Saying goodbye to an old musical friend this weekend

I have been out of radio full time for just over two years now, and although I still do some freelance work, I don't anticipate that changing anytime soon.  Too bad, as I still love the medium that gave me a career and livelihood for 40 years.  But you deal with things in the present as best you can and that is what I am doing as I currently look for new career opportunities to get me excited.

That being said, it is always fun and at the same time sad to look back on radio's glorious past and wonder at the magic of it all while the medium continues to redefine itself in the current digital age.  I'm going to look back in this column on the history of a station I have never worked for but have long admired.

CKOC 1150 in Hamilton began life in May of 1922 and was the brainchild of Herb Slack, owner of Wentworth Radio and Supply Company.  Herb, like many of his contemporaries at the time, figured he could sell more radios if he owned a radio station.  What can I say, life was simpler back then...

CKOC became only the third radio station in all of Canada that spring of 1922, and still holds the title  as the oldest continuously-operating radio station in Canada.  True, Saskatchewan's CHAB began broadcasting a week earlier than CKOC, but apparently they had an interruption in service in 1933 before reopening, so the key word in all this is "continuous".

There have been many broadcast locations over the years, beginning at the corner of King William and John Streets in Hamilton, before moving to the 11th floor of the late, lamented Royal Connaught Hotel in the downtown core, the corner of James and King Willimas Streets and later the imposing old building on Garfield Avenue near King and Sherman Avenue North.

The frequency they broadcast on changed almost as often as the physical location, including 880, 630 and 1120 kHz, before moving to its present home at 1150 back in 1941.

Most people of a certain age remember CKOC as a Top 40 music station from 1960 to 1992, when it faced the music, as it were, and changed to Oldies 1150 with the call letters CKMO.  Turns out listeners liked the music but not the call letters, so saner heads prevailed and they reverted back to CKOC the following year, and it has remained that way ever since.

Until now, actually.  At noon today the final chapter in the glorious history of CKOC will play out as the final Top 500 Countdown begins to signal a shift in programming at the venerable institution.  After this weekend, the station, owned by Bell Media, will become TSN Radio 1150 and become an all-sports station.

From what I've heard, the programming will be local in the morning and they will carry the Hamilton Tiger-Cats games as well as be the Hamilton affiliate for the Toronto Raptors and the Toronto Maple Leafs, but in-between they will be basically repeating the corporate network TSN feed.  So full-time local programming will be a thing of the past.

Too bad, and I know many will lament not just the loss of local programming but the loss of CKOC as a whole.  But radio, as much as many would hate to admit it, is a business, and a business needs to make money to survive.  CKOC bucked the trend for a very long time, not forsaking their musical format on radio until now, even though many others long ago gave up on broadcasting music on the AM band, including my former employer CKTB many years ago.

In radio it all comes down to numbers, as in ratings, and that translates into advertising dollars, and simply put, CKOC was not generating the numbers needed to sustain it in the present marketplace.  I know people will lament its passing, as will I, but the grim reality is you have to have the numbers to make it work.

Like it or not, CKOC simply didn't have the numbers.

So the big change happens Monday, just in time for the annual Tiger-Cats/Toronto Argonauts Labour Day tilt.  Time will tell if TSN Radio 1150 generates bigger numbers than CKOC did.  If not, who knows what the next format change will be, if any.

Radio isn't the fun business it once was.

Although I didn't have a direct connection to the station, I do have an indirect one.  Years ago when one of the sister stations in the group, CKLH-FM, changed music formats and was in need of old comedy albums by the likes of Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart and others, I was contacted by station manager Nevin Grant and a deal was struck to sell my large comedy LP collection to the station for a nice sum of money.  Later I found out the station was willing to go much higher than they actually paid, but I was happy to get rid of them and get what I could for them at the time.

So after my evening shift at CKTB one Friday night, I made the drive down to the Garfield location in Hamilton and dropped off my boxes of albums and collected my cheque before continuing my journey to Toronto for the weekend.  Back then, there was actually a live studio person overnight on one of the stations, so he knew I would be arriving about 1 in the morning or so.

That's as close as I got to being a part of CKOC's history, but at the time none of us had any idea things would change as much as they did.  Back then stations were still playing albums, for heaven's sake, and CDs were the up and coming trend.

As I write this, my former radio colleague and photographer extraordinaire Ted Yates and his former morning-show co-host Shelly Marriage are on the air until 2 pm kicking off the final countdown, with guest appearances by Nevin Grant and Roger Ashby over the course of the two-hour broadcast.  The rest of the team, past and present will carry the tunes the rest of the way until the end of the long run and the start of the new era on Monday.

I wish TSN Radio 1150 luck in the future, and I wish the past and present staff of CKOC (Classic Hits 1150) all the best.  Thanks for the memories, gang, and keep the hits coming in our collective memory banks.

Have a great weekend!

September 3rd, 2015.