The Day The Light Went On

By Frank Absher

In the late ‘60s I had occasion to drive through the Northwestern Canada and the Yukon. I should not have been surprised by what I saw at a radio station there. It was an early indication of radio’s downward spiral.

Things then were primitive by today’s standards. Most of the single, major highway through that region was gravel (1,000 miles’ worth). When you could pick up a radio station on the drive, it helped keep you sane. The terrain was rough, and the mountains made it unfriendly to AM radio waves. Repeaters would have been expensive, but a few stations got around the problem.

In Dawson Creek, British Columbia, the Alcan Highway officially begins, and the local radio station’s approach to maximizing coverage back then involved utility lines. While they broadcast from a tower, they also ran a basic carrier-current operation so drivers on the long gravel “highway” could pick up the signal. Those electric lines ran next to the road – most of the time. When they veered away, you lost the station.

When I got to Dawson, I had to visit the station. It was in a nondescript building that also housed the co-owned television station. Memory is foggy, but it may have been CJDC. The studios were primitive.

I got there late in the afternoon, introduced myself as a tourist and fellow broadcaster looking for a station tour. Both stations were getting ready for their 5 o’clock news and I was invited to watch.

The radio guy walked me through the TV studio, up a flight of stairs and into a cramped radio studio. There was a window at the back looking onto the street below and a small window that looked into the TV studio. As we approached the top of the hour, a news reporter came in and gave the jock a stack of carts, then turned and left.

The jock told me the guy was going to the news booth on the other side of the TV studio. I sat back to watch.

The intro played, the announcer threw the mike switch and the news guy started speaking. When the news guy came to the point where the actuality should run, a light flashed in our studio (activated by the newsman across the building) and the jock played the cart.

This process fascinated me. I asked why they didn’t just have the news guy in the same studio and was told it wouldn’t work because there were other functions being performed, like answering the phone, which would interfere with the broadcast.

Curious, I asked if I could see the news booth. I was told to go down through the TV studio (behind the set since they were broadcasting live too), up another flight of stairs, and wait until the “On air” light went off.

The news studio was the size of a large phone booth. Now the picture was clear to me.

Radio was not as important as television. It was, at best, an afterthought – a sort of stepchild that had to be tolerated. Radio was relegated to whatever spare space could be found. I remembered a couple years before when I had visited WDAF in Kansas City. Television occupied most of the building. The radio station was upstairs in the back.

It didn’t matter to ownership that radio was important to the listeners and that, in many cases, listeners spent more time listening to radio than they did watching TV.

It didn’t matter to owners that their radio stations were #1 in the market. Television was “where the money was.”

Apparently the money isn’t in TV anymore, or radio either, for that matter. The layoffs continue, and in spite of the primitive conditions in which we worked, I'm glad I was in the business then instead of now.

Discuss on the STLMedia Message Board. (Registration required).