Small Town Radio in the 1960s

They say you can never go back, and that may be true. But just for the hell of it, let’s fire up the old Time Machine and slip back half a century … to the “decade that shaped a generation” — The Sixties.

The 1960s was a time of incredible societal change: in cars, dress, drug use, world events … and, of course, music. 

The setting for our story is a small radio station in a small town in a small province in Eastern Canada. This post is about the goings-on at that station in The Sixties when pop culture and rock music blossomed.

It was also a time when three young DJ’s — who eventually became veteran reporters — blossomed as well.

“Most things are forgotten over time. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.” – Haruki Murakami, from Kafka on the Shore.

Murakami sums things up quite nicely. The award-winning writer does a good job of describing the memories I cling to of my first full-time job … at CKMR Radio, “790 on the dial” in Newcastle, New Brunswick.

The 1960s gave us a whole new language with words like Nam, rock on, main squeeze, pinko, friggin, laid back, pot … and full of it. It was at radio stations across Canada, the U.S. — heck, the world — where announcers did their own thing … and had a blast.

I graduated from the Campbellton [New Brunswick] Composite High School in Canada’s Centennial Year, 1967. How long ago was that, you ask? Well. The Toronto Maple Leafs last won a Stanley Cup in 1967.

It was a wonderful time to be young. In ’67, I was 18 and working at four part-time jobs: sports reporting at CKNB Radio and at The Graphic, compiling stats for the North Shore Hockey League … and public address announcing at Memorial Gardens, the local hockey arena.

Three jobs paid nothing, the other not much more. I was getting exposure, they said. That was all well and good, but I could die of exposure. I needed a full-time, paying job.

Rod Butcher, an announcer at CKNB, heard they were looking for a DJ at CKMR Radio in Newcastle, a pulp mill and port town in east-central New Brunswick, and he said to me, “Why don’t you apply?” And so in late August 1967 I did just that, especially after hearing words of encouragement from my mother [“You're not living at home forever …”].

That’s the way it was back then. Eighteen meant you weren’t living at home. You were on your own. Not only that, you were proud to be living on your own.

I soon got a phone call from CKMR’s manager, Bob Wallace. He wanted to meet. And so on a Friday afternoon — 8 September 1967, to be exact — I travelled 115 miles by rail to Newcastle, grabbed a cab at the train station and headed straight for the radio station, downtown, on Castle Street.

It was AM radio of course; back then only a handful of stations in the country were on the FM band.

And CKMR was the only radio station in the Miramichi Region. The tiny broadcasting operation had virtually no competition and as a result, it had a solid, loyal audience. As they say in the biz, it had a good book.

CKMR was on the second floor of a two-story cinder block building, above a garage.

After walking up a flight of stairs, I was met by the receptionist, Barb Lockerbie, who escorted me to Bob Wallace’s office in a far corner of the building. Two large windows gave the station manager an excellent view of the main street.

THE INTERVIEW. THE JOB.

I took a seat on an old wooden chair in front of Wallace’s desk. For someone who’d been in the broadcast industry for a number of years, Wallace was quite formal. Stiff. He seemed like a nice enough fellow, but he wrung his hands like the best man at a wedding reception who was lost for words.

We chatted for half an hour, if that. Wallace pointed out that the Canadian Radio Television Commission [the broadcast licensing cops in Canada] had given CKMR a licence for the maximum five-year period, while the radio station in Campbellton, where I’d been working, had only been granted a licence for the one year, the minimum period.

I  was surprised to learn that Wallace wasn’t a former broadcaster, but ex-Air Force. He was also the station accountant, the bean counter.

Yesteryears may be buried deep, but I remember clear as day walking into a recording studio where I cut an audition tape. Using an old AEA Big Ribbon mike — a beautiful industry icon, even then — I did my best to read cold copy from the teletype machine. ‘Cold’ meaning I hadn’t read it over. That’s often the best way to see how well someone can knock off a newscast.

HIRED … AND ON THE AIR

About ten minutes later, Wallace slipped the reel onto an Ampex tape deck and my ramblings were soon coming through a wood-encased speaker suspended high in the studio. The manager didn’t say much except that it was a ‘good read.’ Although he did point out — stopping the tape to reinforce his point — that I had mispronounced ‘abutment.’ The strange word — well, strange to a teen — was in a news story about a poor guy who checked out when his car slammed into a bridge.

I learned that the job was mine while I was in the studio. Wallace asked when I could start and I said, “Yesterday.” Pay would be $40 a week. And no, $40 wasn’t a lot of money back then. But I was in broadcasting and had full-time work.

The following Monday, I was the evening DJ in Newcastle and on the air, nervous as all get out and trying my best not to show it.

I quickly discovered that being a disc jockey involved more than spinning records and saying, “This is … and that was.” Reading news was a challenge as well. It was all live and every mistake stung. My two-second pauses seemed like 20 seconds of dead air.

I was from the 1940s, the equipment from the 30s. On the far upper left of the photo is our log which we followed to insert commercials, public service announcements, news, weather breaks and network programming.

CKMR was a CBC-affiliate, which meant we carried some of its network programming.

Another announcer — younger than I, if you can believe that — was assigned to babysit the new on-air guy, but after 20 minutes he left me alone and plunked himself down in a big chair in the reception area where he began to flip through Billboard, a New York-based music industry weekly famous for charting the Top 100 tunes. When the kid got tired of reading, he moved to a desk and phoned his “main squeeze.”

A VISITOR FROM MONTREAL

All kinds of interesting people drop in to radio stations, usually during the day, and usually for interviews. One winter evening I got a visit from a man I figured to be in his late 80s. He stood at the top of the stairway, gently knocking on the door. We shook hands and exchanged names.

The old guy said was he from Montreal … and he wanted to see our station. I said to myself, what the hell, and I let him in.

It was the strangest thing: He sat alone in our recording studio, listening to the on-air broadcast off the big speaker. Even though the lights were out, I could still make out his outline in the dark.

An hour later, the man stood up and walked over to thank me for allowing him in.

I asked what brought him to Newcastle. He said he was in the Maritimes visiting as many radio stations as he could. He then revealed that in the early 1920s he had been Canada’s first broadcaster, working out of XWA Radio in Montreal. First broadcaster? Wow! This was like Guglielmo Marconi or Alexander Graham Bell dropping by.

I watched him walk down the stairs, slowly, one step at a time. When he reached the bottom he opened the door, looked my way, waved good-bye and disappeared into the snowy night. I never saw him again.

XWA later changed its call letters to CFCF  ["Canada's First, Canada's First"]. The station went off the air in 2010. The bean-counters at Corus Entertainment pulled the plug on the country’s oldest radio station, citing it was losing money — or not making enough money — who knows?

RICK SHALALA

It wasn’t easy being a teen, naive and in a strange town. I didn’t know a soul in Newcastle … and I was shy to boot.

I started coming out of my shell after I met Rick Shalala, our morning show host. Rick was a friendly, outgoing sort who was eight years older. His name is pronounced: ‘Rick.’ Okay, lame joke. ‘Sha-lahl-la’ then.

Turns out, Rick was from Campbellton as well. I’d played indoor soccer with his kid brother, Raymond.

Rick was a pilot and, like Bob Wallace, ex-Air Force.

He had on-air style some would describe as “homey.” Hearing Rick Shalala on the radio was like listening to a trusted neighbour leaning on the fence and going on about this and that. The man wasn’t polished like the Big City Guys but, God, he was real. I could see why people were drawn to him.

I was with Rick one time when he was working a country show. He read a commercial, then — without any introduction — cut straight into a “foot-stomping” fiddle number. The tune — we would later say — “kicked ass.” That’s a 90s expression. Rick cranked up the studio speaker until the dust jiggled off it, then flicked on the mike and announced: “… Walk back on ‘er.” He glanced my way and with a glint in his eye, said, “That’ll get ‘em …”

At that moment, thousands of people around the Miramichi had just cranked up their radios. Good for Rick, I thought, he’s bringing joy to many. And he was having a lot of fun himself.

Let’s break to hear some CKMR “promos” … spots recorded by country singers Tommy Hunter [CBC TV], Hank Snow and Doc Williams [Grand Ole Opry, Wheeling, West Virginia, USA]. The clip runs about two minutes.

Download: ckmr-promos.m4a

In my eyes, Rick Shalala was worldly, a bit of a rebel but more important, an original. He was his own man. He stood up for things that mattered, and that made an impression on me. I never told Rick, but he was my hero.

Rick Shalala was also reliable — unlike a certain morning man who didn’t always show up for work on time. When a station has no overnight staff and the morning announcer is late for their shift, that’s bad news for listeners who rely on clock radios to get them up.

This one announcer would sometimes show up one hour late. That’s when our audience would experience a slight of hand. When the guy finally signed on — at 6:30 a.m. — he’d announce his first ‘time check’ as 6 a.m. He’d continue to fudge the time until, by 7:30 or so, he would be right on.

P.T. Barnum would have been proud.

In the winter, morning announcers in New Brunswick usually had their own demons to deal with. They plowed through deep snow to get to work. Even if the weather was nice, they sometimes had to try several times to get a stubborn transmitter to sign on. Or, they discovered that the paper on the teletype printer started to bunch up … at 2 a.m. That meant no news, weather or sports. And no ‘Today in History.’

More than once Rick arrived at work with the teletype paper screwed up. Yet, in 30 minutes he was reading a complete newscast. How did he do it? I’ll tell you how. Rick sprinted down the street to a restaurant where he found a copy of the Moncton Daily Times. He then proceeded to give listeners the news straight out of the paper, with some quick editing along the way.

No one was the wiser. Mr. Barnum would have been proud of that too.

MUSIC OF THE 60s

It was Blair Trevors — our engineer who got around with the help of a wooden cane — who decided which songs made CKMR’s playlist. That’s because Blair was our Music Director. And so he manned the Pearly Gates at our record library, but I don’t think he spent much time reading the Bible for the music industry, Billboard. I use the Pearly Gates analogy because Blair always went to church.

We young “jocks” didn’t go to church, except perhaps if we were dating a religious girl and wanted to make an impression.

Blair spent a lot of time sitting on a chair beside an old turntable where he took the new records for a spin.

The thing I remember most about Blair was that he would often ask about my father, a former soldier … where he had served during World War Two and all that. Can’t remember now, but I believe Blair may have been in the war himself.

The vinyl arrived straight from the record companies. If Blair thought a song was a keeper, he’d put a small label on the record indicating a genre code and a number. The rejects — psychedelic music and hard rock, for example — were immediately tossed in the garbage. The grooveyard, if you will.

It was in the small garbage can where I found a 45rpm record called ‘Incense and Peppermint’ by the Strawberry Alarm Clock. I recognized the name from Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. I said to Blair, “Why the hell would you throw this out? … it’s a hit.”  ”No,” he shot back, “… that’s not music, that’s garbage!!”

I held onto the record and we all started to play it. ‘Incense and Peppermint’ climbed to #1 across Canada and the United States.

You can hear that song — plus a few other tunes in this short [1:12] collage from the ’60s …

Download: music-collage-the-60s.m4a

Don’t sit there listening to the music and staring at the screen. Keep scrolling! …

LEARNING THE ROPES

I continued to play DJ, alternating between afternoons and evenings. I was becoming less nervous and feeling more at home.

There were a few ‘oh shit’ moments, like the time I was in studio and rolled back in my chair, only to hear it crunch a stack of [brittle] 78rpm records, smashing them all to hell. I scooped up the pieces, put them in a paper bag and — around one in the morning, after I got off work — discreetly tossed them into a garbage bin on the way to my boarding house, about half a mile away.

Another thing about playing records is that they sometimes skipped or worse yet, got stuck in the same groove and played the same refrain over and over and over. That’s why we were told to never leave the studio, except for bathroom breaks — which were always fast.

If you were on your way back from the can and heard a stuck record, you ran to the studio like a track star on speed. We got to know which records had long playing times. Bobbie Gentry’s ‘Ode to Billy Joe’ was one of the best. It ran 4 minutes and 15 seconds, nearly twice as long as most records.

Old jocks must have some of the strongest necks in the world because of the workout they got everyday in studio, their heads twirling, trying to read a record label as it went around and around on the turntable. What’s the name of this song again? Who sang it? Who wrote it? How long does it run?

My first experience with a remote [an out-of-station broadcast] happened shortly after I joined the station. It was on a weekend, which is when most remotes take place. We were set up in a hockey arena where the local Pontiac GMC dealer was strutting his stuff: the shiny new models for 1968!

I was up on the stage and operating the equipment — essentially quarterbacking things — spinning records and throwing the switch now and then to an announcer who was down on the floor interviewing sales staff and happy customers who had just bought new wheels. Easy enough. What could go wrong?

A part-time announcer, Terry White, walked up to a man who just bought a brand new car. The proud owner was sitting behind the wheel of a Pontiac when Terry asked — this is all live, mind you — “Could you tell me something about this fine vehicle …?” The customer looked at him and said, “Well I hope it’s better than the lemon you sold me last year!”

Folks, that is real radio.

PAUL MCLAUGHLIN

Enter Character #3 in this story: Paul McLaughlin of Fredericton. 730 Hansen Street, Fredericton. Now isn’t that the strangest thing? I was only to Paul’s home once, but I never forgot his address.

When I joined CKMR, Paul was away on medical leave after being injured in a car crash. When I finally got to meet him, he asked, “Do I walk with a limp?” “No,” I replied. “Damn,” he said, “because if I did, l’d get more money from an injury settlement.” So I said, “You poor bastard. You can barely walk …”

Paul and I became close friends and we chummed around. He had a car and that mean we could travel here and there. In Sixties lingo, he had wheels.

Paul was a bit shorter than me, prompting Barb, the receptionist, to nickname us “long and short broadcasting.” And even though he was shorter, I looked up to Paul. He just knew more and had a gentle way about him.

“HI BOB!”

It didn’t take long for the company secrets to come out. The one that hit me between the eyes was that I got in the business because of sex. I kid you not. I’d replaced the evening announcer — whose initials just might be KV, maybe not.

One evening the young man was with his girlfriend at the station. Remember, this is on the second floor of an office building downtown, and the door is locked shut. No one’s coming. And by that I mean, through the station doors.

Let’s jump the details of foreplay and get to the action: the girlfriend of Mr. Evening Announcer is sitting on the corner of the secretary’s desk … her panties are off … and so are the trousers of Mr. Announcer. She’s sitting and he’s standing … screwing away … when there is the sharp click of a door opening. Oh oh. Company has arrived.

In walked the station manager, Mr. Wallace. Wallace was the absolute wrong guy at the absolute wrong time.

It was a sticky situation, but the old guy handled it as best as anyone could. As he passed behind Mr. Evening Announcer [who didn't miss a stroke], the announcer looked over his shoulder and calmly said, “Hi Bob.”

That night, the announcer lost both his job and his girlfriend. So much for “make love, not war.”

It’s time for another musical trip down Memory Lane … but only this time, a longer collage of hit tunes from 1968, starting off with ‘Born To Be Wild’ by Los Angeles-based Steppenwolf and ending with a full version of ‘Abraham, Martin and John’ by the legendary Dion DiMucci of the Bronx. The clip runs 08:41.

Download: music-collage-1968.m4a

Sex seems to be a common theme with Memory Lane stories, and so in keeping with a time-honoured tradition, here’s another ditty: one warm summer evening in 1968, I was walking down a quiet, tree-lined street overlooking the Miramichi River when three men approached. I’d never seen them before. They looked to be from out of town.

Indeed, they were from out of country.

From what I could pick up from their broken English, they said they were from a merchant ship moored in the harbour. The leader of the group curled his index finger over his thumb to make a small opening, proceeding to poke another finger through the hole. Aha. The boys wanted a whore house.

I pointed the three men to a white house at the end of the street, the home of a certain boss at CKMR and his plump society-lady wife. The frisky trio made their way up the street.

This was going to be interesting, and so I stood in the shadows and watched. This was better than a skit out of the TV series, Happy Days. The leader walked up a couple of steps and rang the doorbell. The other two stood back on the sidewalk, hands in their pockets. Perhaps they were warming up, not sure.

The door opened … and there stood Ms. Society-Lady, holding the door open and looking both puzzled and pontifical. The leader went back to using sign language and my smiles graduated to muffled laughter. Then it dawned on me that I might get caught, so I got the hell out of there.

I never did find out what happened after that, whether the three were told to beat it, or if the old gal made a few bucks.

OTHER PRANKS …

Go to any established radio station, chat it up with an old-timer and you’ll likely hear some cool stories about pranks — some of them outrageous — usually pulled by the DJs. The jocks were always the goofiest.

Perhaps pranks are common in other industries, I don’t know. Do lawyers spray foam on cop cars? Wait. Lawyers [judges in training] get tanked up at Christmas parties and put their bare asses on photocopy machines, so maybe jocks aren’t out of place after all …

Another observation is that times have changed and life is more serious today. Maybe that’s a good thing. But maybe it isn’t. You decide.

A common prank at CKMR was to light fire to a news reader’s copy  – while LIVE on air, no less. This was done both for a laugh and to see the reaction of the news reader. It certainly demonstrated how well they could ad-lib. More often than not, so things weren’t a complete disaster, a second script was handed the newsreader. And no, we had no smoke alarms back then. And yes, staffed regularly smoked in the building. Ashtrays were everywhere.

Another gag was to turn off the studio lights while someone was reading a live commercial, or doing the news. If you were the newsreader, the key was not to panic, but to hold your copy up to the VU monitor, unscrew it quickly … and continue reading thanks to light emitted from the two small bulbs.

It’s amazing how fast one can react when thousands of people are listening.

Just about every radio station, old ones anyway, had staff that practiced Frisbee throwing with old 78rpm records. We did that at CKMR too, pitching the records as hard as we could and watching them smash on the roofs of businesses on the other side of the street. Just as well none of us ever became music directors.

Paul and I once grabbed a pile of old 78s, dropped them on the floor and stomped them to pieces — just so we could record a cool sound effect and play it on air. A sound effect is known in the biz by its initials: SFX. The idea was to play this peculiar SFX between records, just to get people wondering. Maybe even the boss would say, “Hey, great sound effects …”

But what to do with the smashed vinyl? I mean, we couldn’t just dump it in the garbage at the station. Paul had this idea to put all the pieces into a box and throw it off the Centennial Bridge, near what was called Chatham at the time. At around three in the morning, Paul stopped his Mustang in the middle of the road, and at the highest point on the bridge we heaved the box over the side. It made a loud thud when it landed on the frozen ice. Never to be seen again.

Or so we thought. A few years later I was working at Radio 5AU in Port Augusta, South Australia when an envelope arrived from newsman Paul McLaughlin, then working for another radio station in the Maritimes; can’t remember where now, it was so long ago. Enclosed was a short newspaper story about fishermen in the Miramichi landing an unusual catch — a box of old, broken records.

Every radio station has a straight guy, perhaps more so today than in the old days. Jerry Miller, who did the women’s show [now called mid-morning] was a good man. He didn’t take part in the shenanigans.

Jerry dated a pretty gal whose name, I recall, was Susan. She once gave me a lift somewhere and as her small car made its way through the streets of Newcastle, I noticed a well-worn photograph of Paul up on the dash, next to the radio. And so I asked her about it. Susan explained that she had pictures of all the announcers, and when they were doing their shows … she put up their photo. That was both creative and classy.

Jerry and Susan later married and moved to Moncton, New Brunswick.

Rick was a pilot — and damn good one too. He introduced Paul and I to flying. Rick flew out of a dirt runway nearby, sometimes taking us up for short trips. They were a lot of fun.

Here’s a photo I snapped over Newcastle …

Here’s a shot of Chatham, a few miles east …

MORE GOOFY STUFF

Small towns aren’t always exciting with many things to do. More often than not, a bored Paul Mclaughlin would arrive at the station in the evening, when I was working, and he’d hang out for a while.

During a broadcast of the CBC of an orchestra in Winnipeg, Manitoba, one of us came up with an idea: why not play along with the orchestra? We went into the recording studio where there was an old piano, the one the religious folk used during their broadcasts, and we literally threw a mike down into the guts of the piano. We then “played” along with the CBC broadcast.

It sound liked hell since we did not know one key from the other. No matter. We had a great time tickling the ivory. We figured no one was listening, because, let’s face it, who listens to orchestral music? Keep in mind, I was 18 and Paul 19.

The CBC announcer, in a great baritone voice which put us to shame, then introduced the pieces. But not before we opened another mike and joined him, snorting and sniffling when he paused. It was a scene straight out of Happy Days.

Meanwhile, down the road in Chatham, where Rick Shalala was living, his landlady rushed to his unit and banged frantically on his door. “Come and hear this,” she said. “You work over there, you tell me what’s going on!” Rick listened to the broadcast but had to steady himself, he was laughing so hard. He knew what was happening.

Sometimes Paul and I would “practice” reporting and ad-libbing, doing our own ‘After Midnight Show’ in the main studio. I mean, it didn’t really matter what we said because the transmitter was shut down and we were off the air.  Trouble was, the transmitter failed to click off one night and we did the show anyway. We figured, what the hell … who’s up at this hour? Plenty heard the illicit broadcast since it was a warm summer night and people couldn’t sleep. One of the listeners was the mayor. The highlight came when we identified the station as “S.H.I.T. Radio, the brown spot on your dial.”

We were both called into a meeting, apologized profusely — but pointed out the need to get equipment that wasn’t booby-trapped.

I pointed out, “What about the politician who got drunk at a party with us, stumbled out to his car on main street and pulled out a vibrator from his trunk, proclaiming, ‘look at this!’”

Hey, at least that incident didn’t go to air. We wouldn’t want people to know what their elected officials were up to.

 

Back then, there was a drug scene in Newcastle, as there was pretty well everywhere. Management at CKMR had a clever way to make sure we didn’t do drugs — at least not anything beyond smoking some pot, which was usually supplied by somebody else. We simply couldn’t afford drugs, or even much booze for that matter, and that’s because our wages were terrible.

The pay was so bad that we announcers once took out an ad in the local newspaper looking for part-time work. The novelty of being on air soon wore off, and reality set in. It got so bad that Valerie Atkinson, the mother of a wonderful girl I was dating, would regularly make pies for the “boys.”

Another girl — and be darned if I can remember her name, but she dated Paul for a while — worked part-time as a cashier at a grocery store and she would deliberately key in the wrong prices when we bought food. This was before the days of electronic scanners. A $25 order was $5.

Around this time, Bob Wallace got a nickname, courtesy of disgruntled staff: “Runny Buns.” I Can’t remember who tagged the old fart with that moniker.

As time wore on we became less enchanted with on-air work and more disgruntled with the wages we were being paid. Runny Buns always said he was open to suggestions but, really, he wasn’t. It got so bad that while we stopped short of forming a union, we did protest in our own way. One was to put a suggestion box, with no bottom, directly above the garbage can in the main studio.

One good thing about CKMR was that it gave out Christmas Bonuses — a week’s pay. We looked forward to getting those. Not until years later did we realize they weren’t bonuses after all, but regular holiday pay. Owing to being in the broadcast business, we were entitled to three weeks’ holiday. We got only two. It was just before Christmas that Runny Buns would call us into his office, one by one, and hand out what seemed to be a Christmas bonus.

The station was a cool place to hang out at night for young folk with nothing better to do to. One evening, four or five guys arrived to keep me company, including Paul. One of them came up with an Einstein idea that I could improve the deepness of my voice when reading news if I put one of the metal waste-paper baskets over my head and read that way.

I was in favour of a better broadcast sound and fell for it — hook, line and sinker. “Byron, why don’t you sit on the couch outside the studio,” they suggested, “string a mike inside and read your news — with the waste paper basket over your head?” It seemed like a grand idea at the time, and so I agreed. But once I got comfortable on the couch and began to read, the bozos, using elastic bands, began to fire metal paper clips at me.

The ones that missed the metal basket and hit me instead stung … and the ones that didn’t made a pinging sound, as though I was reporting from a war zone. It wasn’t as if I could call them a bunch of pricks because everything was live and there was no off-switch on the mike. The guys would not have heard me anyway because there was so much laughter. A few stumbled getting off their shots, they laughed so hard.

The shenanigans ended abruptly when someone noticed a car pulling up out front. Damn. Runnybuns was coming to the rescue. I scrambled back into studio and closed the door, all the while reading news. I settled in as if nothing had happened. The boys pretended to be busy reading the newspaper or trade magazines.

Once the news was finished, Runny Buns opened the studio door and remarked, “We have to do something about that mike. It sounds terrible.”

Rick Shalala was the best off financially, and fair enough I suppose since he had a family to support. He used his powers of persuasion to sell cars on the side. In fact, I bought a couple of used cars from him myself. At this point, Rick had become a household name in the Miramichi. He was — dare I say — “famous.”

Growing up in Campbellton, my family never owned a car and so I knew nothing about them. When Rick delivered my first car [a 1961 French Simca], I looked down at the floorboard and asked, “Why are there two brake pedals?” The response was: “One pedal is the clutch.”

I spent the next few weeks driving around Newcastle alone, learning how to parallel park, and use those two pedals properly. Paul took me out for the odd driving lesson. He also showed me how to clean and wax a car, a passion I retain to this day. I have more electric polishers, scratch removers and waxes than all my neighbours in my cul-de-sac combined, including a guy who does professional bodywork.

In three weeks, I had my driving licence and, feeling like a Nascar driver at slow speed, drove back home to Campbellton to show off the car to my family and friends.

CONSTABLE NEWMAN 

Newcastle had its own police force, and the officers did an excellent job. Then again, given that the town had street names like ‘Pleasant’, is anyone surprised?

New recruits to the Newcastle Police Department often had the job of walking the beat in the evening, which for the most part meant going from one downtown business to another, making sure the doors were locked.

One policeman in particular often made the long walk up the stairs and dropped in for a visit. That’s how we got to know Ambre Newman, a young officer who was built like a football lineman.

On cold nights Ambre would take a break from his beat to warm up, relax in one of the big leather chairs and listen to the music. As the visits increased, Ambre became more relaxed. He began by asking if we would play one of his favourite tunes. In subsequent visits, the request list grew longer. We then showed Ambre how to work our record library. Ambre went from relaxing to go through index cards in our library and pulling his favourite vinyl.

Paul slapped on Ambre’s police hat, catching his reflection in the glimmer of the studio glass, to see what he would look like had he chosen a different career. The weeks morphed into months and Ambre was soon a regular when he was on foot patrol at night. Paul and I later taught him how to use the studio controls and, believe it or not, play his own records. He became quite good at operating the equipment.

The test came one warm summer night when Paul and I wanted to zip to another part of town to get some milkshakes. We kept the radio tuned to CKMR to see how Ambre was coping. He would later tell us he was nervous, but he did just fine. We may have rewarded Ambre with a burger and a milkshake, not sure.

Ambre would park his police cruiser outside our station, his eyes peeled for bozos and bimbos who blew through a stop sign, about half a block away. If he caught someone, he would peel off in a hurry, lights flashing. One night we spotted him hiding in the dark, and broadcast that police were monitoring a certain intersection, but his cruiser stayed put.

Another night, we grabbed the large fire extinguisher from the teletype room, opened a side window and sprayed foam all over the back of his car. Ambre didn’t notice a thing.

We laughed hard as Officer Newman pulled away with the rear end of his cruiser completely covered in foam. Not long after, an upset Ambre phoned the station, “I know it was you!” he said. And we said, “Hey, did you hear about that freak snowstorm?”

Ambre’s father died, towards the end of the 60s, and Paul and I got him a sympathy card. Ambre had become a good friend.

REQUESTS BY LETTER ONLY

For the life of me, I’ve never worked out why CKMR management decreed that requests for songs could only be in writing. But that is what Manager Bob Wallace wanted … if anyone wanted to hear a favourite song played, they couldn’t phone the station … they had to write a letter.

That was a bit of a pain in the butt for people who wanted to hear a song played that evening — and for us because we had to field angry calls from listeners. Still, we played by the rules.

The boys got to meet some of those who made the trip up to our studios to hand-deliver their letters …

WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE …

Apparently isn’t good for the gander. No one likes double standards and the announcers at CKMR slowly became ticked over the manager slipping into the studio — with a forced smile and a record in hand — asking if we’d “slip this in.” We always did but we always resented it because, word was, it was actually a phone request — from the Commander of the Air Base at Chatham.

The solution was to fake a phone call when Bob Wallace was there in the evening, sitting at the receptionist’s desk and going through his financial books. I went into a darkened studio and placed a call to our own main number and Rick Shalala ‘happened’ to be there to take the call, within earshot of Runny Buns who was only six feet away.

Here’s what Runny Buns overhead Rick say … “Good evening. CKMR.” [pause] “No, I’m sorry, sir, we can’t take requests by phone.” [pause] “Sorry, sir, but those are our directives … [pause] … if you want to hear a song, you’ll have to drop off or mail a letter with your request.” [pause] “Sorry, sir, those are our regulations and there are no exceptions.” [pause] “I don’t care if you’re the Base Commander …”

At that point, Runny Buns rushed over to the phone Rick was holding. Rick could not contain his laughter. Neither could I. But Mr. Wallace could. He went back to counting beans.

NEWS AT CKMR

We didn’t have a newsroom, nor a full-time reporter or news reader. We all read news as part of our shifts, which meant a trip to the noisy teletype room to get our national and international news. The source for that was Broadcast News [simply known as BN], now called The Canadian Press.

We also wrote news, although there wasn’t a lot of original reporting. When there was, we submitted our stories to the BN Bureau in Halifax. And for that, we were paid one dollar a story. And no, $1 wasn’t a lot of money back then.

The two international news stories that stood out in 1968 illustrated the turbulence of The Sixties: the assassinations of Martin Luther King in Memphis and Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles. Their deaths of these two men — strangers to us — had  quite the impact at our small station.

“DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING,” THE COP SAID

Two local deaths in 1968, both from traffic accidents, sure had an impact on me. The first involved a man whose station wagon had missed a turn in the country and plunged down a fairly steep ditch. It happened late in the evening and when I got off the air at midnight, I scooted over to the accident scene.

A local man had been transporting a large juke box. When his car plowed into the ditch, the heavy juke box shot forward with such force that the man was killed instantly. His body had been taken out by the time I got there. At the scene, a single police officer was directing traffic. I asked him if I could check things out. He said, “Sure — but don’t touch anything.”

I grabbed my flashlight and scampered down into the ditch. The window on the front passenger door was down, and so I peeked in to get a better look. It was a mess. The steering wheel was bent to one side and the dash was all smashed. There was blood everywhere. It glistened when I shone my light on it.

It occurred to me that I’d been on air when the man died. Could it be that my voice was the last one he heard? Strange, I know, to think about that, but I did. My curiosity got the better of me and so I reached in to see if the radio had been turned on. No click. It was. I then aimed the flashlight at the dial, and sure enough the tiny red diagonal bar was at 790. Hmmm.

Before I could get out, something dropped from the headliner and landed on my neck. I reached back and pulled it off. It was a wet clump of tissue paper. Or so I thought. But when I felt it further and shone the light on it, I realized it wasn’t soft tissue paper after all but a chunk of human flesh. I tossed it on the ground and got out of there.

The second incident happened at the local police station, again past midnight. There had been a fatal, and I dropped around to the cop shop in the hope of getting some information. An officer was at the counter and he knew me, or at least of me. In any case, he was a trusting sort. A man had been killed in a head-on, and he walked over to his desk to get the man’s wallet to get the victim’s age. We both went through the contents of the man’s wallet … driver’s licence, date of birth, address … and what haunted me were the pictures of him and his family. He had a wife and children. At that point his family was home sound asleep, tucked in their beds, oblivious to what had just happened. That was about to change … the officer would soon make a phone call.

The story ran in the morning without the man’s name … just his age and hometown, time of the crash, etc. I’ve long forgotten the name of the victim, but not his family picture.

THE END OF THE ROAD

When 1969 rolled around, Runny Buns was getting fed up with us, and the feeling was mutual. Myself, Rick and Paul all left. I joined a radio station in Quebec City as a DJ, and Rick and Paul joined newsrooms of competing radio stations in Saint John, New Brunswick.

We would eventually all end up reporting news.

Paul recalls a time when he and Rick were both called out to a crash site, with their news cruisers pulling to a stop within seconds of each another.

Rick spent time in Morocco, North Africa and Spain and God knows where else. He also ran a nightclub in his hometown of Campbellton.

Paul says, “Rick is a character who has lived many lives. He deserves a movie.”

Paul recalls, “Rick was working down the street at CHSJ Radio & TV and they wanted him to go on camera. He called me up looking for a dress shirt and accessories. Ok! Next thing I hear he has left town — with my clothes.”

“Jump forward two or three years … Rick is back in Saint John, and so am I. We get together. He says sorry about your clothes and gives me an awesome pair of beaded mukluks, so we are square. He picked them up while hard rock mining in Thompson, Manitoba.”

“I still have them,” continues Paul, ” … actually use them in cold weather on dry snow. They are still awesome.”

The antics continued, for sure, but not to the same degree as before. I’m not sure what happened, either we or the industry grew up, or both.

Rick later joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where he did television news, some of it outstanding. That didn’t surprise me in the least. This man could get anyone to talk, and when people in Nova Scotia told me about a hair-raising-on-the-back-of-your-neck interview with an old miner who had survived a deadly coal mine disaster, I knew the reporter had to be Shalala. It was.

Paul went from one radio station to another, always working in the Maritimes. He settled down as a television reporter for Global News, ending his journalism career in Saint John, New Brunswick. I did more DJ work in British Columbia before working radio and television in Australia. When I returned to Canada I did further DJ work in Edmonton before becoming a newsman with the CBC, often chasing crime stories. After that I jumped back to private radio where I did more reporting.

The three of us met at Shediac, outside Moncton, in 1992, when this picture was snapped. I think we were all a little snapped ourselves that night.

We stayed connected, usually by phone call or Christmas card. The common refrain from our spouses was, “I heard so much about you. You guys were nuts …”

Rick talked about this days at the CBC, known in the biz as ‘Mother Corp.’ “Christ, the workers were lazy,” he said. Yup. Over a beer or two or three, Rick went on to describe a typical CBC worker. “They wore a tweed jacket,” he pointed out, running his forefinger above his lips, “and they had a tiny moustache. And the men,” he said, “looked the same.”

Paul, Rick and I last got together in the fall of 2013. Paul, freshly retired, made the trip from Saint John to visit Rick and me at Rick’s apartment in Atholville, just west of Campbellton.

Rick hadn’t changed. He was still smoking, but vowing to stop. And he still had great one-liners. “I had this girlfriend, he said, rubbing his chin “… and man! she was a SCREAMER! You’d think she’d never seen a knife before.”

IF WE COULD DO IT ALL AGAIN, WOULD WE?

Don’t think so. For starters, CKMR Radio no longer exists. It morphed into a station called The River, 99.3 FM.

Hell, Newcastle and Chatham don’t even exist anymore, at least by those names. The two towns, together with  smaller communities like Chatham Head, Nelson and Douglastown, amalgamated in 1995. The place has a new name: Miramichi.

Rick Shalala is now in his seventies, retired of course, and living in Atholville, just west of Campbellton. Rick and I got together in late October 2013. I picked him up in my rental Dodge Chargers for a trip to Tim Hortons in town where we traded jokes, reminisced about our days at CKMR and our time with people like Paul and the gang, particularly Runny Buns.

After that, we drove to a hill overlooking Atholville, pulled off on a rutted trail best suited for dirt bikes, not muscle cars. “Christ,” Rick blurted, “Watch it! We’re gonna get stuck!” “Rick,” I said, glancing his way as the car lurched back and forth … “ain’t you the one who believed in getting off the beaten path?”

Not to worry. The Charger handled the deep ruts as though it was a 4X4. We eventually made our way to a safe track that cut through a field.

When we stopped, I told him he was in for a surprise. I popped the trunk, and there was a Phantom, a remote-control quad-copter with an HD video camera attached. “Watch this,” I said, as the Phantom rose slowly in the air, doing a 360-degree circle.

“Hang on, Mr. Pilot,” I said, and I gave it full throttle, rocketing the craft hundreds of feet in the air until it became a dot. “Holy shit!” Rick shouted, craning his neck to look skywards, “I gotta get one of those things …”

We laughed, kinda like the old days. This was almost as much fun as The Sixties.

Within a day or so, Paul drove up all the way from Saint John, at the other end of the province, and the three of us reunited at Rick’s apartment. Rick was still chain-smoking, he still had a good supply of one-liners and Paul and I did what we usually did when in the man’s company. We listened. And laughed — as though we had just pulled another one over on Runny Buns.

Paul McLaughlin recently retired from Global Television where he had been a reporter for years. When Global announced that Paul was retiring, it was news. At least Paul didn’t make the news for a cold-case paper-clip assault on a helpless newsreader.

The others: Last I heard, Dan Leeman was living somewhere in Ontario. The last contact I had with him was more than 20 years ago when I was with CBC Radio. He phoned for information on some orchestral music, of all things. Jerry Miller died in Moncton, New Brunswick in 1993. Blair Trevors died as well, though can’t remember when. I contacted his widow and sent her a small donation. She wrote back to say the money would be used to buy a Bible for Blair’s church.

Rod Butcher was killed in a car crash 20 years ago perhaps, not sure. Hank Snow died in 1999, Doc Williams in 2011.

Ambre Newman was promoted from Constable to Chief of Police in Newcastle. I went around to the police station in the mid-80s or so, when he was Chief. He came out to the counter and said, “So what’s up Byron?” Ambre died a number of years ago.

As for Bob Wallace … Well. A few years ago I was in Newcastle, doing research for my book on U.S. fugitive Richard Lee McNair [The Man Who Mailed Himself Out of Jail]. In October 2007, McNair spent his second last night of freedom on the edge of Newcastle, sleeping in his stolen van outside a hotel and scoping out a car dealership for a possible break-in. I went around to the site to snap some photographs of the spot when a man approached and asked what I was up to. The conversation got around to me having worked at CKMR many, many years ago. “You know,” he said, “Bob Wallace is still around … but the poor man is in a senior’s home and not in good shape. He may not have long to go …”

I wanted to tell the guy to tell our former station manager, “Hi Bob” … but I figured that might kill him off.

In any case the man we nicknamed Runny Buns was gone in weeks.

Rest in Peace, Bob. Thanks for the job in radio … and all the great memories. It was a gas. Until I meet my bridge abutment, Ciao, Dude.

Download: ckmr-news-2.m4a

Special thanks to Paul McLaughlin for the cool audio tapes and photos. Paul held onto them. I guess he knew one day they’d be special.

And thanks to Paul, Rick, Barb and the entire crew at CKMR – and to all our wonderful listeners — for some great memories.

That includes a middle-aged woman who spotted my name tag at a homecoming event in Saskatchewan in the early 1990s. “I’m originally from the Miramichi,” she revealed. She then got to the point: “… aren’t you the guy who played music for us on CKMR when we were kids …? “Afraid so,” I replied. “Thank you!” she said.

You are most welcome, young lady. And thanks for remembering the radio station, too.

One final confession: In spite of strict company directives, Paul, Rick and I frequently took music requests from listeners. To us, you shone more than military brass.

Hey, that bit about ‘you can never go back’ … well … L.M. Montgomery in ‘The Story Girl’ writes, “Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.”