Transcript
00:00:02 Speaker 1
We’re in business.
00:00:03 Speaker 1
Are you talking about CQ?
00:00:04 Speaker 1
CQ, WX?
00:00:07 Speaker 2
That was that wasn’t the original call letters, though.
00:00:10 Speaker 2
I forget what they were.
00:00:11 Speaker 2
I think it was something like CCK CD SFDC something like that.
00:00:18 Speaker 2
Ross McIntosh can can tell you because Ross was tied up in it.
00:00:22 Speaker 2
But the the first five years.
00:00:26 Speaker 2
The station operated in the Nahua in a very peculiar way.
00:00:31 Speaker 2
The man who owned a gas station there who was an ignition expert, went under the name of Sparks.
00:00:36 Speaker 2
That was the name that gave sparks holstead.
00:00:40 Speaker 2
Had been down in the States and he had seen this new entered since his new entertainments in cool radio because it was still earphones, you know, and.
00:00:52 Speaker 2
He got the he got the franchise for the Greeby, the machine machine radio called the Greeby.
00:01:00 Speaker 2
And so.
00:01:01 Speaker 2
What what happened was that he would find a prospective customer.
00:01:08 Speaker 2
And I think it was Ross that was with him then.
00:01:13 Speaker 2
He’d get a hold of us and he put the put the heap on.
00:01:18 Speaker 2
He put a greeby in the back of his car, drive down to the customer, sell the car, but the point was.
00:01:26 Speaker 2
As he told me later on, he says I didn’t know I had to have a license and he was operating.
00:01:30 Speaker 2
Without a license.
00:01:32 Speaker 2
Until the pardon me, until the boys walked in one day and said, where’s your leg?
00:01:40 Speaker 2
That is the story, as far as I got it, but Ross will probably give you a lot more details on the thing, but then they moved.
00:01:48 Speaker 2
They moved over here to Vancouver and Halsted, bought a gas station on 14th and Granville and opened up CKW X.
00:02:00 Speaker 1
Really, what he was doing was selling batteries.
00:02:02 Speaker 1
With this, I mean that’s.
00:02:03 Speaker 2
Why he?
00:02:03 Speaker 2
Well, he was selling new selling everything with batteries and the safe.
00:02:06 Speaker 2
And you know, he was in business but.
00:02:10 Speaker 2
I do remember him saying that they they barricaded the place one time after the federal authorities came in and they barricaded it.
00:02:27 Speaker 2
No, I don’t think so.
00:02:28 Speaker 2
This is something I never did.
00:02:30 Speaker 2
Find out that no, I don’t.
00:02:32 Speaker 2
I don’t think they.
00:02:33 Speaker 2
I think it was all cleared up by.
00:02:34 Speaker 2
Then, but that was the start of CKW.
00:02:39 Speaker 1
Sort of like the pirate stations they had in England.
00:02:41 Speaker 1
There for a while.
00:02:41 Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, something like.
00:02:43 Speaker 2
Well, I mean, he was innocent.
00:02:44 Speaker 2
He didn’t know.
00:02:45 Speaker 2
And he he was a automobile, man, you know.
00:02:48 Speaker 2
But that that was the early start of WX.
00:02:53 Speaker 1
When you moved into into radio when the talkies came and you’ve been a professional pianist.
00:02:58 Speaker 1
In the movie hoses, which must have been an interesting life in.
00:03:01 Speaker 2
Itself, yes.
00:03:02 Speaker 2
Yeah, I funny.
00:03:04 Speaker 2
I was up in.
00:03:07 Speaker 2
It’s got nothing to do with what you want to know, but I was up in Dustin City 1966. I had eight summers up there with a show called the.
00:03:14 Speaker 2
Gas light Polish and.
00:03:18 Speaker 2
I was doing an interview like I’m doing here now, and uh, I don’t know how the subject came up with.
00:03:24 Speaker 2
Well, yes, I think the lady was a correspondent for the CBC.
00:03:29 Speaker 2
And she said, well, how did you get into this show business, you see?
00:03:35 Speaker 2
From this I went back talking about the early days of motion pictures.
00:03:41 Speaker 2
Which I’m a pioneer. In 1912, Jimmy, Randy and I compared notes and Jimmy, Jimmy and I decided that we’d have the same sort of background training. But he was two years ahead of me. I was only a kid of 14.
00:03:57 Speaker 1
Well, how did 14?
00:03:59 Speaker 1
How did you get involved in it as a professional?
00:04:01 Speaker 2
And this is a funny part.
00:04:02 Speaker 2
I came to a little town called Fernie BC with my mother, who had married the second time, and her husband was out here working in the coal mine.
00:04:14 Speaker 2
I landed on the 12th of January and I forgot it 12th of January.
00:04:19 Speaker 2
I landed in Fernie at 10:30 in the morning by CPI train with my mother. My stepfather was a professional pianist from England, was working with the coal company up at Coal Creek, which was two theaters open on a Sunday night. One had the piano player and the other didn’t.
00:04:38 Speaker 2
He went and talked to the manager and they put me in the pit at 7:30 that night and I worked the whole night too.
00:04:43 Speaker 1
And that was that was the start of my professional series and I’ve, you know, ever since, well, I gathered and how how had you received your training just through the normal piano lessons you take?
00:04:53 Speaker 2
Like any other thing else like we did even in the radio days that we had no guidelines for you.
00:04:58 Speaker 2
You just learned?
00:05:00 Speaker 2
I mean, you, things came to you like, like I do now.
00:05:05 Speaker 2
It’s a crazy stunt I do at the UBC.
00:05:08 Speaker 2
Occasionally they have silent films.
00:05:11 Speaker 2
I go and play.
00:05:13 Speaker 2
When I sit on the stage at a piano, no music.
00:05:17 Speaker 2
And they run the film.
00:05:19 Speaker 2
And I play the picture very the silly part of it is I get standing ovations at every performance, which I’ll have maybe 3 pictures.
00:05:28 Speaker 2
And you know, there’s this stupid like, I laugh at it because it’s it’s plenty to me.
00:05:35 Speaker 2
But it it was a challenge because in a way, you were.
00:05:42 Speaker 2
You you follow the picture, you look for the crashes and you know there’s a serious bit in 2 minutes is going to be a thundering crash someplace.
00:05:49 Speaker 2
Somebody gonna trip?
00:05:50 Speaker 2
You know there there’s the in the old days.
00:05:53 Speaker 2
It was situations very poor.
00:05:55 Speaker 2
Seen story this situation.
00:05:58 Speaker 2
And I worked those you see in the early days, just the piano player.
00:06:02 Speaker 2
And then of course, I grew up.
00:06:03 Speaker 2
With the business.
00:06:05 Speaker 2
And I had, and I started getting musicians.
00:06:08 Speaker 2
And then I started learning and learning and arranging because I’d been I’d been pretty well trained in England, was a kid eight years of age and I was being trained for concert.
00:06:22 Speaker 2
But I found that the technique for concert work is just as important in playing great time with Scott Joplin and some of this stuff.
00:06:31 Speaker 1
Well, that’s a good sound musical training.
00:06:33 Speaker 2
You know, it’s a good a good basic training issue and so you know I followed that all my life.
00:06:38 Speaker 2
Outside of three years, I was with the Canadian Army and the.
00:06:40 Speaker 2
First World War I was in France for that.
00:06:43 Speaker 1
Or when you went into radio finally in 1928 with CTWX, what were you doing there? Were you still be in this?
00:06:50 Speaker 2
Well, Ross McIntyre was the man that suggested.
00:06:53 Speaker 2
Why don’t you try reading on his work?
00:06:56 Speaker 2
Why don’t you come over?
00:06:57 Speaker 2
This doesn’t work on the transmitter.
00:06:58 Speaker 2
You won’t get any pages, but come over the transmit.
00:07:01 Speaker 2
And knowing a little bit about it, I don’t think I learned very much about the transmitter, but I did go over and do that and at that time we had George Taggett who became a.
00:07:11 Speaker 2
Uh program director for a while was CBC uh George Taggett had a children’s program in which he was a little dulcimer.
00:07:22 Speaker 2
And played a riggity jig and nothing.
00:07:24 Speaker 2
We go where we, you know.
00:07:26 Speaker 2
And one afternoon I was at the transmitter and the phone call came down.
00:07:33 Speaker 2
Would I go to the studio and play the dulcitone because the man who was doing the job had been taken ill.
00:07:43 Speaker 2
And I went up there after I went up the studio, which is at that time was the little penthouse and top of the Hotel Georgia and where where was the transmitter transmit.
00:07:52 Speaker 2
It was 1220 Seymour St. down down, near an indoor open station which no longer exists, and it was up over an electric store, an electric shop, Charlie Longley.
00:08:02 Speaker 2
The electric shop and the upstairs store was the transmitter and.
00:08:09 Speaker 2
I I went up and played this show and Harold Paulson was the manager. Then we only had about 7 people working in the station and I want his, I think was about 100.
00:08:18 Speaker 2
And Harold Paulson was there.
00:08:22 Speaker 2
And after I got through the show, he said, did you ever stop to or consider what you’d like to be an announcer?
00:08:28 Speaker 2
I said no, I hadn’t thought of it, so I’m going to give you an audition.
00:08:33 Speaker 2
So he gave me 3 different things.
00:08:35 Speaker 2
He gave me one on music which didn’t bother me because it was all a lot of.
00:08:39 Speaker 2
You know.
00:08:40 Speaker 2
Pronunciation something out of a newspaper and a commercial.
00:08:45 Speaker 2
Institutional commercial and I did it.
00:08:48 Speaker 2
Just fine, he says.
00:08:49 Speaker 2
Tomorrow morning, you start up here and I never went back to transmit.
00:08:53 Speaker 1
How how much were they paying you to be an announcer?
00:08:56 Speaker 1
Once again, and what will?
00:08:58 Speaker 2
You get and I think.
00:09:02 Speaker 2
Well, I think we got over $25.
00:09:04 Speaker 2
A week or something.
00:09:05 Speaker 2
It was wasn’t bad money and it was, but even in the days of the depression we were lucky. We got our $25 a week. Even though the bus didn’t get his, you know, a few little things that were little.
00:09:19 Speaker 2
A little rough there in the depression, when he always gave us a bonus or there wasn’t much of a bonus, but compared to date, but he always gave us a bonus.
00:09:28 Speaker 2
And I can always remember in that that bus in 1929, he came up and he was crying.
00:09:37 Speaker 2
And he says, I’m sorry.
00:09:39 Speaker 2
He said, I can’t give you anymore for Christmas, but they stand me a bottle.
00:09:42 Speaker 2
Of whiskey.
00:09:45 Speaker 2
And I found out after that he and his wife had pork and beans for Christmas dinner.
00:09:51 Speaker 2
That was the kind of guy who?
00:09:52 Speaker 2
Was and I know that you know fellas in the window when the trash came, fella started leaving and.
00:09:59 Speaker 2
He came in one day and ohh one of one of the fellows from named Bill Moyer was on the station who was what I would call a drifter.
00:10:06 Speaker 2
He worked so long at the place and got on another place and always on the move.
00:10:12 Speaker 2
He just told sparks that he’s going to quit.
00:10:18 Speaker 2
So he told me.
00:10:18 Speaker 2
He said you couldn’t.
00:10:19 Speaker 2
Too, I said no.
00:10:21 Speaker 2
And then quitting, he made a statement.
00:10:24 Speaker 2
He says any man that stays with me through this need never worry about the future.
00:10:30 Speaker 2
And he lived up to it’s it’s nice to have a.
00:10:32 Speaker 1
Boss like that and and anytime.
00:10:35 Speaker 2
Did you?
00:10:36 Speaker 2
I don’t suppose you have a new?
00:10:37 Speaker 2
Tiny outfit no.
00:10:39 Speaker 1
With the name I’ve become quite similar.
00:10:41 Speaker 2
Tony Elvik became manager of the station when television Carson took all the while, they didn’t take over, but they operated the station.
00:10:47 Speaker 2
You know they put.
00:10:48 Speaker 2
Money in.
00:10:49 Speaker 2
They had a network of 14 station.
00:10:52 Speaker 2
That they were doing that because they only own the one station which is CFCF in Edmonton, not CFFC FAC CFCF in Montreal.
00:11:02 Speaker 1
But as a matter of fact, I found Hugh Pearson the other day and I thought I’d really come across a gold mine.
00:11:08 Speaker 1
Oh, you did?
00:11:08 Speaker 1
You did you find I found him.
00:11:10 Speaker 1
But he was with the automotive side of the business and really.
00:11:12 Speaker 1
Didn’t know much.
00:11:13 Speaker 1
About the broadcasting, very fine.
00:11:16 Speaker 2
You know, take a **** and causing but two of them died.
00:11:19 Speaker 2
I was.
00:11:19 Speaker 2
Saying that you know the, that’s why.
00:11:21 Speaker 1
I said I thought I had.
00:11:22 Speaker 1
A real gold.
00:11:22 Speaker 1
Mine when I when I found you.
00:11:23 Speaker 2
You know, yeah.
00:11:24 Speaker 1
Because I you know, I expected he’d be able to tell me a lot about the broadcast operations and then the development of all.
00:11:30 Speaker 1
Canada and South Korea, clothings and.
00:11:32 Speaker 2
Well, and I can remember our person coming to me one time, he used to come out of it quite a bit.
00:11:41 Speaker 2
We’ve been having a little trouble at WX. We we had we after we we got a bigger crew, so we had to move from the penthouse on the George and we moved over to 543 Seymour St. where we have a Little Theatre and everything up there and we had the largest and.
00:12:00 Speaker 2
The young girl in there was running the library.
00:12:05 Speaker 2
The unique, unique knack of going over to the record companies.
00:12:12 Speaker 2
Getting a whole bunch of records on approval, bring them to the library.
00:12:14 Speaker 2
And leaving them there.
00:12:17 Speaker 2
And everybody comes over.
00:12:18 Speaker 2
I’ll play this one.
00:12:19 Speaker 2
You know, they gradually disappeared, and they eventually came to the point that.
00:12:26 Speaker 2
Your Ruth.
00:12:27 Speaker 2
She married Bob Fortune the weatherman, and because Bob was with us WWX, we had a lot of people go through WX and.
00:12:40 Speaker 2
Ruth was quitting to get married.
00:12:44 Speaker 2
When Hunter left to come in and he told me about it, he says, you know, he says no.
00:12:52 Speaker 2
Jody online, he says, probably, but could you set me up a foolproof library?
00:12:58 Speaker 2
He says don’t worry about expense.
00:13:01 Speaker 2
Don’t worry about time.
00:13:02 Speaker 2
Set up a foolproof library.
00:13:05 Speaker 2
I said, well, do what I can.
00:13:10 Speaker 2
I spent two years building a library.
00:13:13 Speaker 2
Which they still have done that.
00:13:14 Speaker 1
But how do?
00:13:15 Speaker 1
You make it foolproof.
00:13:16 Speaker 2
Cross indexing and I mean really cross indexes.
00:13:20 Speaker 2
We had the card file which had the title of every number and the information on it.
00:13:27 Speaker 2
We had a card file on every artist and all the numbers seemed done.
00:13:31 Speaker 2
And we had.
00:13:33 Speaker 2
Everything was numbered.
00:13:35 Speaker 2
And we cross index types everything.
00:13:38 Speaker 2
I spent two years and all I did was pound the typewriter.
00:13:42 Speaker 2
In the meantime, I’d keep it going with the new records come in.
00:13:45 Speaker 2
But I had the only authority to buy records.
00:13:51 Speaker 2
Took Me 2 years but I got it.
00:13:54 Speaker 1
When you were hired as an announcer, did you do any any selling at all?
00:13:59 Speaker 2
Well, in the old days, with seven of us who did?
00:14:01 Speaker 2
The whole works this this to me was this, to me, was where I was lucky, I think, because.
00:14:10 Speaker 2
You had to sell, you had to go out.
00:14:13 Speaker 2
We didn’t have a staff for sales.
00:14:15 Speaker 2
And the BC electric, which is the hydro now, they had an advertising department, Jim Light body would phone up the I want to go in the air.
00:14:23 Speaker 2
We want to go in there.
00:14:24 Speaker 2
We’ll send somebody now we’d go down I would.
00:14:29 Speaker 2
And uh.
00:14:31 Speaker 2
Go to his office and explain what he wanted.
00:14:34 Speaker 2
I’d fill out the.
00:14:35 Speaker 2
Contract and then he would sign it.
00:14:39 Speaker 2
I’d sign it and we discussed the points he wanted.
00:14:44 Speaker 2
I would make the notes so I would go back to the station.
00:14:46 Speaker 2
I would write the commercial then.
00:14:51 Speaker 2
They were using records, then I would select this program.
00:14:56 Speaker 2
And then I would put it on the air, operate it and then once.
00:15:01 Speaker 1
It came.
00:15:04 Speaker 1
Kept you a little bit busy.
00:15:06 Speaker 2
But you know, but I learned the business.
00:15:07 Speaker 2
You, you know, I learned the business.
00:15:09 Speaker 1
How how much would I presume they were buying 15 minute and half hour programs at the time rather than these small spots as we know?
00:15:16 Speaker 2
No, no spots in those days were usually around a minute every minute.
00:15:21 Speaker 1
But he but he would, would, would he just buy the sponsor?
00:15:24 Speaker 1
Would he buy the 15 minutes or whatever?
00:15:25 Speaker 1
The program was.
00:15:26 Speaker 2
You know, he would buy a program institutional.
00:15:31 Speaker 2
Home, right.
00:15:32 Speaker 2
Also, they also were doing live in the summer from Stanley Park.
00:15:38 Speaker 2
They were doing the Vancouver Symphony and I got the job that was coast to.
00:15:43 Speaker 1
Coast, you were on, you were on the.
00:15:45 Speaker 1
Network that time but.
00:15:45 Speaker 2
Yeah, wonder where the network goes on then.
00:15:49 Speaker 2
I was on.
00:15:49 Speaker 2
I was also.
00:15:50 Speaker 2
I also did network.
00:15:54 Speaker 2
Man from Lake Louise with Mike Kenney and Earl Hill.
00:16:00 Speaker 2
Maria Deskins trio when he’s wild, but.
00:16:05 Speaker 2
And that was that was something we’re rambling, but these are some things that happen in the business.
00:16:10 Speaker 1
The the the network were you on?
00:16:12 Speaker 1
Was that the CBC by that time, or was that still the old CNN network?
00:16:18 Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, I’ve got some scripts in my scrapbook.
00:16:22 Speaker 2
I can give you the exact dates, but I I didn’t bring.
00:16:25 Speaker 2
The book for me.
00:16:25 Speaker 2
Well, it was.
00:16:26 Speaker 1
Prior to 19.
00:16:27 Speaker 1
33 It must have been the CNN.
00:16:30 Speaker 1
Or it could be.
00:16:30 Speaker 2
Yeah, well, it it was around that period.
00:16:33 Speaker 2
But the way the way they worked it the way they worked at that time.
00:16:37 Speaker 2
We got, we got a holiday.
00:16:41 Speaker 2
The CP would give us guest rooms in the hotels both at ramp and Louise because you alternated one day one day, one day back on board and you had to take that old Brewster.
00:16:52 Speaker 2
Things every morning and.
00:16:56 Speaker 2
They would give us that.
00:16:59 Speaker 2
They would give us the rule as a guest and we would eat with the staff.
00:17:05 Speaker 1
But we’re not paid the fees.
00:17:08 Speaker 2
You know no extra pay, but it was a holiday.
00:17:09 Speaker 2
Yeah, and it was really nice because that was.
00:17:12 Speaker 2
That was when Mike Kenny was at Lake Louise with his southern western gentleman.
00:17:17 Speaker 2
Now he’s in Vancouver, he’s still got a big orchestra, but he’s selling real estate.
00:17:20 Speaker 2
That mission.
00:17:22 Speaker 1
Here, well, how how much would a contract?
00:17:24 Speaker 2
Such as you were talking about with me.
00:17:26 Speaker 2
See, electric.
00:17:27 Speaker 2
How much would that cost me?
00:17:28 Speaker 2
The election.
00:17:31 Speaker 2
You know that that, that figure that didn’t bother too much?
00:17:35 Speaker 2
I wasn’t the accountant, so I didn’t bother about it too much. I know spots ran about $2.00 and 2:50 and they were minutes spots.
00:17:44 Speaker 2
But when they bought programs.
00:17:47 Speaker 2
Oh, depending what they had on it, there were no things like production charges.
00:17:52 Speaker 2
No these eggs or you know you.
00:17:54 Speaker 2
You sold the guy you sold the guy 30 minutes on the air for probably, you know, hundred 150. Well, you know the good one because we had no problem.
00:18:07 Speaker 2
Occurred the problem occurred.
00:18:09 Speaker 2
You see, this is before national rates.
00:18:14 Speaker 2
And he had a local right.
00:18:17 Speaker 2
Well, when you’re going to, national rates have to go up because you know, the agencies say, well, we’re going to fiddle around 5050% on local rates. So we had to put rates up.
00:18:30 Speaker 1
Of course, everything was was live too in those.
00:18:33 Speaker 2
Days live we had you know that we had a one hour show on a Friday night.
00:18:39 Speaker 2
Complete live talent.
00:18:42 Speaker 2
Which consisted of a seven piece balalaika orchestra.
00:18:49 Speaker 2
Individual singer a Russian singer, a girl singer.
00:18:54 Speaker 2
A husband and wife team who wrote the show.
00:18:58 Speaker 2
They wrote the show and I I was a pianist and I was doing comedy with my I I did a comedy program with an old white man, an old English word, Roman for nearly 15 years, three times a week.
00:19:12 Speaker 2
You did, you know, you did the whole cocaine thing.
00:19:15 Speaker 2
And we had that show on.
00:19:18 Speaker 2
Every Friday.
00:19:20 Speaker 2
A live talent show.
00:19:21 Speaker 2
What do you think it costs?
00:19:23 Speaker 2
We gave, we gave the guy and his wife.
00:19:25 Speaker 2
We gave the guy and his wife 10 bucks.
00:19:27 Speaker 2
For riding Michelle.
00:19:29 Speaker 2
And everybody else got 3 bucks.
00:19:31 Speaker 2
Except the staff members. But we have had that on for we had that on for couple of years and every show written every week because I remember it happened at 1/1.
00:19:43 Speaker 2
One show.
00:19:45 Speaker 2
One Friday it happened to be my birthday.
00:19:48 Speaker 2
And I couldn’t wait.
00:19:49 Speaker 2
I wouldn’t tell me what we were gonna do, and it was a birthday party for me.
00:19:52 Speaker 2
And the whole thing was scripted and and all the songs fitted in.
00:19:58 Speaker 2
And and this this was fantastic and my old friend Bill Hill.
00:20:00 Speaker 2
I don’t know where he is now, probably dead.
00:20:03 Speaker 2
Now he would know what?
00:20:05 Speaker 2
Well, man, not not a first class hotel man, but a good man.
00:20:10 Speaker 2
Who did the silly English?
00:20:14 Speaker 2
And I used to call him Lord Algebra X.
00:20:18 Speaker 2
We have no quantity, but we have we had.
00:20:22 Speaker 2
I still have a big library of the old theatrical stuff and we used to do.
00:20:28 Speaker 2
We used to do a program.
00:20:32 Speaker 2
And which we wrote our scripts.
00:20:35 Speaker 2
And we did voice impressions.
00:20:40 Speaker 2
Not a movie artist because we had a man in town here who was very good.
00:20:43 Speaker 2
In the movie artist working for the capital.
00:20:45 Speaker 2
They were a runner for the the Capital Theater was filmed runner from one theater to another, was filmed and became one of the four radio robes and.
00:20:57 Speaker 2
We did everything we did all entirely to when we had a southern gag and we filled it with old, wonderful songs from one thing or another.
00:21:07 Speaker 2
Another thing that turned at one time I had a Roundtree account, one time for chocolate bars and.
00:21:15 Speaker 2
A girl who married the engineer from CBC.
00:21:21 Speaker 2
Eileen Eileen soon forgotten her name.
00:21:26 Speaker 2
Was a fine concert pianist.
00:21:29 Speaker 2
And we played two pianos.
00:21:33 Speaker 2
We played two pianos together and we call it nice and Nifty, spelt with A K nice and nifty.
00:21:40 Speaker 2
And I wrote this script entirely in verse.
00:21:47 Speaker 2
And that what was one account that I have?
00:21:51 Speaker 1
It was.
00:21:52 Speaker 1
It was quite a quite a time in radio as I said, and again being live were there any times when you got stuck on air with your tongue caught between your teeth.
00:22:01 Speaker 2
No, but I had something just as bad.
00:22:03 Speaker 2
I used to do a lot of outdoor outside work, you know?
00:22:05 Speaker 2
I mean, I.
00:22:06 Speaker 2
And he went up the ladder while I was program director.
00:22:09 Speaker 2
And what have you.
00:22:10 Speaker 2
And we still didn’t have a big fat staff, you know, in the early days and.
00:22:15 Speaker 2
Ross McIntyre built a 60 pound shortwave pack and over here in Stanley Park.
00:22:21 Speaker 2
I don’t know.
00:22:22 Speaker 2
Have you been in the park?
00:22:23 Speaker 2
We’ve seen the.
00:22:23 Speaker 2
Theatre there.
00:22:25 Speaker 2
The stage, but underneath they had a a sound equipment.
00:22:28 Speaker 2
They have a sound equipment room.
00:22:30 Speaker 2
Ross put a shortwave pickup in there.
00:22:34 Speaker 2
And I would put the pack on.
00:22:37 Speaker 2
And we would do the we would do, for instance, the legends, the Indian legends which I used to do with Ron Holland who was the chairman of the Parks Board and we would go.
00:22:48 Speaker 2
To the exact spot.
00:22:50 Speaker 2
No cable or anything, just this me with a 60 pound pack and we would do the Indian legend and it was done in a sort of a semi interview.
00:23:00 Speaker 2
Roll would give me questions.
00:23:04 Speaker 2
And we would sit and talk right in that exact spot where the legend existed.
00:23:10 Speaker 2
And this was early days.
00:23:11 Speaker 2
And I mean well, not the real early days, but I’m talking about there was no, there was no guidelines.
00:23:18 Speaker 2
So we experimented.
00:23:19 Speaker 2
We did so many things that were ridiculous.
00:23:22 Speaker 2
But they always seemed to click and we built up a terrific reputation.
00:23:25 Speaker 2
If anything happens.
00:23:26 Speaker 2
In fact, I’ve got it.
00:23:28 Speaker 2
Jack Scott in one of his columns said if anything happens in Vancouver, look for fried bass.
00:23:33 Speaker 2
He’s there.
00:23:35 Speaker 2
We even had shortwave shortwave equipment.
00:23:39 Speaker 2
On the fire hall.
00:23:42 Speaker 2
And Tripp Coleman, last time I was in Montreal or the 667 I was in Montreal because I did the.
00:23:49 Speaker 2
Entire. I did the entire UM 67 Expo travel. Coleman was the head PR man for CP.
00:24:01 Speaker 2
At the Windsor St.
00:24:02 Speaker 2
Station, Montreal Travel used to be the PR here, and he wired every platform of the station so that we could just go down and plug in.
00:24:12 Speaker 2
And he says, well, it doesn’t matter who comes in. He says you guys are down here for it, you know, Deanna Durbin and the premiers of the the prime ministers that were coming through Massey and the old old Bennett. WW Bennett. No hobby Bennett.
00:24:33 Speaker 2
They all came through and then we had.
00:24:36 Speaker 2
We had people like Gracie Fields coming in.
00:24:38 Speaker 2
In fact, I was.
00:24:39 Speaker 2
Gracie Fields favored announced came in on a came in on a yacht one time here from Victoria from Vancouver, and I was down there, of course waiting.
00:24:49 Speaker 2
And as they as they ducked.
00:24:52 Speaker 2
He said.
00:24:52 Speaker 2
Where’s me bold eddied announcer.
00:24:55 Speaker 2
She always look for me and I’ve interviewed her in her bedroom at the hotel.
00:24:59 Speaker 1
Yeah, but you see, we we had this shortwave outfit that we could use.
00:25:03 Speaker 1
And you, you then transmitted back to the station where they picked it up and.
00:25:06 Speaker 1
And aired it as in.
00:25:07 Speaker 2
It went straight into the young one.
00:25:08 Speaker 2
The we had that pick up downtown, we would go down.
00:25:12 Speaker 2
You see, we played uninterrupted symphonies in the afternoon from about two to four 4:30.
00:25:21 Speaker 2
And that was run from the transmitter. This is the early days that was run from the transmitter. I was on the air at 6:30 in the morning, and then I did a live.
00:25:32 Speaker 2
I played piano and announced a show at noon with a singer or our local optometrist here, and we went on for years.
00:25:41 Speaker 2
But I used to set my volume and they would control from the transmitter.
00:25:48 Speaker 2
I just set my volume out, we go, but we do the do the whole thing.
00:25:54 Speaker 1
Well, your hours would be rather long. What? What with one thing and another. You said you’re on at 6:30 in the morning. What? What time did you finish up at night?
00:26:01 Speaker 2
City on some nice, you know?
00:26:03 Speaker 2
Well, I mean, this was this was you.
00:26:04 Speaker 2
Know but before that.
00:26:07 Speaker 2
After I first got started on the transmitter.
00:26:11 Speaker 2
See kid.
00:26:11 Speaker 2
Nobody likes talked to a cafe.
00:26:14 Speaker 2
There was a fellow who was very radio minded, had a cafe right next door to the theater that I’d been working in.
00:26:22 Speaker 2
He built a studio down in the basement and made a deal with C KWX, and I would do programs from that cafe.
00:26:31 Speaker 2
This left out after I was out of.
00:26:33 Speaker 2
The theater I would do programs from from there and finally we the uh finally.
00:26:40 Speaker 2
We ended up by the Pacific Coast terminals there at the at Westminster, which is on the waterfront where they have the big rooms full of fruit and vegetables in the control rooms and salmon and what have.
00:26:51 Speaker 2
You they had a board of directors room up there, which they turned into a studio for us.
00:26:58 Speaker 2
And so we did it from there because at that time.
00:27:00 Speaker 2
It was sharing three stations were sharing the one wavelength.
00:27:04 Speaker 1
What was?
00:27:05 Speaker 1
What was the reason for that?
00:27:06 Speaker 1
I I keep asking this question because this was a very common thing and.
00:27:10 Speaker 2
And and the first well in the 1st place, we must remember what it was low.
00:27:15 Speaker 2
Well, the Vancouver problem.
00:27:18 Speaker 2
Had a license.
00:27:20 Speaker 2
And they only wanted it for their news.
00:27:23 Speaker 2
Which is 15 minutes.
00:27:25 Speaker 2
At night.
00:27:27 Speaker 2
And I had a full name, old Cody.
00:27:28 Speaker 2
It was quite a character.
00:27:30 Speaker 2
He was known as Mr.
00:27:31 Speaker 2
Good Evening, Holly.
00:27:32 Speaker 2
He always came out that way and he always signed up by saying and we wish all our June brides a pleasant evening.
00:27:40 Speaker 2
Good night.
00:27:41 Speaker 2
And they always talked about the steamship, but when I was going up the coast and he had a very deliberate.
00:27:48 Speaker 2
He was all he looked like Kaiser billing away a great guy.
00:27:52 Speaker 2
And people used to wonder where he got all the girls, whether he used the young girls he used to play tennis with.
00:27:57 Speaker 2
But you you’ve got a character and I used to watch him because he came over to US studios and work for a while and he would put a long sheet of paper into the machine, yellow sheet carbon copy and he would start up and he’d.
00:28:12 Speaker 2
Tap out his title, then he would put a heading and.
00:28:16 Speaker 2
Then he would.
00:28:17 Speaker 2
Switch it down so many lines, another heading and he lined it up that way first.
00:28:22 Speaker 2
But he was very much like our Connie because he used to go through this motion.
00:28:25 Speaker 2
You know, the art.
00:28:26 Speaker 2
Connie was his.
00:28:38 Speaker 2
Switch it down so many lines, not a heady.
00:28:40 Speaker 2
And he lined it up that way first, but he was very much like our Connie because he used to go through this motion.
00:28:45 Speaker 2
You know the art, Connie with his waving his hands around, and they would do that.
00:28:50 Speaker 2
And you didn’t say a word while he was doing it, but he became a character and everybody remembered Mr.
00:28:56 Speaker 2
Good, he did.
00:28:58 Speaker 2
And he was a character.
00:29:00 Speaker 2
Well, they had a license for that.
00:29:04 Speaker 2
We had a license for little longer broadcasting than that.
00:29:08 Speaker 2
And there was a an experimental license for a church on Sunday.
00:29:15 Speaker 2
And so the thing was that the three were all in the.
00:29:20 Speaker 1
11 frequency.
00:29:21 Speaker 2
And the one frequency was split, you see and then when the when we went after power increase, the authorities, the powers that be said.
00:29:31 Speaker 2
Well, we can give it here, but you’ve got to amalgamate in some form.
00:29:37 Speaker 2
So this is when we.
00:29:39 Speaker 2
We discussed it.
00:29:41 Speaker 2
We amalgamated with the province for theirs, but the.
00:29:47 Speaker 2
They would take it on like a Wednesday night. We would shut down WDX at 7:30 on a Wednesday night, and the province would come on and they had a big room down there and where they had a character called Uncle Billy Hassell, who had a western program and a program about dogs and that he would go on, you see.
00:30:07 Speaker 2
And then it would be Knights when I would go over to Westminster.
00:30:11 Speaker 2
And broadcast from Westminster.
00:30:15 Speaker 2
And we were on the move all the time we were.
00:30:17 Speaker 2
Always on the.
00:30:18 Speaker 2
Go and.
00:30:21 Speaker 2
When we amalgamated the United Church, had it was the Wesley Church, and they knew what it was, only an experimental of E, something E7, something they insisted on.
00:30:34 Speaker 2
They wanted their church programme on in the morning, which was quite a hassle because they they, you know, they kind of pushed the button and.
00:30:42 Speaker 2
We don’t come if you don’t go, you know.
00:30:46 Speaker 2
And that was a condition that existed for quite a while.
00:30:49 Speaker 2
But the three were on the one bit wavelength.
00:30:53 Speaker 1
The church services, of course, were fairly big items, and nearly these representative considerable chunk of weed programming.
00:30:56 Speaker 2
Oh yeah. Oh yes.
00:31:01 Speaker 2
If yeah, we used we had Friday night.
00:31:04 Speaker 2
So you started the British along with Pusssy King.
00:31:06 Speaker 2
He was on for now.
00:31:08 Speaker 2
A man who built quite a reputation in forecasting you from the Bible.
00:31:13 Speaker 2
What is happening today and he was.
00:31:15 Speaker 2
Right.
00:31:16 Speaker 2
And was quite right, but he was a real student of.
00:31:19 Speaker 2
It and we had that and then we had this church.
00:31:23 Speaker 2
They talking about the the, the, the tongue twisting thing.
00:31:26 Speaker 2
I had one of the funniest things that happened to me.
00:31:28 Speaker 2
Opened, we opened everything and bridges.
00:31:31 Speaker 2
We opened the Patello bridge.
00:31:32 Speaker 2
We opened the Lions Gate Bridge and we opened the YMCA building on Broad Street.
00:31:40 Speaker 2
There was a big civic dinner for the whole the big people, and they’re having this at the City Hall or someplace.
00:31:46 Speaker 2
And I am put at the.
00:31:49 Speaker 2
Doorway of the YMCA with your backpack and no, this was this was this was a line job.
00:31:57 Speaker 2
I was put there with equipment, but I only had 6 feet of cable because you know, everything was going to happen at the door.
00:32:03 Speaker 2
The opening ceremony, if you.
00:32:04 Speaker 2
See and.
00:32:05 Speaker 2
It’s going to take place at 9:00.
00:32:06 Speaker 2
O’clock nine o’clock.
00:32:08 Speaker 2
There’s no dignitaries.
00:32:10 Speaker 2
I’ve got six week.
00:32:16 Speaker 2
And lived.
00:32:18 Speaker 2
They turned up at 20. After nine. We were up there at 9:30.
00:32:23 Speaker 1
So you never did get the get the dignitaries on.
00:32:27 Speaker 2
We got we, you know, we just got them on that was it and you know for 20 minutes I had lived there.
00:32:32 Speaker 1
What did you talk about?
00:32:34 Speaker 2
I don’t know, but I talked.
00:32:38 Speaker 2
This is where my my theoretical training came in handy is because in the early days of show business you did a lot of ad libbing.
00:32:46 Speaker 2
You know, I still do a lot of that.
00:32:48 Speaker 2
I work with people on shows.
00:32:50 Speaker 2
I go up the Yukon.
00:32:52 Speaker 2
And I work with one particular girl.
00:32:57 Speaker 2
Up there.
00:32:59 Speaker 2
And she’s just as good and that liberal as I am.
00:33:02 Speaker 2
And we will, we would, we will be entertaining and good when I had lived, that just goes on and on and on.
00:33:07 Speaker 2
And it’s full of laughs because we’re, you know, the wheels are going around.
00:33:12 Speaker 1
And you’re professional about?
00:33:13 Speaker 2
It you know, well, I never used the script in my life.
00:33:18 Speaker 2
Never used the script.
00:33:20 Speaker 2
I would have maybe one or two important points written on a piece of paper.
00:33:24 Speaker 2
I’ve never used the.
00:33:24 Speaker 1
Script support, except when you’re reading commercials.
00:33:27 Speaker 1
It would be.
00:33:27 Speaker 2
A different well commercial.
00:33:29 Speaker 2
Yeah, but I’m talking about outside events, you know.
00:33:32 Speaker 2
And we did a lot of it.
00:33:34 Speaker 2
In fact, we build a big reputation on it.
00:33:36 Speaker 2
We we really did like for instance.
00:33:38 Speaker 2
For the big fire, one night I was broadcasting.
00:33:42 Speaker 2
There, there’s a story I’ll tell you about something too.
00:33:44 Speaker 2
About what?
00:33:45 Speaker 2
I’ve been broadcasting a quartet with the pipe organ from the capital there.
00:33:52 Speaker 2
And just as I was, I’d packed just finishing and I put my.
00:33:58 Speaker 2
Earphones up on my ears.
00:34:01 Speaker 2
Everything was OK and listened to him signing off from the transmitter and it was watched.
00:34:06 Speaker 2
And he says, hey, Freddy says, Graping fire on Hamilton St.
00:34:09 Speaker 2
get over there, he said.
00:34:10 Speaker 2
Meet you with the.
00:34:11 Speaker 2
Back and it was a butter, butter and peanut butter and margarine place.
00:34:17 Speaker 2
And boy, it was really going but.
00:34:20 Speaker 2
The Fire Chief had been a Sergeant with me in France in the First World War, so I had to pass the police we had.
00:34:27 Speaker 2
We had passes through the police line, so I go down there and sure enough, there’s Ross.
00:34:33 Speaker 2
He’s got the package travel on my shoulder and I go with the fireman right into it.
00:34:38 Speaker 2
Stand right with the nozzle so you get the switch of the water and generally describe it and this this is the sort of thing we did.
00:34:44 Speaker 2
Nobody said you couldn’t do it, but it was always a challenge.
00:34:48 Speaker 2
We had no guidelines.
00:34:49 Speaker 2
Well, you were in.
00:34:50 Speaker 2
You were inventing radio.
00:34:51 Speaker 2
We were renting, you know, idiotic things like.
00:34:56 Speaker 2
Selling 2 minutes of silence.
00:34:58 Speaker 2
Would you believe that possible?
00:35:00 Speaker 1
I believe it.
00:35:01 Speaker 1
I wish more people would do it.
00:35:02 Speaker 2
These days, well, I think the fund is going out of the business.
00:35:06 Speaker 1
That’s something everybody, everybody says.
00:35:09 Speaker 1
This fund has gone out of business.
00:35:10 Speaker 1
Is it because it’s?
00:35:11 Speaker 1
Become a business now.
00:35:13 Speaker 1
And you can’t.
00:35:14 Speaker 1
You can’t fool around.
00:35:15 Speaker 2
We didn’t make any money, you know, 2530, but $5 raise is a big deal. But as it went up because it went up, the thing, The thing is, I’ve got a few little anecdotes that you can work in if you want to use them.
00:35:31 Speaker 2
He goes through.
00:35:34 Speaker 2
And this quartet I’m talking about.
00:35:38 Speaker 2
There was a corner St.
00:35:40 Speaker 2
club I belong to Quanis and I belong to a variety and and I’m a life member and actor and I’m a life member and the musicians, you know, I’ve everything I’ve got is a lifeguard and.
00:35:55 Speaker 2
We had we had a a blank spot come up.
00:36:01 Speaker 2
And this was a Friday night.
00:36:03 Speaker 2
This is after the after one of these.
00:36:07 Speaker 2
Later on, after the shows had finished the Friday night show, there was a Friday night.
00:36:14 Speaker 2
And I got talking to holstead about it.
00:36:17 Speaker 2
I said, what are we going to do?
00:36:19 Speaker 2
You know, it’s just see if you can get a hold of him, see if you.
00:36:21 Speaker 2
Can get hold of something.
00:36:22 Speaker 2
We’ll do a.
00:36:22 Speaker 2
Half an hour, so I remember the come on the street, on the filler on you with the name of Ray Holbrook, who was working for an automobile tire company here.
00:36:37 Speaker 2
And I got hold of Ray and I said, Ricky, could you fill up Friday night for me?
00:36:41 Speaker 2
Doing hell now he says fine.
00:36:43 Speaker 2
So we got talking about life and what you gonna do.
00:36:45 Speaker 2
And he said, he said, why don’t you try and get some of the boys some some.
00:36:49 Speaker 2
Of the other.
00:36:49 Speaker 2
Boys from the street to make a quartet.
00:36:55 Speaker 2
Because I’m preparing this a couple of days ahead, you see, and I said, Oh dear.
00:37:01 Speaker 2
Well, we’ll try it.
00:37:04 Speaker 2
So he got a bass singer Burning Bill Carr.
00:37:15 Speaker 2
A high tenant and baritone basing.
00:37:19 Speaker 2
No, they didn’t have a basing on this, right?
00:37:22 Speaker 2
I’ve been going to.
00:37:23 Speaker 2
Be the basing.
00:37:24 Speaker 2
I’m going to announce the program I’m going to play it.
00:37:26 Speaker 2
I’m going to be.
00:37:27 Speaker 2
A poop.
00:37:27 Speaker 2
Poop. Poop. Poop. But anyway.
00:37:31 Speaker 2
These fellas are scared to death.
00:37:32 Speaker 2
The other two guys.
00:37:32 Speaker 2
Were scared to death.
00:37:35 Speaker 2
So I just said, look, we work it this way.
00:37:37 Speaker 2
I said right and.
00:37:38 Speaker 2
I’ll start.
00:37:39 Speaker 2
It, I said.
00:37:41 Speaker 2
You make a lot of noise outside on the window or something and make a lot of noise, I said.
00:37:46 Speaker 2
I’ll get you in and I built a little skit, but here’s the general or the window washer outside doing the window washing, you see.
00:37:53 Speaker 2
And he’s making a lot of noise and I get him to come in and, you know, can he sing and so forth.
00:37:59 Speaker 2
And we fixed up some other.
00:38:01 Speaker 2
Kind of an entrance to the other guy and we did.
00:38:04 Speaker 2
We did a program.
00:38:08 Speaker 2
Right after the program finished.
00:38:11 Speaker 2
Spud Bobby, who was the we all had nickname from The Who was the boss of this company phones up, he says.
00:38:18 Speaker 2
He’s like that quartet you had tonight.
00:38:20 Speaker 2
I said good.
00:38:22 Speaker 2
He says.
00:38:24 Speaker 2
What time you got available on Sundays?
00:38:28 Speaker 2
Well, I said, why are you interested in buying?
00:38:29 Speaker 2
He says.
00:38:30 Speaker 2
You know, I said, well, we’ll, I’ll send it this time.
00:38:32 Speaker 2
We had said, I’ll send the serial number.
00:38:36 Speaker 2
Salesman comes back and it’s two nights later.
00:38:39 Speaker 2
He wants to show, but both he wants his wants his quartet.
00:38:44 Speaker 2
We had no scene that no, nothing, you know.
00:38:46 Speaker 2
So I got the follows in a hurry and I said look, let’s let’s do something about it as it’s bud wants a program this Sunday night.
00:38:52 Speaker 2
We’re doing this on a Friday and he wants it Sunday.
00:38:56 Speaker 2
And he picked.
00:39:03 Speaker 2
Was it 8 to 9 or 9 to 10 because we had the home gas?
00:39:10 Speaker 2
Considering going on and with with the big orchestra.
00:39:13 Speaker 2
But anyway it was around that period of the evening you’ll be 9 to 10.
00:39:21 Speaker 2
We worked this thing out, you see.
00:39:24 Speaker 2
What are we going to do?
00:39:25 Speaker 2
And I took an old I took an old melody, an old southern melody ***** melody.
00:39:31 Speaker 2
Oh, cool way down South and I wrote the words both be breaks.
00:39:41 Speaker 2
Don’t for gambians.
00:39:42 Speaker 2
Bobby and I wrote a scene.
00:39:46 Speaker 2
Near the guy standing here with this thing, they knew that you and they didn’t know me.
00:39:50 Speaker 2
You know, that program is on for nine years.
00:39:54 Speaker 1
I presume it got a little a little more organized as.
00:39:57 Speaker 2
Oh yeah, because if I was singing.
00:40:00 Speaker 2
Can you imagine working?
00:40:01 Speaker 2
We worked in the Orpheum Theatre for at that time.
00:40:04 Speaker 2
We were working different theatres.
00:40:05 Speaker 2
Australian the capital and the Orpheum.
00:40:07 Speaker 2
We all had good organs, you know.
00:40:09 Speaker 2
And the Orpheum.
00:40:10 Speaker 2
The Orpheum theatre.
00:40:12 Speaker 2
We had to hang big, heavy drapes down from the lodges on account of the acoustics.
00:40:17 Speaker 2
There was quite a lag.
00:40:21 Speaker 2
The quartet sang down at the microphone by the organ.
00:40:26 Speaker 2
And I announced from up against the big black velvet curtain hanging down.
00:40:31 Speaker 2
Then I had to dash down and sing bass, and I can always remember the first show we did on that too.
00:40:38 Speaker 2
It was Rachman Australian, and I was doing the the big Low sea, you know, sea sharp.
00:40:47 Speaker 2
You know, they finally got to the point, boy, they said you should getting a little too much.
00:40:51 Speaker 2
And I found that they, they they searched around and we we found a found named Bill Carr who took it and that program ran for 9 years.
00:41:02 Speaker 1
What were you paying the other people that we were in there?
00:41:05 Speaker 1
Obviously they weren’t station employees.
00:41:06 Speaker 1
You were.
00:41:07 Speaker 2
But they they they.
00:41:10 Speaker 2
But they got I think they got about 10 bucks on that, something that, you know, you know, no big money in.
00:41:15 Speaker 2
Those days when you could buy any talent for 3 bucks.
00:41:20 Speaker 1
And then people wanted to go out and.
00:41:21 Speaker 1
Love you too.
00:41:22 Speaker 1
An awful lot of.
00:41:22 Speaker 1
Them came on for nothing.
00:41:23 Speaker 2
Well, this was the point.
00:41:24 Speaker 2
I’m just going to just going to tell you something about that.
00:41:28 Speaker 2
I was programmed when I when I when I they made me program director.
00:41:33 Speaker 2
Program manager.
00:41:35 Speaker 2
I had a talent bill for one week.
00:41:38 Speaker 2
Knock your.
00:41:40 Speaker 2
$27.00, As you say, everybody wanted to get in the action and all you all you had to do was say, well, you know, everybody had had talent came along, we had live talent on at 8:00 o’clock in the morning with about 40 people.
00:41:58 Speaker 2
Which included an orchestra and everything else.
00:42:00 Speaker 2
I have them and getting pretty tall.
00:42:02 Speaker 2
They just wanted to be.
00:42:02 Speaker 1
In radio anyway.
00:42:05 Speaker 1
It’s gotten to the point where it’s it’s nothing much more in the jukebox anymore.
00:42:10 Speaker 2
Another fight on for that.
00:42:12 Speaker 2
You know what a lot of money turning the country X dropped its.
00:42:17 Speaker 2
Talk shows.
00:42:19 Speaker 2
Went country and they’ve been doing better since, but.
00:42:24 Speaker 2
I was a good old station and I enjoyed working for it and I enjoyed working for those people and they were happy days.
00:42:30 Speaker 2
And I said we didn’t make much money in the early days, but.
00:42:33 Speaker 2
It would make we were lucky, but.
00:42:37 Speaker 2
Came the bump in 29. I remember Leo Nicholson.
00:42:41 Speaker 2
Was over on CJR and Leo had a children’s program.
00:42:54 Speaker 2
He was doing his children’s program.
00:42:56 Speaker 2
He mentioned a cafe where he got his meals for nothing.
00:43:00 Speaker 2
And you mentioned a rooming house where he was living and he got that and that was their pain.
00:43:06 Speaker 2
And this Eileen Robertson Robinson was her name at the time that worked with me in this nice and nifty dear.
00:43:11 Speaker 2
She was a freelancer.
00:43:14 Speaker 2
Eileen worked for for a butcher.
00:43:17 Speaker 2
She got no money, but she got roasted beef and things like that.
00:43:21 Speaker 2
That’s how bad it well.
00:43:23 Speaker 1
Eating and sleeping were the essential things.
00:43:25 Speaker 1
And then you had fun.
00:43:26 Speaker 1
In between.
00:43:27 Speaker 1
I often wonder if everybody spent so much time at the stations because they weren’t getting paid enough to do anything else.
00:43:33 Speaker 2
No, the thing was no, the thing was that.
00:43:37 Speaker 2
The way I see it, when I look back, I mean, it didn’t bother us at that time, but there’s something about working in radio where you’ve got to challenge all the time.
00:43:48 Speaker 2
You never notice time.
00:43:51 Speaker 2
You’ll never.
00:43:52 Speaker 1
Notice well, in a job there was there was a.
00:43:54 Speaker 1
Hobby regularly.
00:43:54 Speaker 2
It was a hobby and I’ve been very lucky in my life because theatre, I was thrown into that and it became my hobby and I loved every minute and I still love every minute of it because I’ve I’ve done everything.
00:43:55 Speaker 1
Eaten it was.
00:44:07 Speaker 2
I worked. I worked for Columbia Films at the station, used to lend me to go and do pictures for for Columbia films. I did. I did 66 films in three years for Columbia.
00:44:18 Speaker 2
All because they were going to do 1 here and somebody in Hollywood knew me, said get all afraid, bass.
00:44:23 Speaker 2
You’ll get you all the local college.
00:44:24 Speaker 2
You want and I end up by playing a drunk.
00:44:28 Speaker 2
They were going to bring in, it was going to be expensive to bring in the house.
00:44:31 Speaker 2
The houseman from.
00:44:33 Speaker 2
From Hollywood and.
00:44:38 Speaker 2
I got the job because I started clowning around and the man that did me that put me in that was a freelance director and named Nick Brendy who.
00:44:49 Speaker 2
Was a director of freelance director.
00:44:52 Speaker 2
Work with Frank Capra.
00:44:55 Speaker 2
Another thing, another thing that I always get a big kick out of is my scrapbook.
00:45:01 Speaker 2
I worked in the first picture of Rita Hayworth ever.
00:45:03 Speaker 2
Worked in.
00:45:04 Speaker 2
And she couldn’t even speak English.
00:45:07 Speaker 2
And and that was a fur hijacking story with Charlie Starrett in the lead called the Devil.
00:45:13 Speaker 2
And Herman.
00:45:16 Speaker 2
And we had to teach her fanatically every night.
00:45:19 Speaker 2
She used to sit like a bump on the log.
00:45:20 Speaker 2
And if we weren’t working, we weren’t shooting at night, she said in the hotel room.
00:45:25 Speaker 2
Say nothing, little black hair girl.
00:45:28 Speaker 2
And she came from the Consuelo family in Mexico, who were a bunch of travelling oddies.
00:45:34 Speaker 2
And he would sit there and we’d be playing Penny and him.
00:45:40 Speaker 2
We had the all the different members of the crew.
00:45:43 Speaker 2
One thing in that picture we had with another man that I admired very much.
00:45:47 Speaker 2
He was a man that did the lighting for that lama scene in Shangri-La.
00:45:51 Speaker 2
The old Lama sitting there, the beautiful lighting job he was with us on that show.
00:45:57 Speaker 2
We were only doing the bee thing, you know, and the other things would kind of be and.
00:46:05 Speaker 2
That that was that was one highlight, not a highlight in the early days of radio too was uh.
00:46:13 Speaker 2
When were the major Bose units used to come through here?
00:46:15 Speaker 2
The old pantages?
00:46:17 Speaker 2
In my scrapbook.
00:46:18 Speaker 2
I have a list of people that were on one of the bills.
00:46:21 Speaker 2
I interviewed them all.
00:46:22 Speaker 2
You know, everybody in the interview.
00:46:23 Speaker 2
Go get an interview.
00:46:25 Speaker 2
Say, playing records and.
00:46:28 Speaker 2
One of the names is Frank Sinatra.
00:46:32 Speaker 2
We interviewed on the Dover Durman when she was on her way down to do.
00:46:35 Speaker 2
The her first picture.
00:46:36 Speaker 2
She came through Vancouver, I met with.
00:46:38 Speaker 1
The train.
00:46:39 Speaker 1
Well, you’re one of the first stations I’ve come across that seems to have have gone.
00:46:44 Speaker 1
I guess you today you’d probably call it public affairs.
00:46:47 Speaker 1
That is, the live interviews and the the actual news events.
00:46:51 Speaker 2
Well, this is how we built.
00:46:52 Speaker 2
This is how we build a high rating.
00:46:54 Speaker 2
We we did not get away from the public.
Part 2
Transcript
00:00:03 Speaker 1
The public we went to the public.
00:00:07 Speaker 2
Well, what did they?
00:00:08 Speaker 2
Have in the way of newscasts as as such they used to be 15 minute programming as opposed to what we had.
00:00:13 Speaker 1
News news cars were pretty well the same.
00:00:15 Speaker 1
We had the the teletypes, and when they eventually you know, but they used to be pretty well the same.
00:00:21 Speaker 1
The teletypes and newspapers.
00:00:23 Speaker 1
Reporters on the street we see we did a lot of outside work.
00:00:27 Speaker 1
In fact, we did more outside work.
00:00:29 Speaker 1
I think we did playing records.
00:00:30 Speaker 1
That’s why we were able to take that two to four in the afternoon and play an uninterrupted Symphony.
00:00:35 Speaker 1
That was our contribution. We also had. We also had a there was a network show that we used to get from Stanley, Max said CP in the morning at 10:30.
00:00:46 Speaker 1
And he makes the and that used to come from somewhere back East.
00:00:52 Speaker 1
But then we got tied in with the mutual.
00:00:54 Speaker 1
Network eventually.
00:00:57 Speaker 1
And so you know.
00:00:58 Speaker 1
We had lots.
00:00:58 Speaker 1
Of you know, you know to see the set up now and she’s going there now.
00:01:03 Speaker 1
There’s still some of the old boys there too, but not not as far back as I went, but some of the old boys that came there when I when I get the when I get the quarter century Club.
00:01:16 Speaker 1
Listing which I’m a member.
00:01:21 Speaker 1
I go down all that list and I just tick off the boys that used to work at WX.
00:01:27 Speaker 1
We were a great training ground.
00:01:29 Speaker 1
We were something else we did too.
00:01:34 Speaker 1
We ran.
00:01:35 Speaker 1
This was later on when we’re Seymour St.
00:01:39 Speaker 1
We ran a radio training class at the UBC and they got diplomas and everything and they got not only got the so many weeks theoretical and they got so many weeks actual training and when you go to.
00:01:57 Speaker 1
I guess it’s like.
00:01:59 Speaker 1
You’re bumping the Ron Robinson.
00:02:01 Speaker 1
Ron Robinson was one of the boys that is now assistant manager or something.
00:02:06 Speaker 1
One of the space over there.
00:02:09 Speaker 1
He’s one of the boys that we got from that school and the authorities said they stopped it.
00:02:19 Speaker 1
Because it was a commercial club.
00:02:21 Speaker 1
But we gave them an entire library.
00:02:23 Speaker 1
We gave them the World library there at the world transcription.
00:02:27 Speaker 1
We gave them the entire library out there because they have their own little set up around there in the UBC.
00:02:33 Speaker 2
Doing reviews these, but we were training.
00:02:36 Speaker 1
No, they’re getting trying to get the BCIT, you know.
00:02:40 Speaker 1
But you know these these we did things in those days that they’re just messing around with and they’re coming back again.
00:02:48 Speaker 2
We’re talking.
00:02:49 Speaker 2
We’re coming back to think.
00:02:50 Speaker 2
Of your word, of course.
00:02:51 Speaker 2
At the.
00:02:52 Speaker 2
CRC has recently said that FM is going to have to be something.
00:02:56 Speaker 2
More than you know, wall to wall recorded music.
00:03:01 Speaker 2
Is there any chance that because of those regulations we might get back a little bit to sort of the variety, the drama programs and certain things?
00:03:08 Speaker 1
I I doubt it.
00:03:09 Speaker 1
I doubt it because there’s too much cutthroat business too much.
00:03:14 Speaker 1
I doubt it.
00:03:15 Speaker 1
The now it’s all sports, all sports.
00:03:18 Speaker 1
How long that’s going to last.
00:03:19 Speaker 1
I don’t know.
00:03:20 Speaker 1
It’s just like in in the show.
00:03:23 Speaker 1
People who got getting fed up with all this sexual stuff and all that, and that’s the amazing thing to me because I do a lot of it and I travel lots of places.
00:03:31 Speaker 1
I do live in the winter Carnival and a lot of.
00:03:34 Speaker 1
This is.
00:03:35 Speaker 1
I go to the Yukon.
00:03:37 Speaker 1
I’ve been three times in the Yukon since since I quit the Yukon.
00:03:41 Speaker 1
I had eight years, 8 summers, 15 weeks of a crack with it, with a live show and.
00:03:48 Speaker 1
I quit it because it started to affect my health.
00:03:51 Speaker 1
And poor living conditions are actually because of eating and.
00:03:57 Speaker 1
Cheap restaurants sort of stuff and I had to quit it.
00:04:02 Speaker 1
But I’ve been doing two week shots and this sort of thing I’m doing so I.
00:04:07 Speaker 1
Guess this is these places and.
00:04:13 Speaker 1
It amazes me how the young people come along and they say.
00:04:18 Speaker 1
Well, I’ll give you an instance in in Dawson City.
00:04:22 Speaker 1
Got through the show one night and that well it was had to go out in the front of the house.
00:04:25 Speaker 1
We did it for the Governor General and everybody you know, they all came through and off the lanes and their other Lang.
00:04:31 Speaker 1
I knew him as a young fella and he and I were all old friends.
00:04:35 Speaker 1
In fact, I got kidding. He he had the governor of the Bank of Canada with him one-on-one trip.
00:04:43 Speaker 1
And I raised the point about I didn’t think the dollar was worth a dollar.
00:04:47 Speaker 1
And he said, well, have you got a dollar?
00:04:49 Speaker 1
And I said no, I said.
00:04:50 Speaker 1
Oh, let me block.
00:04:51 Speaker 1
So I gave me a a dollar.
00:04:54 Speaker 1
And what was his name now?
00:04:56 Speaker 1
Not not our present left hand, not our present.
00:04:59 Speaker 1
Governor of the bank with the one before him.
00:05:05 Speaker 1
So he said, well, he says that’s my signature on the front.
00:05:10 Speaker 1
You will. The country will pay me $1.00.
00:05:14 Speaker 1
The dollar isn’t worth the dollar. The date. This is all around about 69 of them and.
00:05:23 Speaker 1
He said give me the bell and I still got it.
00:05:26 Speaker 1
He turned over the back and he wrote his signature guaranteed to guarantee that, you know, so many things like that.
00:05:39 Speaker 1
But these are, these are little little anecdotes.
00:05:41 Speaker 1
And I’m kind of wondering.
00:05:42 Speaker 1
Around over my years and mixing show business and and radio and you’re more concerned with radio and however the tapes can be edited.
00:05:50 Speaker 1
That’s that’s the beauty of it.
00:05:53 Speaker 1
But if you ever get ambitious, maybe you’d like to ghost write.
00:05:57 Speaker 2
I’d love to, you know, sit down and do about 60 hours worth of this and then.
00:06:02 Speaker 1
Well, I’ve got.
00:06:04 Speaker 1
I’ve got.
00:06:05 Speaker 1
I’ve got a a large tape record of the big tape.
00:06:11 Speaker 2
Like with you.
00:06:12 Speaker 1
If you ever be interested and let me know and I’ll just ramble around about the early days and some of the stuff I’ve told you now and and I’ve I’ve got a few personal experiences that, for instance, did you know that I was?
00:06:24 Speaker 1
Only given I was only given three months to live in 1920.
00:06:29 Speaker 2
I suppose the doctors are all dead by now.
00:06:32 Speaker 2
I suppose the doctors are all.
00:06:33 Speaker 1
Dead by now?
00:06:34 Speaker 1
Well, I don’t know, but this this is dealing with the war.
00:06:38 Speaker 1
I got wounded.
00:06:39 Speaker 1
On October the 18th, 1918, just three weeks before the Youngesters.
00:06:44 Speaker 1
That was in the last 100 days I got wounded and I got shot between the eyes.
00:06:48 Speaker 1
Here it was a actually it was a a spent piece of a nose cap.
00:06:53 Speaker 1
But it got me between the eyes and it stopped under my brain.
00:06:57 Speaker 1
1/4 of an inch with a sharp point.
00:07:01 Speaker 1
And for ten years.
00:07:04 Speaker 1
I was still.
00:07:04 Speaker 1
I was working in the theater then.
00:07:07 Speaker 1
For 10 years, everything seemed to be kind of normal until I probably get some severe headaches, so I went to shawnessy hospital.
00:07:15 Speaker 1
Here, the military hospital and they put me on a diet, one stricken pillow a day and 292 like I was looking in artificial light.
00:07:28 Speaker 1
In the theater and.
00:07:31 Speaker 1
I’m not bad already.
00:07:33 Speaker 1
Not bad.
00:07:35 Speaker 1
And I finally had a talk with.
00:07:39 Speaker 1
Doctor Shin Bone doctor Shin Bone was, I believe, the first man to do a heart operation in the First World War.
00:07:46 Speaker 1
He took a bullet out of a man’s heart.
00:07:48 Speaker 1
He was known as the Butcher.
00:07:50 Speaker 1
Cold blooded about me and I had to talk with him, so he called in some specialist eye, ear, nose and throat men dumps and then a few and they gave me a going over.
00:08:02 Speaker 1
And I said, well, look, get rid of this pain.
00:08:05 Speaker 1
Take that damn thing out.
00:08:07 Speaker 1
It’s driving me nuts.
00:08:10 Speaker 1
But the wound is not easy, which would have been on the electromagnet, and those are in danger of that point cutting my brain.
00:08:19 Speaker 1
And so they showed me a guy that they had done an operation and he was completely paralyzed.
00:08:23 Speaker 1
Unhappy body, strangely enough, a musician.
00:08:25 Speaker 1
He was a Russian and.
00:08:28 Speaker 1
They said no, that’s the best we can do for you.
00:08:31 Speaker 1
Well, the kid here, you’re going to end up like this.
00:08:34 Speaker 1
I said I don’t give a damn.
00:08:35 Speaker 1
Get rid of this.
00:08:36 Speaker 1
I can’t stand much more of it and.
00:08:42 Speaker 1
All right, get you get everything in order.
00:08:44 Speaker 1
We’ll give you 3 months.
00:08:46 Speaker 1
We’ll give you 3 months.
00:08:47 Speaker 1
We’ll do the operation and a week before the operation was occurred.
00:08:52 Speaker 1
I caught a cold.
00:08:56 Speaker 1
Saturday night and instead of going out with the boys and playing painting and a few poker games and this sort of stuff, I went, I got a bottle wrong and I went to my apartment in Westminster.
00:09:08 Speaker 1
I’m living in Westminster, then we was working there and.
00:09:13 Speaker 1
I poured the whole bottle into a jug and filled it with hot water and I climbed into bed and I just drank my passed out.
00:09:22 Speaker 1
I woke up in the morning and asked him I couldn’t breathe from my nose.
00:09:32 Speaker 1
My bed was soaking wet and been perspiring all night.
00:09:36 Speaker 1
And I couldn’t clear my nose.
00:09:38 Speaker 1
So instead of blowing up like that in a big flash of white light and something fell in my throat and I spit it out with this piece of steel, I still got it.
00:09:49 Speaker 1
And I’ve got.
00:09:49 Speaker 1
I’ve got newspaper stories on it.
00:09:52 Speaker 1
Is this piece?
00:09:53 Speaker 1
Of steel.
00:09:54 Speaker 1
And here’s what the doctors were going to operate operate for.
00:09:58 Speaker 1
Nature did it, or God or whatever you like.
00:10:00 Speaker 1
And I’m going to tell you, it made me do a.
00:10:02 Speaker 1
Lot of.
00:10:02 Speaker 1
Thinking about religion and I coughed it out, and then I was scared to death.
00:10:07 Speaker 1
I was alone.
00:10:08 Speaker 1
I wasn’t my I wasn’t married, and I didn’t get married.
00:10:16 Speaker 1
I was getting this.
00:10:17 Speaker 1
Yeah, we’re going to bleed to death for it and give it a doctor or something.
00:10:20 Speaker 1
And I was really panicking.
00:10:22 Speaker 1
You were almost panicking anyway.
00:10:27 Speaker 1
I have a handkerchief there.
00:10:29 Speaker 1
No signs of a hemorrhage, nothing.
00:10:33 Speaker 1
And so I very gingerly got up and said what’s going to happen.
00:10:36 Speaker 1
And I’ve got this piece up you.
00:10:37 Speaker 1
Know like this.
00:10:39 Speaker 1
I got on the phone.
00:10:40 Speaker 1
I called my doctor and I said, Doc, I said something strange has happened to me.
00:10:45 Speaker 1
He said that piece of steel has come down through my into my throat and I coughed it out.
00:10:49 Speaker 1
Does your what?
00:10:51 Speaker 1
I should have coughed it out.
00:10:53 Speaker 1
This is you’re kidding, I said I’m not.
00:10:55 Speaker 1
I’ve got it here right in my hand right now, he says.
00:10:57 Speaker 1
You are.
00:10:57 Speaker 1
You’re hemorrhaging, I said.
00:10:59 Speaker 1
That’s the silly part of it.
00:11:00 Speaker 1
There’s no sign of him hemorrhage.
00:11:02 Speaker 1
And he said, plug your nose and come up with my office.
00:11:04 Speaker 1
He said I’ll give.
00:11:05 Speaker 1
You an examination and when I went in there, this piece of steel, he says, well, I’ll be tapped.
00:11:12 Speaker 1
So he got on the phone.
00:11:14 Speaker 1
Calling Shawnessy for me to go over the next morning.
00:11:18 Speaker 1
And when I went over there, the father, it was the fellows had heard about it at the front desk.
00:11:23 Speaker 1
When I went there and.
00:11:24 Speaker 1
One of the fellow says you got this piece of steel said.
00:11:27 Speaker 1
Yeah, here it is.
00:11:27 Speaker 1
It’s just going to show it to the doctor, which was dubbed in the eye or nose, and it was duresky Dobson and Shin by these were the three main guys and.
00:11:40 Speaker 1
He was gone for quite a while and he finally came out and I said, well, what don’t you have to say?
00:11:45 Speaker 1
He says I’m going to tell you.
00:11:46 Speaker 1
You’re a bloody liar.
00:11:49 Speaker 1
But said alright, you know, right, right way to the rushed me down for because I’ve been taking X-rays.
00:11:53 Speaker 1
You see only with this headache and they were doing me quite frequently with X-rays. I used to have to go over every other day and.
00:12:02 Speaker 1
On the graph, of course, there was no sign of a movement, so you’ll see used to do full face on the side.
00:12:08 Speaker 1
And it was level with my ear and right straight in there.
00:12:11 Speaker 1
So it was right in the middle of my head.
00:12:12 Speaker 1
And the only thing was holding up was nerves.
00:12:16 Speaker 1
And what had happened with this shop point?
00:12:19 Speaker 1
There was a little hollow.
00:12:22 Speaker 1
And a little ball of Puss had formed in there and it was expanding, and it was pressing nerves.
00:12:28 Speaker 1
And This is why I was getting.
00:12:29 Speaker 1
My headache.
00:12:31 Speaker 1
And until I got to the point that was this big snuff, I took it, shook it loose.
00:12:38 Speaker 1
From the nose.
00:12:39 Speaker 1
And it came down my throat. That’s one extra, you know? So so, you know. And I’m still collecting little big fat pension of $50.00 a month now.
00:12:44 Speaker 2
No solution.
00:12:51 Speaker 1
And I’ve done that since 1928, but these these are the stories that I have. My, my, I’m strictly anecdotal because the.
00:13:00 Speaker 1
The things that have happened to me are weird and I’ve come through them.
00:13:04 Speaker 1
I knew when I joined the army.
00:13:07 Speaker 1
And I said so.
00:13:09 Speaker 1
That they wouldn’t.
00:13:10 Speaker 1
They wouldn’t get me.
00:13:13 Speaker 1
And if I did get hit, it would have to be the third one and it was the third one.
00:13:17 Speaker 1
I knew it inwardly.
00:13:20 Speaker 1
I’m Pisces right in the middle of Pisces and you know you get punches and.
00:13:28 Speaker 1
These are things that happened.
00:13:29 Speaker 2
One of the among the things they did in early radio, they used to have Fortune telling programs and that kind of thing just.
00:13:36 Speaker 1
I started a man who became the big the big man of England with that.
00:13:41 Speaker 2
With that, Carol.
00:13:43 Speaker 1
Carol Levis came up to me one day at the station.
00:13:46 Speaker 1
He says, look, Freddie says his father was a detective here in Vancouver who was murdered outside the old library chasing her.
00:13:59 Speaker 1
And Carol and his family, they lived over in the South part of town where.
00:14:02 Speaker 1
I live.
00:14:04 Speaker 1
And Carol was always better with shelman.
00:14:07 Speaker 1
Quite a guy he came and he said, look, I’ve got exactly $0.75, he said. I’ve got an idea for a radio program.
00:14:14 Speaker 1
Will you give me a break?
00:14:15 Speaker 1
Is how much time is it going to take you to about 15 minutes?
00:14:19 Speaker 1
I find I gave him a 5:00 o’clock in the afternoon and he started out with ozella, the dream girl.
00:14:27 Speaker 1
He had to go with him.
00:14:28 Speaker 1
That was the dream girl, and it was strictly a fortune telling gimmick.
00:14:35 Speaker 1
And he was selling a book or something that he got up and a cheap book.
00:14:45 Speaker 1
Then he got in with Lifton.
00:14:50 Speaker 1
From there he he got in with Lipton and Carrie was saying patent medicine.
00:14:55 Speaker 1
Prince musky.
00:14:56 Speaker 1
Musky, right?
00:14:57 Speaker 1
Yeah, he he was a musky key.
00:15:00 Speaker 1
He was chief musky key.
00:15:03 Speaker 1
And he came to me one day and he says, you know, he says I’m going to throw my hand at England.
00:15:07 Speaker 1
He says I got 6 pounds.
00:15:09 Speaker 1
He says I’ve got £6. He says to land me in England to get me in England. I’ve got I’ll have £6, he says, and I’m going. I will see what I can do over there.
00:15:19 Speaker 1
He the first people he contacted was a Quaker oats.
00:15:24 Speaker 1
People who were doing commercials from Luxembourg.
00:15:27 Speaker 1
There were no commercials in England and and.
00:15:32 Speaker 1
He went over there.
00:15:35 Speaker 1
And he started putting on a talent show.
00:15:38 Speaker 1
And our wavelength of that time was 10/10.
00:15:42 Speaker 1
And that was what he asked for.
00:15:45 Speaker 1
He always said that was lucky.
00:15:47 Speaker 1
They called him lucky they was and.
00:15:51 Speaker 1
From there, the BBC got him and he started out with the discovery program that is Discovery Talent, which ended up by being stage shows as well.
00:16:02 Speaker 1
The man, the man absolutely coined money hand over fist and he had a nervous breakdown and came back here and Scotland Yard.
00:16:12 Speaker 1
And somebody from the British Treasury came right out here to see me in Vancouver.
00:16:20 Speaker 1
And he was in in a home here in Vancouver and a place for people who know his breakdown.
00:16:26 Speaker 1
And they’ve been to see him and.
00:16:30 Speaker 1
They said.
00:16:32 Speaker 1
We don’t know whether he’s going to come out.
00:16:34 Speaker 1
We get over it over it or not, but.
00:16:40 Speaker 1
We know that you you started them and you, you have good influence on me, said.
00:16:43 Speaker 1
Would you have a talk with them?
00:16:46 Speaker 1
And they brought him over to see me.
00:16:48 Speaker 1
And he was a little weird in a way.
00:16:50 Speaker 1
But somebody saw me and I everything was fine.
00:16:54 Speaker 1
So I had.
00:16:55 Speaker 1
I gave him a little talk and said, look, you gotta put yourself together and get this thing straightened out in the meantime.
00:17:01 Speaker 1
This Richard Dawson, that’s on TV right now.
00:17:04 Speaker 1
The very popular Richard Dawson.
00:17:07 Speaker 1
Had taken his idea.
00:17:11 Speaker 1
And he ended up in court.
00:17:13 Speaker 1
And I’ve got stories and new English newspapers where he.
00:17:23 Speaker 1
I don’t think they have, but in my obituary plenty to read your own obituary.
00:17:28 Speaker 1
But in my obituary, you know, I’ve done things like posing as Santa Claus for the front page of the Christmas thing or the big beard.
00:17:35 Speaker 1
And, you know, Santa Claus, they claim.
00:17:39 Speaker 1
That I was the first man to ever do a broadcast on the street.
00:17:45 Speaker 1
Because one of the things happened, I’m 29 radio stations here went into auctions.
00:17:56 Speaker 1
With, you know, 6:30 in the morning, you get through your shot at 10:00, o’clock at midnight, you’re going on your 10:50 o’clock. You’re going on the air, and you’re gonna be selling stuff all night. Phone, phone bids, you know.
00:18:08 Speaker 1
So the whole color of coal, McCloud River coal, one night, myself.
00:18:15 Speaker 1
And it struck me there was an easier way to get money from people for charity purposes than this raffle rat.
00:18:22 Speaker 1
This buying because a lot of funny guys were putting in fake fake bids and fake offers, you know, like home gas for instance. They gave a 1000 gallons of gas.
00:18:36 Speaker 1
Everybody wanted to buy them by the gasoline, you see, and then we’d get a phone call in.
00:18:41 Speaker 1
This is such and such a gas station, such and such a place.
00:18:44 Speaker 1
We’ll give you 500 gallons to sell, but you, you’re in good faith in. Mind you, we’re working on. But you, we’re knocking ourselves out to do this and because people needed money. Believe you me.
00:18:59 Speaker 1
They were phonies.
00:19:01 Speaker 1
But the home guests picked them all up, but the point was that.
00:19:05 Speaker 1
There was too much of that and then I bumped into one of the boys on CJR one day and then I saw him on the Street car and asked him about the auctions and going these little fine, he said, me and my friend, he said, whipping up some swell bargain.
00:19:17 Speaker 1
This is the staff, but you know, let’s let’s if we’re going to do something for charity, we’re going to say do it.
00:19:23 Speaker 1
This is going to get the idea of going out on the street.
00:19:28 Speaker 1
And so I worked out an idea with an old cigar can with a hole cut through the top of it. Anybody could be interviewed and I started it on November the 24th.
00:19:42 Speaker 1
In 19.
00:19:45 Speaker 1
1930 started in November the 24th and I went right up till the start of the Second World War. The second war the anchor was sung.
00:19:54 Speaker 1
Backed me up.
00:19:56 Speaker 1
They ran the totals every day and they sent a report us out to work with me and we got everybody we could on there and it got to the point when I had to go out at.
00:20:09 Speaker 1
At 1:00 to 3:00.
00:20:12 Speaker 1
332.
00:20:15 Speaker 1
3330.
00:20:17 Speaker 1
I’d be outside the Hudson.
00:20:18 Speaker 1
Be the first shot, the next one would be outside.
00:20:21 Speaker 1
What is now heatons.
00:20:22 Speaker 1
That’d be at Woodwards and I’d be at the old BC Electric retail store and they used to put a great big Santa Claus in there with, you know, Fred Bass will be here.
00:20:32 Speaker 1
And it got to be it was it actually.
00:20:35 Speaker 1
It actually was.
00:20:36 Speaker 1
The only thing that was worth a damn.
00:20:39 Speaker 1
Because people would come down.
00:20:42 Speaker 1
And the new kids I meet people today.
00:20:45 Speaker 1
They were little kids.
00:20:46 Speaker 1
And I remember you when you used to do the man on the street.
00:20:50 Speaker 1
And here I go, man with families now.
00:20:52 Speaker 1
But you know, it was very funny because there was humor in it.
00:20:56 Speaker 1
There was tragedy in it, but I never played the tragedy and I kept away from the sun stuff.
00:21:03 Speaker 1
I just said look, it’s needed. They don’t needed the manager of the offense. He had to come down here as 100 pass and give them away to anybody.
00:21:11 Speaker 1
Passes for two one would to face them down Christmas Day. We’re going to give a dinner for 100 families.
00:21:17 Speaker 1
Here’s the tickets you picked the people, and then there was another place come around.
00:21:21 Speaker 1
I’ve got some dolls.
00:21:23 Speaker 1
You want to give away?
00:21:24 Speaker 1
It became, it became.
00:21:26 Speaker 1
It became a real thing.
00:21:28 Speaker 2
What did you talk to the people about?
00:21:31 Speaker 1
I’d sit and play a game of crib.
00:21:32 Speaker 1
On the curb.
00:21:34 Speaker 1
With one of the reporters from the sun and whoever got struck put a buck in the can if he.
00:21:39 Speaker 1
But would you believe that that fund as the last several years that fund got to such a proportion?
00:21:49 Speaker 1
Or 80,000 bucks was the figure all from a can on the street. But I put in a lot of hours and I did it from November the 24th to December the 24th. Right up Christmas Eve.
00:22:03 Speaker 1
And in the meantime, the sun was taking care of other fun.
00:22:07 Speaker 1
And we would find out like for instance, we found out somebody came and said, look, there’s a there’s a woman next to us that’s just just had a baby.
00:22:15 Speaker 1
She’s really high up.
00:22:17 Speaker 1
She’s had a baby.
00:22:19 Speaker 1
A newspaper on the floor?
00:22:21 Speaker 1
Well, right away, the sun would send investigators down and with the checkbook and.
00:22:27 Speaker 1
They would set up a credit with the stores and it was a lot of organizational work.
00:22:32 Speaker 1
In fact, it used to take the Vancouver Sun six months to clean up that fund.
00:22:38 Speaker 1
That old boy was hip hop going and people still talk about it.
00:22:42 Speaker 1
What was it called?
00:22:43 Speaker 1
Just the Christmas one year.
00:22:44 Speaker 1
No, it’s just the Manning St.
00:22:46 Speaker 1
Menas men’s.
00:22:48 Speaker 1
And a lot of these lot of these reporters that know Bob Bouchette and chanted, if you and a lot of these, they’re they’re top reporters, those guys used to come out and do a.
00:22:58 Speaker 1
Shift with me.
00:23:00 Speaker 1
And I got to remember Bob Bouchette, there was a big meeting on the Georgia reliability of political guys, the mayor and a whole bunch.
00:23:08 Speaker 1
And Bob came down there.
00:23:09 Speaker 1
Bob was a boozer, and he had a few drinks.
00:23:12 Speaker 1
He’d been somewhere, and he came down.
00:23:14 Speaker 1
He was going to.
00:23:14 Speaker 1
Be with.
00:23:14 Speaker 1
Me and he says they free.
00:23:16 Speaker 1
He says that’s a political thing on here.
00:23:19 Speaker 1
They I’m going in with it.
00:23:20 Speaker 1
Still, I’m going in to put the bee on them.
00:23:23 Speaker 1
So how much ever right Bob goes and he comes back and he’s a pocketful of checks and money.
00:23:29 Speaker 1
And he he really puts the beyond.
00:23:30 Speaker 1
He puts all that and it wasn’t till which used to take 1/2 an hour break because the world was a day that somebody going to stick me up.
00:23:37 Speaker 1
Because I had all this money.
00:23:39 Speaker 1
And so the son used to send a carrier down to pick up the money, like at the end of my period.
00:23:46 Speaker 1
And I’d have 1/2 hour break and then start another place.
00:23:51 Speaker 1
I was counting up the money and Bob said.
00:23:54 Speaker 1
Try there funny.
00:23:56 Speaker 1
Oh no.
00:23:58 Speaker 1
He said I got my wages today.
00:23:59 Speaker 1
She isn’t.
00:24:00 Speaker 1
That’s all in there.
00:24:02 Speaker 1
He couldn’t reach that was above him as he committed suicide done in English pretty well.
00:24:08 Speaker 1
The party.
00:24:08 Speaker 1
One night on the bullish party.
00:24:10 Speaker 1
Grace straight up in the water.
00:24:14 Speaker 2
What sort of equipment were you using the backpack with that man in the speed?
00:24:17 Speaker 2
Or was it a line connection?
00:24:19 Speaker 1
You had we had a deal.
00:24:20 Speaker 1
No, we had.
00:24:21 Speaker 1
We looked at it with the stores like the Hudson Bay.
00:24:24 Speaker 1
We would give the Hudson Bay location for two hours.
00:24:29 Speaker 1
They would pay.
00:24:30 Speaker 1
For full wine and their donation was backed.
00:24:36 Speaker 1
And so it was.
00:24:36 Speaker 1
It was strictly charitable.
00:24:38 Speaker 1
We had commercials in between.
00:24:40 Speaker 1
Sometimes I would do.
00:24:41 Speaker 1
In fact, I did more of the commercials on the street where I was, you know, in the low.
00:24:45 Speaker 1
And they would drop on line up from the 6th floor, right down the street.
00:24:48 Speaker 1
And I would stand.
00:24:48 Speaker 1
Then I’d go there at noon or one o’clock.
00:24:51 Speaker 1
There’s a long line up with people waiting.
00:24:55 Speaker 2
OK.
00:24:57 Speaker 2
You know that’s the thing.
00:24:57 Speaker 1
Good night.
00:24:58 Speaker 2
Radio does so well and they don’t do much of it anymore.
00:25:01 Speaker 2
It’s simply get out live into the community.
00:25:04 Speaker 1
Because there’s too many commercials.
00:25:07 Speaker 1
You see, now it’s done with the saturation.
00:25:09 Speaker 1
Even on TV, where they go saturation, we start this saturation years ago, which was a Shorty, you know, so this is, this is nothing new.
00:25:21 Speaker 1
You know, there was one chocolate firm here.
00:25:24 Speaker 1
McDonald’s, while we’re on Robson St.
00:25:27 Speaker 1
Sold him one day.
00:25:29 Speaker 1
Someone that wants my name and address, he says they know my child.
00:25:33 Speaker 1
Well, how much you going to charge a guy for his name and address?
00:25:35 Speaker 1
You know, we’re going to charge him momentum, but this is this is again today they’re doing on TV, but we didn’t radio years ago.
00:25:46 Speaker 1
And the only thing that we ever got out of it was that the Vancouver Sun.
00:25:51 Speaker 1
Out of their promotion part of it.
00:25:54 Speaker 1
Gave me a voucher for a Turkey for every member of the staff.
00:25:59 Speaker 1
That was all we ever talk about and I’d be out there and people coming and oh, you poor man.
00:26:03 Speaker 1
It’s snowing and it’s raining.
00:26:05 Speaker 1
You must be really.
00:26:06 Speaker 1
I was bundled up.
00:26:07 Speaker 1
You’re just tell us.
00:26:08 Speaker 1
But, well, thank you very much.
00:26:10 Speaker 1
You know, these people give you.
00:26:11 Speaker 1
This is my big days.
00:26:14 Speaker 2
They feel sorry for you as well.
00:26:15 Speaker 1
Yeah, they felt sorry for me, but I was having fun because I’ve got pictures of all this.
00:26:20 Speaker 1
In fact, I’ve even still got my my my period receipts in my scrapbook.
00:26:26 Speaker 1
That the Vancouver Sun come got the money from you, but.
00:26:33 Speaker 1
This this, to me is radio.
00:26:36 Speaker 1
Radio can do a beautiful job if they can find some way to.
00:26:44 Speaker 1
Or the cost of running radio today, the cost of it that they’ve got to have the because, mind you, they don’t starve to death.
00:26:51 Speaker 1
We know that.
00:26:52 Speaker 1
But they’ve still got to they still got a a lot of replacement for machinery and you know, and.
00:27:02 Speaker 1
It’s it’s quite a problem, but we had fun.
00:27:09 Speaker 1
Remember the Helldriver was coming through one time and they they came up to steer there.
00:27:16 Speaker 1
Believe you me.
00:27:17 Speaker 1
I know a lot of the lot of the people in the entertainment business because I interviewed so many of my time and.
00:27:27 Speaker 1
The hell drivers came up and they said well.
00:27:30 Speaker 1
We come up, we’ll show you what we’re going to do.
00:27:32 Speaker 1
So we went out to where the where we’re going to do it.
00:27:35 Speaker 1
And he says he will be a rope.
00:27:37 Speaker 1
He’ll keep the spectator back, then everybody.
00:27:39 Speaker 1
Here, he says. But.
00:27:39 Speaker 1
You’ll be out in there, he says.
00:27:41 Speaker 1
And he says we’ll roll one and show you.
00:27:43 Speaker 1
So they rolled the car and he said they, I said that’s where it’s going to be.
00:27:47 Speaker 1
That’s where it be tomorrow.
00:27:49 Speaker 1
Just set your microphone.
00:27:50 Speaker 1
Right.
00:27:51 Speaker 1
It was fine until the next day where the Big Deal is on all kinds of people and I’ve got a funny feeling I’m in the wrong place, you know, just like there was something said.
00:28:01 Speaker 1
Look, get out of the way and I eventually gave into it and I moved back.
00:28:07 Speaker 1
Good job I did, because, gosh, don’t.
00:28:09 Speaker 1
Right where I’d been.
00:28:10 Speaker 1
Oh yeah.
00:28:13 Speaker 1
You know, little little hunches that sort of hit you.
00:28:17 Speaker 1
There’s a lot of little things like that that’s happening in those days, but they were all part of things, all part of thing.
00:28:24 Speaker 1
The the deal we got in bed with the Hudson Bay.
00:28:27 Speaker 1
One time we were doing.
00:28:29 Speaker 1
Testing and I had met.
00:28:34 Speaker 1
Guinness and the Chancellor of the Exchequer from Great Britain.
00:28:39 Speaker 1
I had met them here in Vancouver before the landscape bridge was built. This was when Guinness was looking over the British properties, which he was going to buy and they were going to build the $600.00 bridge and he had the chance of the exchequer pace with them.
00:28:56 Speaker 1
And they took me knowledge and at that time being English and knowing the setup of the the name of bash, you know bash is beer.
00:29:06 Speaker 1
I always kept track of my.
00:29:08 Speaker 1
I’m very, very distant.
00:29:10 Speaker 1
Right, Marie.
00:29:11 Speaker 1
My father was a sixth cousin.
00:29:13 Speaker 1
But anyway.
00:29:15 Speaker 1
I had no idea that what Guinness was going to do is buy this property here because they were just hitting the American market with that glass of stout.
00:29:24 Speaker 1
Guinness is good for you and they’re just hitting that.
00:29:26 Speaker 1
They hadn’t got a big market, they got a big market in China, logical place shipped from here.
00:29:32 Speaker 1
So I thought they’re going to be able to.
00:29:37 Speaker 1
The plant here.
00:29:38 Speaker 1
So I asked him and he said no, no, he says we’re not, he says good ideas and they’re not.
00:29:44 Speaker 1
He says the strange father is the water that’s here.
00:29:46 Speaker 1
He says there’s very little between it and the Luffy.
00:29:51 Speaker 1
Where we get our water from.
00:29:53 Speaker 1
And he says that that’s not it.
00:29:55 Speaker 1
He says it’s the succession taxes.
00:29:58 Speaker 1
He says this is all being bought and turned over to my grandchildren.
00:30:02 Speaker 1
There’ll be no succession, actually.
00:30:06 Speaker 1
And that was why they built the bridge and built the bridge properties.
00:30:10 Speaker 1
And so, you know, I got in on that.
00:30:12 Speaker 1
And of course, naturally, I put in the plug the station we would like to do the for the cash fine and start anytime you like, right from the start.
00:30:19 Speaker 1
So we kept up a running comment on it.
00:30:22 Speaker 1
In the mean time, CDJR.
00:30:25 Speaker 1
Who used to be before we started going out, doing the outside stuff, they had a pretty good reputation, but they didn’t go into as deep as we did.
00:30:33 Speaker 1
We went into it.
00:30:35 Speaker 1
And Seijo I went out and sold an exclusive broadcast to the Hudson Bay.
00:30:42 Speaker 1
And when we heard them announcing exclusive broadcast, say just a minute, just a minute.
00:30:48 Speaker 1
We’ve been honest before you got it, I sort of think so.
00:30:51 Speaker 1
The we called the Bay and said look, we object to the word exclusive because we’ve been on this thing right from the very start.
00:31:00 Speaker 1
And the base as well.
00:31:02 Speaker 1
They’ve sold this exclusive.
00:31:03 Speaker 1
We’re going to do it.
00:31:04 Speaker 1
And so we said, well, we’re not going to permit it.
00:31:07 Speaker 1
We’ve got, we we haven’t got an explosive, but we’ve been right from the start and we object to using a very exclusive because we’re going to broadcast it and it became a fight and the Bay cut us off completely.
00:31:21 Speaker 1
So who turned up?
00:31:24 Speaker 1
Seizure goes out like miles and miles of cable.
00:31:27 Speaker 1
Their pick up point for the opening line of Gate Bridge.
00:31:29 Speaker 1
I walk out with that.
00:31:30 Speaker 1
60 pound pack.
00:31:34 Speaker 1
We did the same thing over the Patella.
00:31:36 Speaker 1
We got a man down there.
00:31:37 Speaker 1
To tug, we had a big we set up a big board in the center of the Patella bridge at New Westminster and a man before him and this end and each one was coming in and doing a little bit.
00:31:47 Speaker 1
We, we tackled it and we we made a job of it.
00:31:51 Speaker 2
Well, you maybe.
00:31:52 Speaker 2
Appeared to have made more extensive use of that backpack idea than anyone I’ve heard.
00:31:56 Speaker 1
Of, but it was heavy, but I was.
00:31:58 Speaker 1
I was Husky than I am now, but I’m in.
00:32:00 Speaker 1
It I did. I did.
00:32:03 Speaker 1
Senator Magnussen decided he wanted to see he wanted to see the proposed Alaska Highway Rd.
00:32:10 Speaker 1
from the air.
00:32:12 Speaker 1
He got a plane and he flew up the route and he came back and he was met by.
00:32:17 Speaker 1
Me with my pack.
00:32:19 Speaker 1
And I got the story about the what it was.
00:32:23 Speaker 1
20 minutes later, I’m over at another part of the airport and I’m interviewing John Charles Thomas, the singer.
00:32:30 Speaker 1
You said I could do it with mobile and we used it.
00:32:34 Speaker 1
You know Ross Ross and say to me, hey, let’s go down to the park, you know, while the symphonies playing, one of the boys run the Symphony and let’s go down.
00:32:43 Speaker 1
Let’s go down the park.
00:32:45 Speaker 1
Well, what we do?
00:32:46 Speaker 1
What do I know?
00:32:46 Speaker 1
We do.
00:32:46 Speaker 1
We’ll go and interview strangers, visit in the summer this summer.
00:32:51 Speaker 1
I’ll go and get a box of chocolate bars.
00:32:54 Speaker 1
We’re good with the pack.
00:32:56 Speaker 1
Go up to the car.
00:32:57 Speaker 1
You’re from California.
00:32:59 Speaker 1
Having a nice trip, and we’ve interviewed people.
00:33:01 Speaker 1
Well, thanks very much.
00:33:02 Speaker 1
Here I have a chocolate and you know on the way out, people were driving downtown and stopping us.
00:33:07 Speaker 1
Hey, you got any chocolate bars?
00:33:10 Speaker 1
You see, we had the people.
00:33:12 Speaker 1
We have been a very human touch with the people.
00:33:16 Speaker 1
We were close to them.
00:33:19 Speaker 1
And this, of course, they’ve cut out now everybody specializing.
00:33:24 Speaker 1
And I always told these young fellows who still have ideas and want to go and radio.
00:33:28 Speaker 1
Look, go out in the country and learn.
00:33:30 Speaker 1
Go to a station where you got to learn everything because you had to.
00:33:35 Speaker 1
It was going to be a news man one minute and you’re announcing the next minute or not.
00:33:39 Speaker 1
The next minute and you know you but you learn the racket you learn.
00:33:45 Speaker 2
You say it.
00:33:46 Speaker 2
Was fun but.
00:33:46 Speaker 2
I don’t.
00:33:47 Speaker 2
Does anybody really want to work anymore?
00:33:51 Speaker 1
Where they go specializing now and this to me is this to me, doesn’t it?
00:33:55 Speaker 1
Doesn’t give you anything of it.
00:33:56 Speaker 1
It’s in the first place.
00:34:00 Speaker 1
To be in radio and know how to put that kind of stuff on.
00:34:05 Speaker 1
You’ve got to know all the mechanics of the job.
00:34:10 Speaker 1
Now, if you if you put one of these men today and say you’re going to do this and do it from the beginning, he’s lost.
00:34:17 Speaker 1
He does nothing about him.
00:34:19 Speaker 1
He’s but he’s got an engineer that will do it all for him.
00:34:22 Speaker 1
And so he he’s just specializing, which to me is it’s not right.
00:34:27 Speaker 2
Well, if you become like the man.
00:34:29 Speaker 2
Turning the widget on the assembly line and so.
00:34:31 Speaker 1
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.
00:34:33 Speaker 1
There’s no variety in it.
00:34:34 Speaker 1
There’s no spice in it.
00:34:35 Speaker 1
There’s no action.
00:34:37 Speaker 1
You know, we had long before long before they they had the setups they had.
00:34:42 Speaker 1
No, we had connections with the.
00:34:43 Speaker 1
Police like, for instance, the one time here they they they said oh.
00:34:49 Speaker 1
People should be fingerprinted and it was a long time ago.
00:34:53 Speaker 1
So who does?
00:34:54 Speaker 1
And does it?
00:34:55 Speaker 1
We do well, right down.
00:34:57 Speaker 1
We’re stuck behind them.
00:34:58 Speaker 1
They put a bar across us when they drink the bar away.
00:35:00 Speaker 1
In fact, with no number on it, put us in one of the cell cell blocks there.
00:35:05 Speaker 1
All other picture red thumbprints.
00:35:07 Speaker 1
There were police passes and we all carried them.
00:35:11 Speaker 1
Because we work with everyone, work with the police, we’re working with fire department.
00:35:15 Speaker 1
We did a series called.
00:35:18 Speaker 1
They walked by night.
00:35:20 Speaker 1
In which and another one of these things where we go out, we went out with the police on night patrol.
00:35:27 Speaker 1
In the cars and on the street, we did a series.
00:35:32 Speaker 1
One night we head down.
00:35:34 Speaker 1
Off edge.
00:35:36 Speaker 1
And then we had cool girls.
00:35:38 Speaker 1
We had pickpockets, we had safe trackers and we went right into the dives where these guys were for 10 or 15 bucks.
00:35:45 Speaker 1
These guys would do your program, you know, and so a lot of them did.
00:35:47 Speaker 1
We’re going.
00:35:52 Speaker 1
It for nothing.
00:35:53 Speaker 1
Like the cool girls, beautiful looking girls driving up in Cadillac.
00:35:58 Speaker 1
You know they’re private.
00:35:59 Speaker 1
Secretary of the Cadillac Millery down here in Burnaby St. down this end of town called Girls 150 Bucks a night in the Hotel Vancouver and Georgia.
00:36:11 Speaker 1
And we did a series that they work by night, but the one that was really something and we had an awful time with it, was the drunken driving and the women because they had the foulest mouths and oh, what they called the cops and the we had the sense of that to beat the band.
00:36:27 Speaker 1
But we went out with the cops on on that.
00:36:29 Speaker 2
Or was this going live on air?
00:36:31 Speaker 2
This was show going along.
00:36:32 Speaker 1
No, that that was recorded, it was recorded.
00:36:35 Speaker 1
You had to go come to the studio there, you know.
00:36:38 Speaker 1
No names were made.
00:36:40 Speaker 1
And then we although we went down, we went down to, we recorded this as was later on we went down to the Balmoral, which is I hang out pickpockets and dope Queens and God knows what.
00:36:52 Speaker 1
We went down there and we went to Mike.
00:36:57 Speaker 1
And they gave us a story.
00:37:01 Speaker 1
It was a good series.
00:37:04 Speaker 1
But you know nothing, nothing was.
00:37:08 Speaker 1
It was nothing that wasn’t a challenge.
00:37:12 Speaker 1
And right now you see where you turn that thing on.
00:37:16 Speaker 1
What are you going to get?
00:37:16 Speaker 1
You know, you’re going to get a whole bunch of game shows in the day later on, you’re going to get a lot of sports weekend.
00:37:22 Speaker 1
You’re going to get nothing but sports.
00:37:27 Speaker 1
Sports and religion?
00:37:28 Speaker 1
Well, nothing.
00:37:29 Speaker 1
Nothing against religion.
00:37:31 Speaker 1
But there’s so many what I call semi funny religions.
00:37:36 Speaker 1
Whether just start making a lot.
00:37:38 Speaker 1
Of money and.
00:37:40 Speaker 2
It wasn’t a known early days either.
00:37:42 Speaker 1
But we’re putting in high church service on the, you know, from the church.
00:37:47 Speaker 1
We didn’t have any simple.
00:37:52 Speaker 1
Oh, Roberts.
00:37:53 Speaker 1
And yet we didn’t have those people we had won and.
00:37:57 Speaker 1
And that was a man that used to come on.
00:37:59 Speaker 1
I used to put him on every morning at 8:00 o’clock at.
00:38:04 Speaker 1
Quite vague, no other some.
00:38:09 Speaker 1
And a doctor, Clem Davis, who had his own ministry.
00:38:15 Speaker 1
But he, finally, he finally turned to British Israel.
00:38:18 Speaker 1
But he went to Hollywood and in Hollywood has the biggest racket now.
00:38:23 Speaker 1
Life is there’s religion and he used to take the shrine temple, which seats 7000 people for Sunday.
00:38:29 Speaker 1
And Myron and Maxwell, the movie actress with an old friend of mine, her mother played organ.
00:38:35 Speaker 1
And that for this doctor, Kevin Davis.
00:38:37 Speaker 1
In fact, Glenn Davis baptized my daughter when she was born.
00:38:43 Speaker 1
He had a big ministry of Big Bible Shelf where they printed all the Bibles and his beautiful big business down there.
00:38:52 Speaker 1
You know, working on a Superstation diet and religion are two big things in Hollywood.
00:38:58 Speaker 1
Everybody in the in fact, some of the some of the some of the movie stars.
00:39:03 Speaker 1
Oh, the Gene hollow type.
00:39:07 Speaker 1
We were paying him $300.00 a week.
00:39:12 Speaker 1
Just to buy their way into heaven or something.
00:39:14 Speaker 1
You know what I mean?
00:39:15 Speaker 1
And I I went to one of his services one Sunday morning.
00:39:18 Speaker 1
I was down in Hollywood.
00:39:22 Speaker 1
I’ll say this for him.
00:39:23 Speaker 1
He was in the Hollywood, but he has.
00:39:24 Speaker 1
A British flag and.
00:39:26 Speaker 1
The American flag on the stage.
00:39:28 Speaker 1
And his brother came out and he said, ladies and gentlemen, he says.
00:39:34 Speaker 1
Says this week is my brother’s birthday. So Doctor Clem Davis is. It’s his birthday, and we’re going to take up the offering today. And we would suggest.
00:39:46 Speaker 1
Your basis.
00:39:48 Speaker 1
What you’re offering is based on your own age, he says.
00:39:50 Speaker 1
We don’t get those nickels.
00:39:52 Speaker 1
Dimes tell us what it is.
00:39:54 Speaker 1
So I give you 36, but $0.36 and with which he wheels out a wheelbarrow in the middle of the stage.
00:40:02 Speaker 1
Down the runway, up, down the aisle, people are just tossing the money and tossing that he he started here in Vancouver.
00:40:12 Speaker 1
But he’s on private life.
00:40:14 Speaker 1
Wasn’t his secretary, was his lady in waiting.
00:40:22 Speaker 1
But he had his own studios up Morgan Hill Drive, because I went there.
00:40:27 Speaker 1
I was there one night I went down and I went to see I was in there and I had a few days free.
00:40:34 Speaker 1
And I went up to see Doctor Glenn and oh, he says.
00:40:39 Speaker 1
I’m going to be doing my I’m going to be doing my.
00:40:43 Speaker 1
It’s ambulance or something and I went down to see Doctor Clem at his home.
00:41:02 Speaker 1
Down it was up, picked up on there.
00:41:04 Speaker 1
Spiral up up Morgan Hill Drive and.
00:41:11 Speaker 1
He says here I do my broadcast from here.
00:41:13 Speaker 1
Go to room setup and he says.
00:41:17 Speaker 1
I’m going to going to tell them that you’re going to do my announcing for you’re going to announce me this while you’re here.
00:41:23 Speaker 1
So I got an I can always remember the guy at the other end when I started to speak.
00:41:28 Speaker 1
The guy at the other end.
00:41:29 Speaker 1
Hey, Joe.
00:41:30 Speaker 1
I’m gonna listen to this voice.
00:41:31 Speaker 1
You look just like.
00:41:32 Speaker 1
The deep voice.
00:41:33 Speaker 1
You can’t listen to this voice, so it’s fine.
00:41:35 Speaker 1
So I did.
00:41:36 Speaker 1
I did the I did.
00:41:37 Speaker 1
The opening point with you.
00:41:39 Speaker 1
Well, he was having a better celebration.
00:41:44 Speaker 1
And he invited me.
00:41:45 Speaker 1
I had my wife with me at the time.
00:41:46 Speaker 1
Little daughter and we were invited to this dinner.
00:41:51 Speaker 1
And who was there?
00:41:53 Speaker 1
But Kate Kaiser, who lived up on the hill further up Kate Kaiser and.
00:42:01 Speaker 1
Oh, land, hope and glory in English.
00:42:07 Speaker 1
Who was visiting out there with my own Maxwell and with her mother?
00:42:13 Speaker 1
We’ll had dinner.
00:42:15 Speaker 1
And after dinner was over, there was a a grand piano.
00:42:22 Speaker 1
A smaller piano.
00:42:25 Speaker 1
And an organ in this place that he had, we had a jam session with Kay.
00:42:32 Speaker 1
And, you know, we just you get amongst all of those.
00:42:38 Speaker 1
Kind of people and.
00:42:40 Speaker 1
I’ve never had a dull life.
00:42:41 Speaker 1
It’s been far from done right.
00:42:44 Speaker 1
I’ve enjoyed every remembered of it, but this isn’t giving you much information for you days of radio.
Part 3
Transcript
00:00:01 Speaker 1
Well, when did you basically get started in radio then?
00:00:05 Speaker 2
Well, I started in radio on November the 24th, 1928.
00:00:11 Speaker 2
Which was really early.
00:00:13 Speaker 2
Those were the days of the.
00:00:19 Speaker 2
Antenna that you move around the room or you twist it in different directions and you have to fiddle around with it and.
00:00:27 Speaker 2
It was just about the end of the period when they started going from earphones.
00:00:33 Speaker 1
Just the end of the.
00:00:34 Speaker 1
Crystal factory and.
00:00:35 Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, just about the end of the crystal set when I’m John.
00:00:39 Speaker 2
And there have been stations operating in this part of the country.
00:00:46 Speaker 2
The the one that I was for was five years old, but it originally started over in the normal and.
00:00:54 Speaker 2
The company.
00:00:57 Speaker 2
Had the station moved to Vancouver.
00:00:59 Speaker 2
And that was when I joined the state in 1920.
00:01:03 Speaker 2
The front of that has been hitting this sort of thing.
00:01:06 Speaker 2
I mean, it was not as steady so many hours a day.
00:01:09 Speaker 2
But when they moved over to the Vancouver then they went into the full daytime.
00:01:14 Speaker 2
Mm-hmm broadcast.
00:01:16 Speaker 2
A part of that, it was hit and missing before I even got into the thing.
00:01:22 Speaker 2
I used to go over and do some experimental work with.
00:01:25 Speaker 2
An engine.
00:01:26 Speaker 2
Here, who had an experimental license over the US.
00:01:33 Speaker 2
We would do a lot of, I would do a lot of live broadcasting.
00:01:37 Speaker 2
This part of that he was doing himself more like a ham operation.
00:01:42 Speaker 2
But then he got down to the point when.
00:01:45 Speaker 2
We decided we would try live music.
00:01:49 Speaker 2
And that that is how I actually got into the business because I was in, I’m I’m a musical director from here.
00:01:56 Speaker 2
There’s a silent picture of Waterville days and Kathy has put me on the wood.
00:02:01 Speaker 2
Ohh, another game.
00:02:03 Speaker 2
I became a bookkeeper, but that’s personal.
00:02:07 Speaker 2
But during that time.
00:02:10 Speaker 2
To follow with the experimental station.
00:02:13 Speaker 2
License in the Westminster Trust blog.
00:02:17 Speaker 2
He would come over vacation and say let you know if you’d like to come over and do a little broadcast.
00:02:22 Speaker 2
Actually, he was starting to do a lot of experimental work himself, but he wanted to work with some live talent.
00:02:28 Speaker 2
And so this is how I got into it.
00:02:32 Speaker 2
And from then on railing, I had to grow with it.
00:02:36 Speaker 2
And we went from the.
00:02:38 Speaker 2
And when I joined the station, I think there were ten white.
00:02:42 Speaker 2
And when they moved to Vancouver.
00:02:45 Speaker 2
Right.
00:02:47 Speaker 2
And we had our transmitter at 12:20 Seymour St.
00:02:51 Speaker 2
And over and over again.
00:02:54 Speaker 2
That’s where we operated.
00:02:56 Speaker 2
On the 100 Watt.
00:02:59 Speaker 2
The amazing thing about the 100 blacks was the.
00:03:03 Speaker 2
The reception that we got on 100 watts.
00:03:07 Speaker 2
We had the one time we had 17 cards of acknowledgement acknowledge.
00:03:15 Speaker 2
Station here in Vancouver.
00:03:18 Speaker 2
In one month from Hawaii.
00:03:23 Speaker 2
And the only thing that we could figure out in a dumb way, I guess, was that it was the skip over the water that was doing.
00:03:31 Speaker 2
Instead of the atmosphere, it was the.
00:03:34 Speaker 2
And we’ll just skip and this this is right.
00:03:36 Speaker 2
This was rather startling because then we we we started getting letters of.
00:03:44 Speaker 2
From Sweden and in Sweden they have a a set up whereby the listeners.
00:03:53 Speaker 2
Belong to an organization and DX club.
00:03:57 Speaker 2
And to to work on this to be a member of this club, they had to do a lot of foreign listening.
00:04:04 Speaker 2
And send them a letter.
00:04:07 Speaker 2
Stating what they’ve heard in the time and the radio stations would acknowledge it and check their records.
00:04:14 Speaker 2
Who would acknowledge it?
00:04:16 Speaker 2
And then.
00:04:18 Speaker 2
You never know where you’re going to get, you know, it’s rather rather peculiar.
00:04:23 Speaker 2
You never knew when you were going to get a car and you remember one time about Fortune.
00:04:29 Speaker 2
You see on CBC with the weather reports won’t work with us.
00:04:35 Speaker 2
He and the power of his gotta swoop.
00:04:39 Speaker 2
And then.
00:04:40 Speaker 2
They was failing down to Fiji.
00:04:44 Speaker 2
And we got a we got a letter from him.
00:04:47 Speaker 2
If you can imagine my amazement.
00:04:50 Speaker 2
Coming up on deck early in the morning says turn on the radio and here’s.
00:04:55 Speaker 2
She gave up. Very.
00:04:56 Speaker 2
Late, which was the station I worked for, and these are the surprising things.
00:05:04 Speaker 2
It was.
00:05:05 Speaker 2
It was the odd things that happened.
00:05:08 Speaker 2
We were.
00:05:09 Speaker 2
We were, I I don’t really would say we were brash, but.
00:05:14 Speaker 2
We were.
00:05:16 Speaker 2
We’re experimenting.
00:05:18 Speaker 2
We had nobody to tell us it went like this or it went like that.
00:05:22 Speaker 2
Or you gonna do this?
00:05:23 Speaker 2
We had nobody to do that.
00:05:24 Speaker 2
So we experiment.
00:05:27 Speaker 2
And some of the things we experimented was rather amazing.
00:05:32 Speaker 2
Because in last few years later.
00:05:35 Speaker 2
And we had CKW actually had a shortwave pickup.
00:05:42 Speaker 2
Underneath the stage of the Malcolm Ball in Stanley Park.
00:05:46 Speaker 2
Which enables me to go out with a 60 pound pack.
00:05:50 Speaker 2
The shortwave pack on my back and broadcast from anywhere around around kind of like the airport.
00:05:57 Speaker 2
When Senator Magnussen was.
00:06:00 Speaker 2
Made his first trip.
00:06:02 Speaker 2
Over the mountains to discover the Alcan Rd.
00:06:07 Speaker 2
the Alaska Highway.
00:06:10 Speaker 2
I met him when he came back.
00:06:12 Speaker 2
That was before the robot ever thought or whatever building let just in the thinking stages the first thought.
00:06:18 Speaker 2
But it was in the sinking.
00:06:20 Speaker 2
And I met him at the airport with my 60 pound bag.
00:06:28 Speaker 2
After I got through with the interview with him, I walked up to another part of the airport.
00:06:33 Speaker 2
And I picked up John Charles Thomas Lee, the singer who was coming up through here in 20 minutes.
00:06:41 Speaker 2
I did 2 broadcast.
00:06:42 Speaker 2
With the aid of that, and they all.
00:06:43 Speaker 2
Picked up in.
00:06:43 Speaker 2
Stanley Park and straight into the transmit.
00:06:50 Speaker 1
Well, this time we’re coming into the radio.
00:06:53 Speaker 1
Then when you’re first getting involved with.
00:06:56 Speaker 1
You right and and it would be.
00:06:58 Speaker 1
A time when the.
00:07:00 Speaker 1
When the radio was first making it.
00:07:03 Speaker 1
Actual signal contribution to the.
00:07:05 Speaker 1
Society because the bill? Yeah.
00:07:16 Speaker 2
As for his testing?
00:07:19 Speaker 2
Was one of these curved faces.
00:07:25 Speaker 2
And the funny part of it was, you see, he would give me a nod and I’d start maybe his play piano would talk and do something.
00:07:32 Speaker 2
And he would put his sweets.
00:07:33 Speaker 2
And I thought.
00:07:35 Speaker 2
And then he frantically dash out to where he had all his entire equipment laid out and.
00:07:40 Speaker 2
It’s table wasn’t in any cabinet or I think it was all spread out all over the table and he would start twiddling around on the what he said to find out where we were, where nine times out of 10, we were probably up on what is not the the Airways, you know the for the for the.
00:07:58 Speaker 2
Right.
00:08:00 Speaker 2
It was all very, very.
00:08:04 Speaker 2
Experimental we we experimented with so many things that.
00:08:08 Speaker 2
Some of them were ridiculous and some of them were are still in use today because we we we had nobody to tell us we had nobody, we were not.
00:08:19 Speaker 2
We we didn’t have, I think the biggest, the biggest thing that used to be we used to be able to get KSL Salt Lake City the moment the moment we got damn KDKAKK DA Philadelphia. I think it was.
00:08:34 Speaker 2
And these were the big stations here.
00:08:38 Speaker 2
And at that time, they started to form a bit of a network of which the local station was see in RV and it was in the Canadian National Railway station.
00:08:51 Speaker 2
That was Wednesday and it was on.
00:08:54 Speaker 2
And there was CKL windows operating.
00:08:58 Speaker 2
Then in fact, they they opened up some.
00:09:03 Speaker 2
CK MO was run by the Spot show schools for broadcasting.
00:09:07 Speaker 2
They opened up a school for broadcasting, and they’re using it two ways.
00:09:11 Speaker 2
They were teaching people.
00:09:13 Speaker 2
Something about the business and at the same time they were operating the station so that they had their.
00:09:19 Speaker 2
And they put their pupils to work there and give them experience and also save money that.
00:09:26 Speaker 2
And the Vancouver property in Vancouver.
00:09:28 Speaker 2
And they had.
00:09:30 Speaker 2
They had a a license, which is they.
00:09:33 Speaker 2
They only landed it for the 15 minute broadcast.
00:09:39 Speaker 2
And then there was a church.
00:09:42 Speaker 2
It was a Wesley church.
00:09:46 Speaker 2
Serial tripe, who was dabbling in that business in those days?
00:09:52 Speaker 2
And throwing himself up a business which became quite.
00:09:57 Speaker 2
And a civil trial had an experimental license.
00:10:00 Speaker 2
Which he used for the Wesley Church on Sunday.
00:10:05 Speaker 2
And then the CQWW.
00:10:08 Speaker 2
Which originally started out.
00:10:09 Speaker 2
I think it was.
00:10:12 Speaker 2
Or something like that. But anyway, the the province was CKCD.
00:10:21 Speaker 2
The three, the three shared one wavelet.
00:10:27 Speaker 1
So you’ve got.
00:10:29 Speaker 1
So that’s sort of an interesting.
00:10:31 Speaker 1
Variants of people who are contributing to the Airways spend.
00:10:36 Speaker 2
Many, many people are.
00:10:37 Speaker 2
Yeah, those are a lot of people that in fact we.
00:10:42 Speaker 2
I guess we became kind of characters to the, to the listening public.
00:10:46 Speaker 1
Yeah, this is.
00:10:47 Speaker 2
What I’m wondering, we had our followers.
00:10:53 Speaker 2
We had at that that we also had a little magazine that was put out by will reader who did some broadcasting up in Kerrisdale.
00:11:03 Speaker 2
Radio news.
00:11:07 Speaker 2
It was quite a popular magazine, quite little popular magazine.
00:11:10 Speaker 2
It was strictly local.
00:11:15 Speaker 2
It had the the programming data same as they do today, but a little difference in the way of the time.
00:11:24 Speaker 2
And there was over there was a split wavelength like.
00:11:29 Speaker 2
It was like a very big, big broadcasting, but it wasn’t because Wednesday night time.
00:11:35 Speaker 2
Now they.
00:11:38 Speaker 2
The province was shut down.
00:11:41 Speaker 2
I used to pick up.
00:11:43 Speaker 2
As soon as they shut down from.
00:11:46 Speaker 2
The terminal city walls.
00:11:49 Speaker 2
In Westminster.
00:11:51 Speaker 2
We had a broadcast studio up there in in that time and.
00:11:57 Speaker 2
We would carry out the midnight.
00:12:00 Speaker 2
Other nights we would be off the air.
00:12:06 Speaker 2
One of the things that was done in those days was that.
00:12:10 Speaker 2
A lot of work was done, a lot of work, recorded especially in recorded programs, was done.
00:12:17 Speaker 2
By recording programs from the transmitter.
00:12:21 Speaker 2
That’s my first show used to be 6:30 in the morning, and my last. She’ll finish at 10:30 at night.
00:12:27 Speaker 2
But we would play up till about 2:00 o’clock.
00:12:30 Speaker 2
We would have a lot of right time, but most days an awful lot.
00:12:33 Speaker 2
Everybody wanted to get on the end and talent was cheap anyway and.
00:12:39 Speaker 2
At 2:00 o’clock, we were shut down from our studios.
00:12:44 Speaker 2
And the transmitter would take over and play Symphony.
00:12:48 Speaker 2
Uninterrupted symphonies all the afternoon we’re about full force.
00:12:53 Speaker 2
And then we would come back on up at the studio.
00:12:57 Speaker 2
And we did anything.
00:12:59 Speaker 2
We did every part of.
00:13:00 Speaker 2
It I worked in the transmitter for five months.
00:13:04 Speaker 2
And then they went up to the studio because I could play piano.
00:13:08 Speaker 2
Went up the school and I never went back.
00:13:11 Speaker 2
But there was so much variety that they never noticed the work hours.
00:13:18 Speaker 2
And you did everything.
00:13:21 Speaker 2
Which is the greatest way to learn radium, which today I feel is the cause of a a lot of sloppy operations, a lot of poor production that we see casually.
00:13:34 Speaker 2
That’s because the man who was doing it, who was a news man who was a sportscaster.
00:13:40 Speaker 2
He was a salesman.
00:13:41 Speaker 2
He was an operator technician.
00:13:44 Speaker 2
He was everything he did.
00:13:47 Speaker 2
So it didn’t matter if this went hey.
00:13:48 Speaker 2
Roger, he could fix it.
00:13:53 Speaker 1
The let’s.
00:13:55 Speaker 1
What was the right community reaction?
00:13:57 Speaker 1
How did the?
00:13:59 Speaker 1
When radio was a new sound to everyone, what you.
00:14:02 Speaker 2
Say well, as I as I as I said.
00:14:04 Speaker 2
Originally it became it.
00:14:07 Speaker 2
It was something mysterious and people thought it looked upon us as that I don’t know what they looked upon us as gods or.
00:14:14 Speaker 2
Not so right.
00:14:16 Speaker 2
But as we started to develop a regular schedule of programs.
00:14:22 Speaker 2
So we started to develop our connections with the public.
00:14:28 Speaker 2
And this is the way we’ve got to follow.
00:14:32 Speaker 2
I was lucky enough to.
00:14:35 Speaker 2
Come out on top of one of the contests one year for the that the magazine put down.
00:14:40 Speaker 2
I got the top lady.
00:14:42 Speaker 2
And but it was in several fields too.
00:14:46 Speaker 2
There wasn’t only one field.
00:14:49 Speaker 2
And so I built up a following and.
00:14:52 Speaker 2
Everybody knew me.
00:14:56 Speaker 2
And we never hesitated to do outside work like public events and that sort of thing.
00:15:01 Speaker 2
In fact, we specialize that I specialize in that because.
00:15:05 Speaker 2
I could have lived.
00:15:07 Speaker 2
I never went up very low a couple of times.
00:15:10 Speaker 2
We used the script, but most of the time.
00:15:12 Speaker 2
Was right off the cuff.
00:15:17 Speaker 2
In fact, I turned it to advantage between.
00:15:21 Speaker 2
From the depression.
00:15:23 Speaker 2
To the Second World War by doing charity work on the street at Christmas time.
00:15:29 Speaker 2
Four and six hours a day for a solid month before Christmas for charity work and taking collections with the microphone just standing on the table.
00:15:37 Speaker 2
But they had the payment flat.
00:15:39 Speaker 2
And the amount that we rolled in was fantasy.
00:15:44 Speaker 2
If I worked, I worked eventually with the Vancouver Sun.
00:15:47 Speaker 2
Until they get me on their battery, report us to work with them.
00:15:52 Speaker 2
Yeah. We go out and receive $2000 in the.
00:16:02 Speaker 1
Sound quality of radio is saying what was.
00:16:06 Speaker 2
The well, the quality of radio.
00:16:10 Speaker 2
If you took, if you took one of the original 78 recordings like we had in our library at WX, we had some.
00:16:18 Speaker 2
Some more Caruso records.
00:16:22 Speaker 2
In fact, we even had some old cylindrical records too, for the old horn gramophone, but.
00:16:30 Speaker 2
If you took the old fashioned or the old the old original type.
00:16:33 Speaker 2
Of early 78.
00:16:38 Speaker 2
We have the recordings of crucial and a few of these people.
00:16:41 Speaker 2
Well, it was thin, there was nobody in it, and the accompaniment sounded.
00:16:46 Speaker 2
And was this somebody’s playing harmony there because there was no highs and lows, you know, it was very.
00:16:53 Speaker 2
And then of course, the experiments were going on with.
00:16:58 Speaker 2
And different manufacturers.
00:17:00 Speaker 2
At the end to broaden it.
00:17:02 Speaker 2
More base.
00:17:03 Speaker 2
More trouble?
00:17:05 Speaker 2
This went over and over a period for many, many years until we came up with that, which I think was about the pioneer in almost a stereo sound.
00:17:16 Speaker 2
On on the, on the on an ordinary record with the the one at London record made this.
00:17:22 Speaker 2
Which eventually became the four way they called.
00:17:26 Speaker 2
And I played the first program of that in ranked.
00:17:30 Speaker 1
But it’s a good reaction to that.
00:17:33 Speaker 2
Oh, terrific.
00:17:34 Speaker 2
So much so that today the general Manager of London Records is a very close personal friend of mine.
00:17:40 Speaker 2
In fact, I saw him last point.
00:17:45 Speaker 2
He’s never forgotten.
00:17:48 Speaker 2
Because I used to, I used to do.
00:17:51 Speaker 2
And my my my particular online I used to do once a week.
00:17:54 Speaker 2
I used to do music from London, which was that you recording type.
00:18:05 Speaker 2
I also did for 15 years.
00:18:07 Speaker 2
I did a a program of seven years.
00:18:11 Speaker 2
Called the British Music Hall.
00:18:13 Speaker 2
And every artist on Mad King.
00:18:16 Speaker 2
And we had this on there was a recorded artist from the British music.
00:18:21 Speaker 2
Because I’d been with the other man and I I knew I was.
00:18:26 Speaker 2
But the early days of radio here were.
00:18:30 Speaker 2
We had fun.
00:18:32 Speaker 2
We just, you know, everything was a challenge.
00:18:34 Speaker 2
What can we do that?
00:18:35 Speaker 2
Let’s do something different and we would do something different.
00:18:38 Speaker 2
You know, we would cover, for instance, supply.
00:18:42 Speaker 2
And one of the things that I was fortunate.
00:18:46 Speaker 2
When was it outside troop?
00:18:48 Speaker 2
At that time was a man who had been a Sergeant with me overseas in the First World War.
00:18:54 Speaker 2
And he got me cut right.
00:18:57 Speaker 2
I could go in with this farm and right into a fire, which I haven’t done more than once.
00:19:02 Speaker 2
And just stand right there with it, with my pack on my back.
00:19:06 Speaker 2
Picking up the water that comes out of the noise room describing the fire.
00:19:10 Speaker 2
And also, Trav Coleman, who was the PR for Canadian Pacific here.
00:19:18 Speaker 2
He liked what we were doing and because we used to go down to meet so many celebrities at the railway station when they were.
00:19:26 Speaker 2
We ride the entire CPR station platforms for all we had to do was gonna plug in after that.
00:19:32 Speaker 2
The bread that used to.
00:19:33 Speaker 2
Have to take a lot of equipment, travel.
00:19:38 Speaker 2
Got it for us.
00:19:40 Speaker 2
Who had the entire station while we did go play now?
00:19:43 Speaker 2
We met.
00:19:44 Speaker 2
We met a lot of premier, the prime Ministers of Canada and a lot of famous people, along with Deanna Durbin.
00:19:54 Speaker 2
By two.
00:19:55 Speaker 2
As they were coming through.
00:19:58 Speaker 2
And a lot of people, lot of film stars.
00:20:02 Speaker 2
Your mother’s got a few pictures.
00:20:04 Speaker 1
Yeah, I understand that. Yeah.
00:20:06 Speaker 2
No, these are these are from.
00:20:08 Speaker 2
These are from like the other days and my radio days and my TV days.
00:20:15 Speaker 1
You find generally that.
00:20:18 Speaker 1
In the beginning of Radiolytic.
00:20:19 Speaker 1
Was a welcomed sound to the sound environment.
00:20:22 Speaker 1
Vancouver, where there are very mixed reaction.
00:20:25 Speaker 2
And that was a welcome sound because of a new form of entertainment.
00:20:28 Speaker 2
You know, it was a new form of entertainment that, mind you, in those days, you had to pay a license fee.
00:20:33 Speaker 2
You’re not your TV, but your radio.
00:20:36 Speaker 1
Or anything like that.
00:20:37 Speaker 2
You pay the line.
00:20:40 Speaker 2
That that was on for quite a long time.
00:20:47 Speaker 2
Radio itself just sort of edged its way into the entertainment, and the talk is of course had become a big thing in the.
00:20:57 Speaker 2
Motion picture business, which killed a lot of life talent.
00:21:06 Speaker 1
Thanks Dave.
00:21:08 Speaker 2
But this can’t.
00:21:12 Speaker 2
And motion pictures.
00:21:14 Speaker 2
Mind you, in those days were pretty powerful too.
00:21:17 Speaker 2
I mean, the business was pretty powerful and they had some good pictures.
00:21:21 Speaker 2
In fact, you watch your TV now.
00:21:23 Speaker 2
They’re running a lot of the old ones right now, and some of them are still good.
00:21:28 Speaker 2
Some of them are a little hammy, but.
00:21:32 Speaker 2
No, you just sort of eased in it.
00:21:34 Speaker 2
You know, people, people started buying little sets.
00:21:40 Speaker 2
Crystal sets one thing and another thing.
00:21:43 Speaker 2
They were within fairly decent range price wise and it became part of life.
00:21:50 Speaker 2
And today you see the younger people of today never lived in the days.
00:21:57 Speaker 2
There wasn’t the radio on.
00:22:01 Speaker 1
Over the years, obviously radio.
00:22:03 Speaker 1
Has improved technically in quality, but do you think maybe that it’s lost some things in its spontaneity or what?
00:22:12 Speaker 2
You know my my candidate opinion is and I told this to the broadcasting not so long ago.
00:22:18 Speaker 2
My candidate opinion is that.
00:22:22 Speaker 2
Radio is not.
00:22:26 Speaker 2
Doing what it can do.
00:22:29 Speaker 2
Now, whether it’s a question of.
00:22:33 Speaker 2
The attitude of, Oh well, we can’t compare with TV.
00:22:37 Speaker 2
I don’t agree with that.
00:22:41 Speaker 2
For one reason, radio can give you an incident on happening right now.
00:22:47 Speaker 2
Two years got to film it.
00:22:49 Speaker 2
It’s going to develop.
00:22:50 Speaker 2
It got cut, it got it edited.
00:22:52 Speaker 2
So radio to do that, but they don’t go out and do these things anymore.
00:22:57 Speaker 2
They contend to sit there and well, we got a spot coming on spot spot spot.
00:23:01 Speaker 2
It’s strictly.
00:23:02 Speaker 2
A cold blooded.
00:23:04 Speaker 2
Money business.
00:23:07 Speaker 2
In those days, there was a lot of humanity in the business, very, very human people would stop there on the street and say, Gee, I like your program.
00:23:15 Speaker 2
They did last night.
00:23:17 Speaker 2
You know today they put gimmicks on.
00:23:19 Speaker 2
You know, we give away money, we give you this, we give you prizes.
00:23:22 Speaker 2
That’s buying audience.
00:23:24 Speaker 2
The old lady?
00:23:24 Speaker 2
You didn’t buy an audience.
00:23:26 Speaker 2
You gave me.
00:23:28 Speaker 2
You had to buy your own personality your own way.
00:23:31 Speaker 2
You handle it.
00:23:35 Speaker 2
This is how you got your listeners.
00:23:38 Speaker 2
I’m giving you a personal opinion here.
00:23:40 Speaker 2
I don’t like these ads where the guy comes in and screams at me in my.
00:23:44 Speaker 2
Face because if I was going into his house to sell him something, I would not go screaming into his house.
00:23:52 Speaker 2
I was going with a quiet persuasion.
00:23:56 Speaker 2
Talked and I knew what I was talking about.
00:24:00 Speaker 2
Today they take people on here and on on, on TV on non radio.
00:24:06 Speaker 2
Who are selling articles?
00:24:09 Speaker 2
That I don’t think they’ve ever used or ever seen outside of.
00:24:12 Speaker 2
Maybe a sample of brought in to show you what the thing looks like.
00:24:16 Speaker 2
In the old days.
00:24:18 Speaker 1
We did our own testing.
00:24:20 Speaker 2
And yet, in all those years, nobody ever came to me and said.
00:24:25 Speaker 2
What brand of coffee are you using?
00:24:29 Speaker 2
And yet the thing was that I could give them the answer because we launched, we were the only people that had an advertising campaign for a certain brand of coffee.
00:24:40 Speaker 2
And I spent three months studying.
00:24:44 Speaker 2
The Rose of coffee.
00:24:46 Speaker 2
How it was handled.
00:24:47 Speaker 2
Open Bogota.
Part 4
Transcript
00:00:03 Speaker 1
Stewart would be embarrassed, you know, to have it set to his face, but all set to the tape.
00:00:15 Speaker 1
History over all of the years I’ve known.
00:00:19 Speaker 1
And that goes back now for 30 years or better.
00:00:25 Speaker 1
Has been one of giving just an amazing number of people, a helpful leg up.
00:00:32 Speaker 1
It’s a very long list.
00:00:34 Speaker 1
You never hear stir talk about it.
00:00:36 Speaker 2
No, you didn’t even talk about.
00:00:39 Speaker 1
I know.
00:00:42 Speaker 1
Some of his benefactions, if you like it.
00:00:45 Speaker 1
Benefaction is not drew to the proper word.
00:00:48 Speaker 1
He has extended a helping hand in terms of career development.
00:00:54 Speaker 1
And helping.
00:00:57 Speaker 1
Helping the little guy helping people, he likes people.
00:01:02 Speaker 2
You gotta like.
00:01:04 Speaker 2
This is true.
00:01:10 Speaker 1
Fred, we’ve.
00:01:12 Speaker 1
Chatted before starting this tape.
00:01:16 Speaker 1
And during.
00:01:18 Speaker 1
Some of the bricks in the table.
00:01:23 Speaker 2
How about?
00:01:25 Speaker 1
What’s wrong with radio today?
00:01:28 Speaker 1
Or what was good about radio yesterday or what was bad about it then and is better today?
00:01:34 Speaker 1
And we’ve been all around the.
00:01:37 Speaker 1
Maple a number of times.
00:01:42 Speaker 1
The primary purpose of this research, if you’d like.
00:01:46 Speaker 1
To call it is.
00:01:48 Speaker 1
To delve into.
00:01:52 Speaker 1
Backgrounds and the recollections of people who.
00:01:56 Speaker 1
Of being a part of or made some contribution to the growth.
00:02:01 Speaker 1
Organization known today as Selkirk Holdings.
00:02:05 Speaker 1
But it occurs to me that there are.
00:02:10 Speaker 1
Two kinds of people.
00:02:13 Speaker 1
In this consideration, there are the people who.
00:02:16 Speaker 1
Actually worked in the organization and worked for the organization.
00:02:22 Speaker 1
And that’s one class of people, and that’s the one we’ve been concerning ourselves with in the main.
00:02:29 Speaker 1
But the people who really built this company and will build any company are its customers.
00:02:36 Speaker 1
In our case, we don’t call them customers so much as listeners.
00:02:41 Speaker 1
We have customers, yes, we have sponsors of course.
00:02:44 Speaker 1
Without whom we couldn’t live.
00:02:47 Speaker 1
In the broadcasting business, but the people who really made C KWX and other stations in the group.
00:02:55 Speaker 1
Were its audience.
00:03:00 Speaker 2
This is right.
00:03:02 Speaker 1
And I think perhaps.
00:03:04 Speaker 1
I’m putting taking words out of your mouth rather than putting words into your mouth like you said as much.
00:03:11 Speaker 1
The radio used to be a lot closer to its audience.
00:03:15 Speaker 1
Than it appears to be today.
00:03:18 Speaker 1
The people reacted more to radio than they do today.
00:03:23 Speaker 1
Why do you think?
00:03:26 Speaker 1
Why do you think they reacted more than now?
00:03:30 Speaker 2
One of the first place while it was to a certain extent, it was a new media.
00:03:38 Speaker 2
This would create a quite a bit of.
00:03:42 Speaker 2
But I think that it’s got away for that. Radio’s got away from the public.
00:03:48 Speaker 2
Who are very important to the broadcaster.
00:03:53 Speaker 2
It might be making a lot of money, but are you making a lot of goodwill?
00:03:58 Speaker 2
And as a goodwill that I think is very important to any industry.
00:04:02 Speaker 2
And particularly in in the in the way of radio, because if you haven’t got the people with you.
00:04:09 Speaker 2
Eventually there’s gonna come to the go to the.
00:04:11 Speaker 2
Point where you.
00:04:11 Speaker 2
Won’t have.
00:04:12 Speaker 2
Any at all and in in those days we did things that we felt the public.
00:04:18 Speaker 2
Wanted to know about.
00:04:20 Speaker 2
Like for instance, if there was a big fire.
00:04:23 Speaker 2
We did the broadcast on it.
00:04:25 Speaker 2
We were there.
00:04:26 Speaker 2
Today you get a newsflash.
00:04:29 Speaker 2
It doesn’t mean anything.
00:04:30 Speaker 2
There’s a fire, right?
00:04:31 Speaker 2
So what?
00:04:31 Speaker 2
There’s a fire at the fire department.
00:04:33 Speaker 2
Put it out.
00:04:33 Speaker 2
But in the old days, we took the people to those events.
00:04:37 Speaker 2
Things like that we if there was anybody anything of importance, we were on the job to make sure that we were getting the facts right away.
00:04:47 Speaker 2
To give them to the public as fast as we could and we.
00:04:50 Speaker 2
We dove into it.
00:04:52 Speaker 1
Earth the radio mediums.
00:04:58 Speaker 1
If you like in the lifestyle of people today, has changed from what it was.
00:05:05 Speaker 1
At the time we’re speaking all at an earlier period in radio’s history.
00:05:11 Speaker 1
At least in part, and perhaps in large part because of television.
00:05:16 Speaker 1
People now will turn to.
00:05:19 Speaker 1
Major newscasts on television.
00:05:22 Speaker 1
To see the big fire.
00:05:24 Speaker 1
They’ll. They’ll.
00:05:27 Speaker 1
They’ll get from radio over the bull.
00:05:30 Speaker 1
That there is such a fire.
00:05:32 Speaker 1
Where it is.
00:05:34 Speaker 1
But they’ll get to see the picture that we tried and and we did, I think.
00:05:39 Speaker 1
Made with words.
00:05:41 Speaker 1
They now see on television.
00:05:44 Speaker 1
I greedy’s role has changed.
00:05:47 Speaker 2
I agree with you.
00:05:48 Speaker 2
Take up to a point.
00:05:51 Speaker 2
The old days we weren’t satisfied with just putting a bullet in on.
00:05:54 Speaker 2
There was a fire.
00:05:55 Speaker 2
We went through the fire.
00:05:57 Speaker 2
And we went very close to it.
00:05:58 Speaker 2
Like, as I know from all my.
00:05:59 Speaker 2
Own personal experiences.
00:06:02 Speaker 2
We got right up there with the firemen at the hose.
00:06:05 Speaker 1
Our television does that today, not too much.
00:06:09 Speaker 2
Not too much.
00:06:10 Speaker 2
I’ve I’ve noticed that they they they get in the area.
00:06:13 Speaker 2
Yes, they get a a long shot of a building burning and all that but.
00:06:17 Speaker 2
Anything had happened in the old days?
00:06:20 Speaker 2
People couldn’t see it.
00:06:23 Speaker 2
But if we felt it was important enough, we made sure that we time while we were on the job, we got an interview.
00:06:28 Speaker 2
We got a story.
00:06:29 Speaker 2
And it was just as quick.
00:06:31 Speaker 2
Because we were concerned with our public who wanted to know the details of it, of what was.
00:06:37 Speaker 2
The people, the people like to feel that they are part of it, you know, Jimmy Durante has the best answer.
00:06:42 Speaker 2
Everybody wants to get in the act and this is the one thing that the average listener does not do to day is get into the act, become part of it.
00:06:54 Speaker 2
And even in radio, we could get people to become part of something by being on our toes, getting there, getting it, getting the sound effects, honey and everything else.
00:07:04 Speaker 2
Sure, we didn’t have a picture.
00:07:06 Speaker 2
But you can make you can make a fire or a wreck or something.
00:07:09 Speaker 2
You can make a pretty strong story.
00:07:11 Speaker 2
Ohh, I don’t think there’s any question about the fact that.
00:07:14 Speaker 1
And has been said many times that the picture should paint in your mind are better than any other kinds of picture.
00:07:22 Speaker 1
This interview was recorded in 1978 by **** Meissner.