Like many kids born in the twentieth century, my dad had a paper route as a kid. He told me that he delivered for two different newspapers in Prince Rupert. I’d picture him clattering up and down the hills, flinging bundles at people’s porches and trying to avoid their barking dogs. In my teens, I also delivered papers around my neighbourhood before school started, but that’s about as far as my own media career ever went.
As a young man in his late teens, Dad developed an interest in journalism. By reading his army discharge records, I learned that after high school, he even took a correspondence course in journalism. I have no idea how well he did, but I have no doubt that he could have been a good one. Being a storyteller seemed to be in his blood. He just loved telling an exciting and colourful tale.
Born in 1921, my Dad grew up in the thirties, when print, film, and radio were the dominant media of the day for current events and entertainment. He’d tell me of listening to the radio with his family, and based on what he said, I could guess at who some of those influential radio journalists might have been.
One of the biggest events of the thirtes and forties, aside from the Great Depression, was the second world war. A prominent American radio reporter of the war was Edward R. Murrow, who reported from the streets and rooftops of London during the worst of the Blitz. His reports would have been broadcast in Canada from one of the major US networks. Closer to home on the CBC, announcer Lorne Greene (yes, the very same) would announce the names of the Canadian soldiers who’d lost their lives that week, earning him the nickname “The Voice of Doom”. If you’ve ever heard Greene’s announcing voice from those old CBC broadcasts, you’ll appreciate its solemn and sonorous depth.
So, these were the among the voices that delivered the big news of the day. In the following decade, as television began competing with radio for dominance, many of those radio announcers and presenters found new audiences on TV.
After finishing his military career (first in the army, and later in the air force), my Dad did end up with a career in broadcasting after all, but as a technician instead of as a reporter or journalist. Like many in broadcasting at the time, his career followed something of a migratory path through the realms of radio and into television. In the air force, Dad learned about radar and radio communications, and after leaving the air force, he got a job as technician at the newly-formed CHEK-TV in Victoria, BC (where he met my mother).
His next job was in the mid-sixties, at CFQC TV in Saskatoon, where he became the Chief Engineer and upgraded all their studio cameras for the transition to colour. In the early seventies, Dad became the Engineer at CJJC radio in Langley, overseeing their antennas and transmitter site (where we lived at the time).
1975 seemed to bring an end to my Dad’s career in radio and television. He accepted a job in Vancouver on the RF team at UBC’s TRIUMF project at the University of British Columbia. He was very proud of his TRIUMF job, supporting a world-class high-energy cyclotron project, amidst an international team of scientists and engineers. He proudly toured his family through his workplace on a couple of occasions, showing us the multi-storey vault that contained the cyclotron, and all the high-voltage equipment he worked on. To me, as a kid, it was all a dizzying array of ducts, cables, and railings, and endless control panels of gauges, buttons and knobs. It was all a technological mystery to me – complex and fascinating.
But I wonder if Dad had enjoyed working in radio and television more. He always told me about the on-air announcers he’d gotten to know at various stations. Years after CJJC radio folded and all their talent had moved on to other radio stations, he’d listen to CKWX every morning on an old tube radio he’d repaired. Whenever he heard a voice he recognized, he’d mention the announcer’s name to me – names like Jack Fraser or Elmer Tippe.
There was still something a bit romantic about radio to Dad, expressed in how he remembered it and treated it with fondness. His stories unfolded in warm, tube-driven tones, from inside the old 1940 Bakelight radio that he kept on his little table in our livingroom.
