I had been at CJNB for only a few weeks when a trio of girls came to the station ostensibly to make a request for the announcer to play their favourite record. In reality, the girls probably wanted to see the new announcer in town. I can still see the three girls standing at the counter. One was a gorgeous blonde named Sheila Weir, another a shorter gal named Evelyn Spraque—and then there was the redhead, the one who caught my eye. Her name was Joan McIntyre. Somehow I found out not only her name but her phone number. Later, I phoned and asked if I could take her to a movie. She was only fifteen, so she had to ask permission from her mother, who said, “You can’t go out with him—he’s a man.” But Joan did get permission, and I arrived at the door of the McIntyre home, which in those days looked like a shack. Her mother, Bess, was to say later that when I showed up for my first date with Joan she privately thought, “He’s not a man—he’s a scrawny kid.” She was right!
I was utterly taken with Joan, and within a few months announced to her that someday we would be married. She later told me she thought it was just a joke. Her girlfriends giggled when she told them, but I was serious about Joan. Although I soon moved back to my hometown, Moose Jaw, to work at radio station CHAB, I returned to North Battleford a year later for two reasons. I had been offered the job of program director—for which I was eminently unqualified—and Joan was there. We dated often and I was a frequent guest at the McIntyre home for dinner, sometimes invited by her mother, not Joan! After gaining experience at two stations in Saskatchewan, I was hired by CKNW on Feburary 1, 1956. Joan and I became engaged. After being at CKNW for only eight months I was given time off to drive to North Battleford, Saskatchewan, where Joan and I were married on October 25, 1956. We left North Battleford with a carload of wedding gifts in a 1953 Chevy Bel Air. Someone had written “BC or bust” on the side of the car.
The honeymoon began with a trip to Saskatoon, about 145 kilometres to the southeast. Whenever the car hit a bump the horn would blow. When I checked under the hood I found two little wires that had been connected to the horn. The other ends were inserted into a small vial containing mercury. Every time I hit a bump the mercury would splash and make a complete circuit, blowing the horn. It was an ingenious contraption made by our station engineer, Al Ruddell. Clever fellow! Al knew that frequent blasts from the horn would attract attention to the honeymooners’ car. We headed to BC where we began our married life together.
Chapter 5
My Career Moves On
Announcers who begin their careers in small-market radio stations can hardly wait to move to a larger market. They routinely send out audition tapes to bigger stations in the hope that the program director will listen to the tapes and consider hiring them. I was just like any ambitious kid lucky enough to get into radio.
Long before I had any plans to marry Joan or work at CKNW in Vancouver, and after a successful start at CJNB North Battleford, a small-market station, I wanted to try for a bigger market. My ambition, after about a year at CJNB, was to get a job at my hometown station, CHAB Moose Jaw. It was a popular station with a large audience through southern Saskatchewan, particularly farm families. It was folksy radio with such programs as The Mailbag every afternoon. A popular personality was a guy named Dick Lillico who hosted a morning program in which he played soft music and read poetry. Dick was habitually late arriving for his 8:30 a.m. start time. The theme song was soft music with birds singing in the background. Halfway through the theme, Lillico would burst through the control door and hand a few records to the operator, then run to the studio. By the time he got there the theme would almost be over, requiring the operator to gently fade down the music, move the needle to the start of the record and begin playing it again. Then he would open Lillico’s mike. Lillico was so smooth that listeners would never know he had been in such a rush. Lillico and personality Bob Giles mounted their own comedy road show, playing in towns throughout the listening area. Farm audiences shrieked with laughter at one skit in which six-foot-four Giles would appear in a baby diaper.
CHAB had attracted some very good broadcasters. Sports announcer Art Henderson was so knowledgeable about baseball and other sports that he could ad lib an entire sportscast after just a few minutes of looking at results from the teletype or a recent newspaper. As a kid of about fifteen, before I got any work in radio, I had hung around CHAB, standing in the hallway outside the main studio watching Henderson flawlessly report the sports. Beyond the studio was the control room where the operator worked the controls and did some announcing. My heart ached to be the guy behind the glass. Only a few years later, that dream came true and I was hired by CHAB.
At CHAB I was a board announcer operating for other announcers and doing some programs of my own. I was quickly put out on the street one morning to cover a major story. An airliner owned by what was then called Trans-Canada Air Lines (later Air Canada) collided in midair with an RCAF training plane. Both plunged to the ground, scattering wreckage over the north area of the city. Everyone aboard both planes was killed. Part of my story involved going to a makeshift morgue in the armoury. I stepped carefully around the bodies of the victims covered with blankets. It was a sobering experience and very difficult for a young person with no experience in news to describe and create a story for listeners.
I was given another assignment on a Saturday evening to go to the local train station to interview someone on the then hot topic of Crowsnest Pass freight rates, which western farmers considered discriminatory. For one thing, it meant that it was cheaper to ship goods east to west than the other way around. I used the station car to do the interview even though the railway station was only a few blocks from the radio station. When I finished the interview and recorded a story I got the bright idea that I could use the station car to drive to Regina, sixty-four kilometres to the east, to visit the guy who had given me my first job at CJNB North Battleford, Tommy Nelson. He had moved to Regina.
We had a nice visit but I stayed a little too late. It was a very stormy night; in fact, it was a blizzard. I found I could see the blacktop highway better if I drove with my lights off. At one point, I happened to glance at the gas gauge and realized in a panic that I was about to run out of gas. I had no alternative but to stop at a farmhouse near the highway, wake the poor farmer and ask for some gas. Obligingly, he put gas in the car from an elevated tank in the yard. It was purple gas that was supposed to be used for farm equipment, purple to show it was exempt from road tax. It was illegal to use it in passenger cars. I made it back to the radio station, but it was now after 7:00 a.m. I parked the car and went in to say hello to our morning man, Jay Leddy. “Have you got the station car?” he demanded. Apparently, the assistant manager, Ned Skingle, had arrived early and wanted to know who had the car. I was in big trouble. Later in the morning I was called up to the office of program director Bob Giles. “George,” he said, “the station car is for station business. Got it?” “Yes, Bob,” I said contritely, and that was the end of it.
Or so I thought. The story went around the station like wildfire. The next day, chief engineer Merv Pickford was installing a direct phone line to the transmitter and asked operators like me where I would like him to place the handset near the control panel. Chief announcer George Price chirped, “George would like to have you install it in the station car.”
Price was a consummate professional. His diction was perfect, his presentation very smooth. He had a habit of reading all his news copy over carefully, then taking a smoke break before going on the air. On one occasion he put the copy down on the lid of a tape recorder and went out for his cigarette. When he returned about two minutes before airtime, he discovered his whole newscast was missing. Paul Hack, a sports guy, had grabbed the tape recorder, put the lid on it without removing the news copy and left on