a single cartridge so that it would rotate through them all as it was repeatedly played.
I do not recall if any other CBC station ever programmed directly to LPRTs, but CFPR did. From 5:05 to 6:00 p.m. every weeknight, Cam Lane did a live Prince Rupert-only program and a similar, but separate program was run for the LPRTs, covering news and public affairs relevant to those smaller communities. Some nights I was assigned to the program and the rest of the week went to the evening announcer.
The evening announcer and I decided that, for consistency, it made more sense to do the program as a team each night. As soon as I began weekend work, that meant a seven day week, but I had few other interests, so I did not mind. The first Monday that I arrived, I was challenged by the ex-RCMP Staff Sargent who directly supervised me, but as soon as he knew I did not want to get paid, he offered no objections. Soon, the station manager was suggesting we try and do a series of in-depth reports together. As we searched for a topic, Cam Lane suggested "Legalized Prostitution" and gave us some community references to get us started. It was a lot of effort and lasted far too long, running for 5-10 minutes daily for about three weeks, but it was good experience. "Sweet Cream Ladies" by The Boxtops provided the introductory theme to each day's installment.
The announcer that I shared that program with was about my same age, and he was intent on convincing me of the value of marijuana to improve my life. His final attempt was, he was sure, the heavy artillery. He suggested I listen to "A Children's Garden of Grass", an LP created by Ron Jacobs, who also created the Cruisin' series, and was Bill Drake's Program Director for Boss Radio Central (KHJ, Los Angeles) for several years. Rather than convince me of the value of marijuana, it convinced me once and for all of the correctness of my original decision never to touch the stuff.
Speaking of LPRTs, I still consider my best-ever long distance radio reception to be hearing 40 watt CBRB in Banff, Alberta, from Vancouver, but that is another story. Some of people I worked with in Prince Rupert have reappeared elsewhere. Cam Lane is an actor, most notably with a continuing though occasional role as a judge on TV's X-Files. Soon after, Laurie Mills moved permanently to CBC Radio in Calgary and is probably still there. Joe Stott was in Edmonton in the mid-'70s, doing news on weekends on CKUA. I think Cam told me Joe's day job was selling cars. He must have done all right, since the only telephone listing for a "Joe Stott" in Canada is in North Vancouver, the second most expensive place to live in Vancouver.
On my last Saturday morning show at CFPR, I played each staff member's favourite song at about the time I understood they would be listening to the radio. Although it was hard to say "goodbye", it just never occurred to me to not go back to university, even though my best friend thought I had found heaven in Prince Rupert.
The next summer I was able to get work in my field, thanks to a federal government youth program, and knew that it was essential to be sure I could get a job when I graduated. It was a good thing I did, as permanent jobs were very hard to find that next year. I had to go to Yellowknife to find mine. Summers there are great, but winter begins early, and I got bored very quickly. You can only work so much overtime before your boss complains.
So, I applied at CBC Yellowknife, and the CFYK manager knew Gerry Bavington very well, making my CFPR experience ideal. Instead of phoning Gerry, he had his best announcer audition me. I was given last Saturday's 30 minute newscast to read and did a lot better than he expected anyone would do.
I started on Saturday, watching and asking questions as the same announcer did the morning show. I returned Sunday morning to work with another announcer who I had met briefly on Saturday, since his shift followed. But, he never showed up. Without time to do the normal sign-on, I merely turned on the transmitter, gave a station ID and started the network feed for the hourly News. During the News, I ran through the record library pulling as much music as I could in my allotted four and a half minutes.
An hour later, I got a call from the announcer who said he had overslept, turned on the radio and heard me, so went back to sleep until when he called. He showed up another hour later just as the live morning show ended and network programming began.
Fortunately, the on-air control room's equipment was of such poor quality that the microphone was not attached to the console and did not even have a base. That meant that I could not turn the mic. in my special way to talk across the mouth. The result was a much better sound. I have no airchecks of live on-air work, but I do have some promos, including voicing of station IDs featuring the network of LPRTs.
My time at CFYK was limited. I was assigned some evening shifts each week but found it very hard to sign off the station at 1:10 a.m. and get enough sleep to be at work at 8:30 a.m. Pretty soon, I became ill from exhaustion. I realized that Yellowknife was not for me, and soon had a job in Edmonton.
I did my final show on CFYK, unpaid on a Saturday night in December 1974, allowing the announcer to go to a party instead of doing his shift. Because I thought it was such a good idea, I ended at 1:30 a.m. by playing "People" by Barbra Streisand, but without talking over it as Shane did each evening at KGA in Spokane in their one great year of Top 40 in 1968-69.
Although I was never on the air at CKUA, I did create the first Computing department within what was then CKUA's parent Alberta Crown Corporation, Access Alberta. During that time (1982-85), I worked with some CKUA staff on their Computing requirements, but my most enjoyable time was spent in discussions with Operations Manager, the late John Runge, about his days at CKLG-FM in Vancouver. He was there, on air, and I was there as a listener, when LG-FM became Canada's first full-time Underground music station.
John had previously perfected the format at CKUA with Bill Coull, but there was significant periods of other block programming on the station at the time.
And I have not been on the air since, but that may change now that I'm retired.
In between, I was gainfully employed in Computing for 33 years, and did a lot of writing. Beginning with a monthly column for a radio (DX) publication as a teenager, I have had more than 200 published articles on computing-related topics until my retirement in January 2007.
Jon Pearkins