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January 16, 2020 3:51 pm  #1


Remembering Canada's 1st Radio Station 100 Years Later

An interesting article in the Montreal Gazette about the now defunct CFCF - and its undeniable history. 

The station that would become CFCF made radio history 100 years ago

By the way, the same article provides a link to a five-year-old obit about Gord Sinclair Jr., who made a name for himself in Quebec radio. His father, of course, was Gordon Sinclair of CFRB fame, but I never realized what a creep he was. Check out this from the archived article:

"Father and son were never close. The elder Sinclair tried to prevent his son from going into the broadcasting business. “He was dead set against it, even violently,” Mr. Sinclair once said. “He used to write to me regularly telling me to quit radio, that I would never amount to nuthin’.”

"Mr. Sinclair, who refused to be called Junior, had no formal education beyond high school. While still in school he was a teenage correspondent for the Canadian High News, a local Toronto CBC radio program, and was seduced by the microphone.

"He ignored his father’s advice and in 1947 started his professional broadcasting career in Niagara Falls, Ont. He worked for several radio stations, including CFNB in Fredericton, N.B., before he moved to Montreal in 1951 to get out from under his father’s shadow."


He later became a morning man, a station owner (CFOX) and a renowned highly rated newsman, all in Montreal. Hardly amounting to "nuthin." Why a father would do that to his son is beyond me. 

 

January 17, 2020 10:58 am  #2


Re: Remembering Canada's 1st Radio Station 100 Years Later

National Radio Day on August 20th is fairly new in the US, only gaining traction in 2012 when NPR gave the day some recognition on air.

If we ever do give National Radio Day official recognition in Canada, we should consider May 20th.  Radio station XWA Montreal had good documentation and even newspaper advertising of the first regularly scheduled broadcast in North America on May 20,1920.  Also XWA possibly was the first licensed radio station in the world.  Their first actual broadcast was in December 1919. XWA became CFCF in 1922.

So for these two reasons alone, we should consider seriously National Radio Day in Canada on May 20th.  XWA was the first, and should get the recognition, at least in Canada.