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Toronto Radio Station Celebrates 58 Years On Air This Week
It was the start of a remarkable mini-empire in radio. It was exactly 58 years ago this week - June 6, 1966 - that CHIN first went on the air, occupying the old 1540 spot abandoned by what was then known as CHFI-AM. The place that Johnny Lombardi started now has two FM outlets, has expanded to dozens of languages and even produces some TV shows.
But it wasn't always that way. Note that the article below says in the early days, CHIN was an ethnic station with a difference - everything was in only one language.
"All broadcasting will be in English, even though he expects to "play music from all over the world" and include the 500,000 people in Metro Toronto of non-English speaking origin in his potential market."
Boy did that ever change over the years! And check out who the original morning was, listed in the third last paragraph of the article below. 
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Re: Toronto Radio Station Celebrates 58 Years On Air This Week
In fact, the CHIN we know now is vastly different from those early days. It wasn't long before Lombardi got himself an FM licence. And you may not believe some of the shows that were on there in the early days.
Check out the Moose Latrek Show that used to air on the other band. (After Fred Snyder left CHUM & CFGM, he became one of the main producers at the station, which is where I first met him when I was interning there.) And they even did a "teenage talk show" at one point. Hard to imagine, as is the fact that a few Leaf games aired there on rare occasions. (I'm guessing it might have been related to the Jays World Series chase coverage in 1992 over on CJCL and having no place else to put the hockey.)
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