MEMORIES OF CJNorthHastings – from 1975
A recent news item in The Bancroft Times rekindled the memory button within my grey matter for I was among the first on-air volunteers for CJNH AM radio in North Hastings. The station was an outreach of CJBQ in Belleville. As I recall George Robinson, recently retired at that time from the CBC, was a driving force putting the aging CJBQ equipment to work allowing us to broadcast locally. I say locally for I lived in the Townsite of Cardiff at that time and my wife couldn’t hear my on-air broadcasts as we lacked the necessary transmission output.
Dave Whitlaw and I co-hosted an evening show called The Second Cup encouraging listeners to sit back and enjoy the show with a second cup of coffee, or tea, after the supper hour.
A very popular Saturday morning program was the Swap Shop, hosted by the amiable Harry Knott. People would phone is with details of items for sale.
The radio station, a little yellow shack that some of us referred to as the Sugar Shack, was located near Hill 88 by the side of the highway. It was named the “88” because when the highway was under construction the men received .88 cents a day for their labour.
Besides being very cozy, as in small, it featured twin turntables for the Vinyl LPs (long playing albums) plus Super 8 cassettes mostly used for advertisements as well as the added accommodation of an outhouse; that little shack out back.
When one felt the call of nature it was imperative to put on an LP to cover the call and one had to make doubly certain that the door was not locked. It was also necessary to check for cows as a small herd usually grazed around the studio, sometimes quizzically looking in the window to presumeably see what we were doing.
I recall one Saturday when I was asked if I could go on-air in the evening as the connection to CJBQ in Belleville had suffered a disconnect. Apparently, a ground hog had chewed through the cable at Keller’s Bridge. Or so the story was told.
And so my wife and I went on air for some Saturday night programming. It was nice to have the company and help for the on-air announcer did everything to facilitate the broadcast which included prepping the twin turn tables with the appropriate songs of choice and preparing the advertisements. We also had to keep a radio log of every song that we played which required a specific per centage of Canadian content. And, occasionally, a listener would phone with a request. With a multitude of albums to choose amongst it took some searching to first find the artist, then the appropriate album and then find a time slot for playing the request, if we had it. I recall when one traveller who was passing through asked if he could drop in and watch our performance.
One summer I was the Camp Foreman of the MNR Junior Forest Ranger program at Cashel Lake. It was the first female JR camp in the area. Some of the 17 year-old girls were very interested in the radio station and so each Sunday morning we would drive in to the station and begin the broadcasting day with appropriate church music. It was all part of the camp’s educational bent.
Readers may recall when Fred White and Margaret Hawley co-hosted a radio show. I believe it was on a Saturday. Fred, who started broadcasting at age 74 carried on until at least he was 80. During one show listeners couldn’t help but smile because Fred had apparently either lost, or forgotten his false teeth and kept reminding Margaret and all of their listeners.
I’m willing to bet that there are a number of our readers who have their own CJNH stories to tell.
Photo – by BM – The Moose, formerly the CJNH AM radio station.