OUT OF THIN AIR

allowed to say something on the air. I remember Lorne Finley trained me and I remember my first radio program was “Saturday Record Time” and I even remember the theme...Larry Clinton’s version of “The Dippsy Doodle”, an old recording from the 1930’s.

Right after it there was the Shur Gain Amateur Cavalcade with Eric Jessome, a most popular program. Ches Cooper would come in and act as MC for it.

I think it was the second summer that I did my version of Rawhide. He was called ’Yukon Ike’. There were stacks of really old records stored in the newsroom. They were heavy and some were only one-sided and we had only one turntable that would play them. I remember they had the grooves going up and down instead of side to side. They were left over from the 1920’s. Well, I had a program on Saturday morning and called it, “The Good Old Days” with this crazy impersonation.

I got lots of letters, some for and some against, but one day Bob Large, who was the Manager, decided to have a little fun with me. Gordon Tait was my operator and he gave Gordon a sound effects record with machine gun fire on it. When the noise came on my earphones, I knew I was being attacked so I immediately made up a skit how the radio station was under attack and I was being shot at, and we carried this on for a few minutes. Right after that I went on vacation for a couple of weeks and the program went off the air. I don’t know if the people rejoiced because they thought I had been put out of my misery or not, but that was the end of my Saturday morning broadcasting. I did enjoy recording and once I had the opportunity of recording The Leslie Bell Singers, the whole of their concert, and Leslie Bell gave us permission to make it into a presentation for broadcast. That to me was very reward- ing. To be able to be creative with broadcasting like that was very exciting. To start at a small station where people know you a bit and trust you and will let you be creative and do different things, that is an advantage.”

There were many advantages for those who wanted to learn about radio and one of these was learning to do newscasts. It was the impor- tance given to our newscasts that got us into trouble with the newspapers.

Generally there was little love lost between the newspaper industry and radio. True there were a few farsighted publishers who saw the potential of radio and wasted no time getting into the business. But mainly, due to the threat to their advertising revenue, the newspaper

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