Early Days
The Foundation’s founders, Ross McCreath and Lyman Potts, and later Pip Wedge and Bill Dulmage, all made major contributions to the research and writing that established this website in the late 1990s and into the 21st Century. Pip and Bill were still writing and editing material for the site in 2020, but the Foundation had also benefited greatly from the work of a group of writers whose valued contributions helped so much to develop the project to what it later became. They included:
Bambrick, Ken
CCF’s mentor back in 1995, he wrote “The Evolution of Radio” – one of the first articles on our website. A Professor, he traveled from coast to coast interviewing elderly broadcasters for a book he was going to write, but never did. Selections from those tapes are on many biographies on our website, and a more comprenhsive collection of his interviews will in due course be added to our site in a new section to be called Voices of History.
Chrysdale, Joseph
Son of Joe Chrysdale, who introduced re-created Baseball and Hockey broadcasts, he wrote many biographies for CCF.
Currie, Roger
A newsman and announcer on several Winnipeg radio stations, he wrote several biographies of local Hall of Famers.
Eastwood, Clive
A well known Radio Engineer – he assisted in writing the CFRB history and several stories under the “Engineering” section found in the General Directory.
Fairbridge, Jerry
A newsman with many years of experience with Broadcast News, he wrote more than 20 biographies for our Personalities section.
Friesen, Lee
A former broadcaster from Swift Current, Saskatchewan, he wrote the histories of several Saskatchewan radio stations, as well as CJFB-TV and CKSW-AM Swift Current.
George, Kate
A graduate of Ryerson, having worked at CJRT-FM (later JAZZ.FM), Ryerson radio station and TVO, she helped develop the early history of those stations.
Gorman, John
Broadcast sales was his life, so who better to write the original history of the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement, and The Evolution of Format Radio.
Johnson, Don
A Newsman all his life, he was cajoled into writing the story of News from 1937 to 1952.
McGarvey, Pete
With first knowledge of early radio in small towns like Orillia and Chatham, Pete had a wide range of indistry experience during his impressive career. For us he has told the story of how news developed from 1920 to 1936.
Norton, Bob
A Broadcast Engineer who helped erect many Radio and TV towers, we asked him to write about “The Wavestack Antenna” – and mention is made of Bob in other Antenna stories.
Taylor, Brent
Brent is a DXer in New Brunswick and was recommended by the Ontario DXers association. We wanted to know about DXing and its growth over the years – we got it in spades.
Tennant, Mike
A broadcaster in Kitchener who supplied us with a great deal of knowledge about Kitchener stations.
Zimmerman, Arthur
Arthur was fascinated by the early days of Radio in Toronto and spent a great deal of time in the Toronto Newspapers’ “morgues” reading all the newspaper’s back issues of the papers of 1920s and early 30s. Thanks to him we have some excellent stories in the “Former station” histories.
The Project Grows
As the Foundation grew with the support of a Benefits Package grant from BCE, and later from CHUM, Astral and Corus, new writers were added to the editorial team, and the website content expanded dramatically to what it later became. Major new contributors included:
Chouinard, Yvon
When he retired from Power Corporation of Canada where he was Executive Vice President of Power Broadcasting Inc., and as a member of the CCF Board, he offered to help our editorial group. His excellent prose can be seen in the Hall of Fame biography where he has written several bios in English and French as well as all the French TV program synopsis, also in both languages, and one of our best Station histories – CKAC-AM Montreal. He also supervised work on the translation into French of much of the material on our site.
Corcelli, John
John is a writer, actor, musician, broadcaster and researcher who supplied us with the first major group of CBC TV and Radio program summaries, and has continued to be a most useful resource in our dealings with visitors to the site.
Dulmage, Bill
One of our long-term employees, Bill first presented us with 140 station Histories from his own website back in 1997 and then joined us again on an almost full-time basis writing and updating Radio and TV station histories – digging through old Broadcaster Magazines, Broadcast Technology Magazines, Broadcast Dialogue Briefings & Magazines, CRTC files and online newspapers.
By 2009 Bill was installing updates and keeping our station histories up to date.
His background after attending Fanshawe College showed his love of radio – from an all-night show on CFBK then to CHVO Carboneer Newfoundland, to CJBQ Belleville to CHUC to the news department at CFMX Cobourg/Toronto. A “pack rat” all this time, he collected and stored information on the growth of the industry, which he turned into his website – which he turned over to CCF.
He continues to be a great addition to the website.
Ingrassia, Joanne
A freelance writer, with a background of “on air news reporter” at CHCH and some time at CKOC Hamilton. Now located in Toronto, she supplied us with the first major group of program summaries for Global Television histories.
Lansdell, Gord
Having worked at four different radio stations throughout BC, Gord was the ideal person to look after the original West Coast station histories. He already had two west coast broadcast websites and a lot of the information we needed. He brought us some of the best histories on our website.
Margles, Sydney
A well known Montreal broadcaster, news man and eventually Manager, Sidney was our choice to organize and write the story of the biggest changes in news from 1952 onward, With the help of coast to coast interviews of news broadcasters by Ryerson journalism students, we now have a very comprehensive group of stories about the remarkable changes that took place over half a century.
Lavers, Daphne
Daphne wrote four histories for the website – Cable Television, Satellite TV and Radio and Digital Audio Broadcasting, as well as an article about this website for Broadcast Dialogue magazine.
Daphne Lavers is a freelance journalist in communications and broadcasting technology and has been senior features writer for Broadcast Dialogue since its inception. With a Masters in Journalism, she has held positions including Canadian correspondent for TV World, features writer for Broadcast Technology, communications officer for a space sciences research institute and editor of Broadcaster.
Patskou, Paul
Paul gave us our excellent histories of Hockey Night in Canada on Television and the Canadian Football League – The Television Years. His credentials are quite impressive. Paul is a video archivist and sports historian based in Toronto, Canada. He is a member of the Society For International Hockey Research (SIHR). As a freelance writer, Paul has been associated with the NHL, CBC, Leafs TV, TSN, Molsons, the Hockey Hall of Fame, the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame and the Canadian Football League. He has also contributed to a number of books and magazines including ‘Total Hockey’, ‘Hockey – A People’s History’, ‘Kings of the Ice’, ‘Ice Hockey World’, ‘Canadian Hockey Atlas’, and ‘The Best of Hockey Night in Canada’.
George Tombs
George Tombs’ fluency in both English and French has been a great asset to the Foundation, as we seek to make our site more bilingual. George worked for several decades in public broadcasting and print journalism, in Canada, the US, France and Britain. He won the Michener Fellowship in 1988 for his work in English and French. He also taught at Athabasca University for seven years. Based in Montreal, George is an author and translator.
Working with our good friend Yvon Chouinard, George has provided thousands of words in the French language to make our site even more valuable and accessible to Canadians nationwide.