Although my father offered me part-time work in his own company, in late April 1971, at the end of first year university, I was determined to find something on my own. I had applied for summer work with all of the radio stations in town, using my (unpaid) work at UBC Radio, SFU Radio and the pirate station in Surrey as experience. But, the only response I got was from a want ad in the newspaper for telephone sales that guaranteed to pay minimum wage.
It all occurred in a single day. The ad was in the morning newspaper. I called them when their offices opened. I got a call back near the end of the lunch hour and was asked to arrive around 7:00 p.m.
I arrived a few minutes early at the agreed-upon location not far from the Marine Building. The Marine Building was Vancouver's first skyscraper when it opened in 1930, built at a cost of $2.5 million and bankrupting its builders by 1932. By the early '70s, this area of downtown Vancouver was pretty run down.
The main floor store front seemed vacant, and the group of us who arrived there were met and escorted upstairs to the second floor, with the door locked behind us to keep out the nightly visitors on the streets.
Our job was to sell newspapers over the telephone. Telemarketing was a new concept in those days. It was rare to pick up the telephone and be greeted with someone trying to sell you something.
We were encouraged to lie, saying we were from Pacific Press, owner of The Vancouver Province and The Vancouver Sun, the two supposedly rival major daily newspapers of the city. We were shown the cubicles in which we would work, adorned with the responses we were expected to give to almost every imaginable objection. Then, we watched as their top producer demonstrated how it was done. He had a deep voice and flawless yet sincere delivery that would make any radio announcer weep, especially an aspiring one like me. We were even shown how to not lose a moment between calls by dialing really quickly.
Then we were each assigned our cubicle and spent the next several hours, trying out our hand at selling by telephone. I failed miserably, not selling anything, but was allowed to be the last one to leave. The manager thought I had a great voice, a polished delivery, but just not pushy enough. I was glad to leave.
Satisfied that I had done my best to strike out on my own, I quickly settled into my part-time job with my father. I prepared the batches of artificial ice and, in between, sealed the finished boxes and carried them out of the way for the ladies who were filling the containers and loading the boxes. Each day I worked, I came home at night tired, smelling of the preservative used in the artifical ice, with it dried on my clothes, acting somewhat like starch.
But just before the middle of June, my life changed in an instant when the telephone rang and it was my future boss calling from CHQM. I had long ago given up hope. With the self-centred thinking of a teenager, I had assumed that summer jobs only start at the beginning of my summer holidays.
I can no longer remember if there was a face-to-face interview or if I was told everything over the telephone. I was to work as an operator part-time, not just for the summer, with less hours per week during the school year.
The starting conditions were unusual, but I had no previous experience to judge from, having never worked for anyone but my father. For the last half of June, I was to receive on-the-job training, unpaid full-time, as part of a competitive trial with another would-be operator. If I was the successful candidate, I would then receive another half month of full-time training, paid, before I began normal part-time work. The pay was two dollars per hour, slightly over minimum wage at that time in British Columbia (B.C.).
I actually knew a lot about CHQM. My father had eagerly anticipated its founding in 1959, and had listened to it ever since. CHQM had received special permission from the Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG, predecessor of the CRTC) to broadcast a wider bandwidth than had previously been permitted for AM radio. This allowed higher audio frequencies to be broadcast at the same volume as lower frequencies. Unfortunately, many AM radios, including my father's, had such high selectivity -- to prevent interference from stations on adjacent frequencies -- that the only way those highs could be heard was to tune the radio slightly off frequency. The resultant distortion was rather irritating to a perfectionist son.
With their emphasis on sound quality (QM stood for Quality Music), CHQM scheduled a much publicized stereo broadcast in cooperation with another local station, CJOR. Each station was to carry one stereo channel of a simulcast broadcast. Unfortunately, apparently for technical reasons, the experiment never occurred.
The next year, 1960, CHQM-FM was on the air, simulcast with AM. On his next trip to the U.S., my father bought an Eico FM tuner in kit form to attach to his hi-fi. Now he had CHQM with very high sound quality.
By 1971, my tastes were towards CKLG-FM, and its hippie-influenced format of album rock -- we called it progressive rock in those days, deriving as it had from the U.S. college FM stations, where it was known as underground. Nonetheless, I heard a lot of CHQM around the house and knew the format: three pieces, first and last by the same artist, announcer extro, commercial, 25 second music-backed station ID, an optional second commercial, announcer intro and next set of music. The only exception was drive time on CHQM-AM with music a song at a time, rather than a three song set.
As you can tell, CHQM AM & FM were no longer always simulcast. By June 1971, the CRTC required AM and FM stations to be simulcast no more than 12 hours per day. But, that was going to change, and so were the fortunes of the station, in just a few short months.
The most senior of the part-time operators, Dave Horne was in charge of my on-the-job training. He never seemed to want to talk about it, but other operators told me that Dave had been working at CHQM since about the mid-1960s, always coming back despite several lay offs. He apparently found work at other stations during these periods, CJOR being one of them.
In the two or three meetings that management had for us in the year that I was at CHQM, it was emphasized that they did not want any of their part-time operators interested in a career in radio. We must all have other interests, typically going to school.
Having been at CHQM for so many years, Dave Horne had been going to school for quite a long time. The year I was there, he was working on his Masters degree in History at Simon Fraser University (SFU). In those days, SFU still had a terrible reputation from the campus riots of just a few years earlier. Known as the Instant University, the entire campus was built at the same time, to the same design, high atop 2600' Burnaby Mountain. The award-winning design of architects Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Mason was less than perfect. The grey of the concrete matched the grey of many of Vancouver's days. When it rained, many of the covered corridors and a few of the enclosed rooms leaked significant amounts of water. I never figured out what the room where the studios of the campus radio station, CKSF, had been intended for. It looked and felt like a war bunker.
When Yippie leader, Jerry Rubin, arrived at SFU, almost the entire student body was in their first few years of undergraduate work. The University Administration was also new to their jobs and granted virtually every demand of the student protesters. The traditional university lecture style of teaching by professors was replaced by organized discussions with heavy student involvement. That quickly degenerated into students talking to their friends in nearby seats, and large lecture theatres that sounded like the student cafeteria at lunch hour. Unable to teach, most of the best faculty members quickly found teaching positions elsewhere.
Despite his poor sense in selecting schools and subjects -- there were not a lot of jobs in Vancouver in the early '70s for History majors, especially from SFU -- Dave Horne was a very good operator. Although he was not always in the best of moods, he was a good teacher. His criticisms of my mistakes were consistent and he even provided the occasional compliment.
When I started, Dave worked 10 hours on Saturdays and 12 hours on Sunday. In those days, anything more than 8 hours in a day or 46 hours a week required overtime at time and a half. As a part-time operator, management never wanted us to work more than 28 hours per week. Dave had been promised 28 hours every week and he probably needed it to live. He had an apartment downtown that cost him about $100 per month, and there was food, tuition, books and transportation.
In the year I worked at CHQM, my biggest biweekly pay cheque was in August 1971 when I made $104 -- exactly two weeks of 28 hours per week.
I learned quickly from Dave and the other operators. Working nearly every day, I was not always scheduled with Dave. Among other things, I learned that my positive opinion of Dave was not shared by any of my fellow operators. They tolerated him -- nothing more. Therefore, I was quite surprised when, a couple of months later, one or two of them got together with Dave and another CHQM staff member and rented a house in the western extremes of West Vancouver, overlooking Georgia Strait.
Operating was usually pretty easy. Both the AM and FM control rooms had identical stereo operating consoles --boards, as we called them. They looked a lot older and worn than the 12 years CHQM had been on the air, but they did have relatively fresh coats of paint. The knobs that controlled volume (pots) were large and each was labelled as to its function with a Dymo vinyl label. The handles on the switches above each pot were also large and followed the most logical pattern: centre is off and right is on. All tape equipment was remotely controlled by clusters of large solid buttons on separate custom-built panels. The only exception was one very popular model of desktop style Ampex tape drive in AM, which had to be controlled with the switch on the drive itself. This was also the only tape drive in the on-air studios that did not sense stop tones. But, despite these two major deficiencies, the machine had one redeeming characteristic that almost made it a favourite for playing voice tracks -- it responded instantly and never started off speed. This capability provided the same immediate response as the best cart machines of the time, but was also extremely useful when you needed to start a voice track in the middle of a sentence. No, this was never used for comic effect, but was required when a commercial had been inserted after the announcer recorded the voice track. It then became possible to successfully interrupt his (there were no female announcers at CHQM in those days) "That was...and here is..." sentence midway, carefully excising the "and". Admittedly, stopping before the commercial still required that you be very quick and perfectly timed with the pot, turning down the volume, while simultaneously hitting the remote on the cart machine for the commercial.
Both control rooms were laid out in a horse shoe or U shape, with board in front of you and equipment, beginning with a turntable, on each side. Next, on the left in AM and right in FM, were the cart machines. On the other side were two large floor model tape drives, each capable of handling at least 10 1/2 inch reels of half inch tape. There were three Ampexs, two of them current models in the same series as those used by recording studios. Two four track models were used by George Martin for the Beatles' Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts album, when he ingeneously mixed back and forth between the two, from four tracks to two, record two more, mix, record two more, etc.
The other Ampex was an older model with all metal parts, instead of some plastic, and more powerful motors so it started faster. The fourth machine was another brand that always seemed like it was on its last legs.
It was fairly cramped, but my positive memories of those days has allowed me to thrive in relatively tight office layouts since that time. In fact, in 1980, when I designed my own relatively spacious private office with a beautiful view of downtown in the distance, I built a tight U with a long table opposite my desk and pedestal.
In front, above the board was a clock and a window into the small announce booth separating the AM and FM studios. Suspended from the ceiling on each side were two speakers. After all this was a stereo studio. It always gave me the strangest feeling doing AM-only programs and being the only person on the planet who could hear it in stereo. In those days, the only AM station I was aware of that was in stereo was English language XETRA in Tijuana, Mexico, playing background music to listeners in San Diego and Los Angeles. Because their signal was aimed so distinctly north, at night, they caused tremendous havoc to CBC's Vancouver station on the same frequency (690 KHz). They hardly made it to White Rock and were usually completely incomprehensible in Victoria, where they were mandated to serve. For that reason, CBC was eyeing CBC affiliate CJVI in Victoria for possible purchase.
Because this was long before the days of decoding chips in radios, XETRA used the rather simple technique of broadcasting the left channel of sound on the left sideband and the right channel on the right sideband, assuming your radio increases frequency from left to right. Unfortunately, most radios only bothered getting their sound from one sideband, so the sound was lobsided to most listeners. This also meant that putting two radios side by side required that one be tuned far enough off the frequency that you could trick it into using the wrong sideband. By this time, the signal was getting pretty noisy, especially in some place as far away and with as much interference as Los Angeles. Needless to say, FM stations sounded a lot better to any purist interested in stereo and XETRA faired no better then as all music as it had as all news -- which is why they selected such unique call letters. They pronounced it "Extra News".
When I started at CHQM, music was about a 40/60 split between records and 10 1/2 reels of tape. Every weekday morning, from 9:00 a.m. to noon, Program Director Maurice Foisy would do Q on the Aisle on QM-FM with pregnant pauses before and after every set of three songs. His operator was always Terry Timms, otherwise at home producing commercials in the Production Studio. Terry would record the music on to those 10 1/2 reels of tape, carefully inserting stop tones at the end of group of three selections, and typing up sheets listing the contents for later repeated use.
As the number of these tapes grew, the number of records used on air, at least on the evening and weekend shifts without live announcers, decreased. Unfortunately, playing records was what I did best.
Jon Pearkins