CHOO Radio Recollections

An on line scrapbook of images & text for former staff and listeners alike

=================================================================

(LEFT) The full "We Sponsor the CHOO News" poster from the mid 1970s. (A truncated version appeared on an earlier page.) Does anyone remember when newscasts were on at fifteen minutes past the hour? This was obviously an attempt to provide newscasts when other stations were not. However by 1979 at the very latest the CHOO news was back on the hour and half hour. Why "Radio 14"? It was just a simplification of CHOO's actual AM frequency of 1390 kHZ. On small AM transistor radios of the day the tiny dials usually just gave the first two digits of any given frequency - so 1400 would read 14, 740 would be 74, 550 would be 55, etc. Given that CHOO's main competitor was CFGM (Richmond Hill) on 1320 it obviously made sense not to call CHOO "Radio 13". That also sounds a bit unlucky as well! So that's why "Radio 14" was commonly used to identify CHOO's frequency from at least the mid 1970s.

6:15pm on Saturdays always meant the end of "Durham This Week" during my time at CHOO in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was a simple but great idea - highlights of the week in news as presented on CHOO. It included audio "clips" from the week put in context with retrospective commentary. It ran approximately 15 minutes and was pre-recorded by the news department for playback at 6pm although I seem to recall it usually turning up in master control to be threaded up on the old reel to reel machine with just minutes to spare!

I have a rundown of all the various shifts and programming content from the early 1980s that I will copy out at some point in the future and add on a subsequent page.

............................................................................................................................

CHOO Radio Timeline

The Canadian Communications Foundation has an impressive on line compendium of Canadian radio and television history.

Their site is http://www.broadcasting-history.ca

Check it out! It's an amazing on line resource consisting of all sorts of historical details as well as facts and figures about the Canadian broadcasting industry. Some of it very little known.

Happily, there is a short timeline history of CHOO Radio too...

You can find it by clicking [HERE].

We salute the Canadian Communications Foundation for their awesome work preserving and conducting much original research into Canadian broadcasting history.

And an extra tip of the CHOO radio dial to outstanding Southern Ontario radio historian Bill Dulmage for writing up the CCF's timeline about CHOO history. Cheers, Bill!

.............................................

(ABOVE, RIGHT) Flip side of that CHOO "Mike-Radio" showing more clearly the "on-off-volume knob" at the top. No, that's not a tuning knob! As I said, you can only pick up 1390 AM on it. In this photo, you can also see the manufacturer's label on the base. Too bad CHOO isn't still on the air today - it would still be pretty cool to use this to listen! Of course, physicists claim radio waves never completely disappear, they're all just travelling away from us through space and are all out there somewhere. Interesting to think that maybe some day after we're all long gone some aliens might be listening to CHOO in some faraway galaxy and wondering exactly where was this mystical land called "CHOO Country"...???