CFYC Vancouver

      In some respects, CFYC is the most interesting and unusual of the early Vancouver radio stations.  Its 6-year lifespan was quite eventful and ended in an important controversy.  The station started broadcasting under the sponsorship of the Vancouver Daily World on March 23, 1922.  The World's front page offered tips on setting up home receivers, which the paper could also provide at nominal cost.  The receivers were supplied by Trans-Canada Radiovox Ltd., the company that built and operated the station for the World.  The licence was in fact issued to the head of the radio company, Brigadier-General Victor Wentworth Odlum.  The transmitter was on the top floor of the David Spencer Ltd., department store, and Spencer's music department provided records for daily phonograph concerts.  One might well assume that, with the support of three businesses, CFYC was destined to endure.  But in little more than a month, the station's daily schedules vanished from the World.  Odlum retained the licence, however.  In 1924, his offices were in the Mercantile Building on Homer Street, which was officially listed as the location of CFYC.  It was probably at this time that the station was taken over by Roy R. Brown.  An enigmatic figure, Brown seems to have been very active in early Vancouver radio.  In 1924, he was president of Commercial Radi Ltd., which also had offices in the Mercantile Building. 

       In April 1924, a CFYC transmitter was set up in the First Congregational Church at Thurlow and Pendrell in the West End.  According to Dr. A.E. Cooke's unpublished memoir on church broadcasting, Roy Brown installed the equipment to broadcast a concert and offered to carry Cooke's Sunday sermon as well.  The Province church pages show that the April 13 services at First Congregational were broadcast "courtesy of the Radio Corporation of Vancouver," yet another radio compnay.  By that time, Milton Stark had been hired by Roy Brown to build radio sets for sale, and the station became one of his responsibilities.

MILTON STARK:  There was a 25-watt transmitter, purchased from Northern Electric, and I found the church on Pendrell Street amenable to letting me put the transmitter into a closet they had and use the salon for a broadcasting element. I operated the station, announced, played records most the time, and got the dictionary so I could pronounce "andante cantabile" correctly.  I picked popular music and I picked classical music.  I don't recall whether we bought the records or if they were loaned to us, but I must have done some chiselling that way.  I could leave my station on the air so there was a squeal the listeners could pick up on their sets and wait for something to happen.  To make things happen, I got a telephone line into the Alexandra Dancing Academy (later the Alexandra Ballroom) on Robson Street at Hornby, it was a peppy place.  I put the two microphones there, set them up with a remote control amplifier, and left the station on the air and announced from the Academy.  I hoped everybody was listening; until I got back to the station.  I couldn't tell.  Len Chamberlain and his orchestra used to come in after about 11 or 12 o'clock to broadcast over the air.  I made acquaintanceship on the air with CFCN Calgary.  There was a chap at CFCN named Bert Lake.  After midnight I used to use our station to talk to him.  My girlfriend was living in Calgary; Lake would relay messages to her, and she'd relay messages back to me.  I'd call her "Jack Benjamin," and I never thought anybody would recognize I was romancing.  We got letters from all over the continent, asking how the romance was coming along.  That was fun.  And the minister (Dr. Cooke) was absolutely astounded because of the monies that were coming in from the peopole that were listening to the services.

          The success of the religious services on CFYC led the First Congregational Church to establish its own station, CKFC.  While the small CFYC transmitter was serving the church, the station was also being used by a Washington logging company that was operating in British Columbia.  George Moore of the Merrill and Ring Lumber Company apparently used a large transmitter licensed to CFYC to communicate with the firm's logging camps.  This transmitter was originally installed at Brown's offices in the Mercantile Building, but another location was eventually chosen.

MILTON STARK: Merrill and Ring got keen.  Moore financed Brown to build a 500-watt station.  We mounted it, with a huge wooden post for the antenna, in Burnaby near the interurban railway track.  I got up many a morning to meet Mr. Moore around 6:00 at the station.  And he would relay messages; he couldn't get any response back, but he could tell by the action that they were hearing him, you see.  So he was able to assist them constantly. 

ROSS MacINTYRE:  Roy Brown also built a couple of transmitters for Merrill and Ring.  One of them was located at Duncan Bay, which is near Campbell River on Vancouver Island, the other at Theodosia Arm on the mainland side of the channel up that way.  So CFYC used to be used, part-time, for point-to-point communications.  We did all this in the broadcast band, of course.  Try and get away with it these days!  Bur that was actually done. 

        On October 24, 1924, CFYC carried what was probably the first political broadcast in Canada.  It was a speech made at the Denman Arena by Prime Minister Mackenzie King, during a tour of the west. 

MILTON STARK: Mary Ellen Smith of the B.C. Liberal Party heard something about CFYC.  She was on the newspaper route which I was running at the same time.  She wasn't seriously interested, just curious.  I said, "Mackenzie King is coming and he will at the Denman Arena.  How about broadcasting him?"  She said, "Oh, I wouldn't like to lose any audience."  But I said, "It'll only cost the $100 that the telephone company would charge for putting a line into the arena."  She thought it over and said, "I'll go for the $100, but until you get a signal from me, don't put it on the air."  I had a younger brother in short pants and we set up at the arena, leaving the station on the air at Pendrell Street.  People just listened; they waited for something to be broadcast.  For a microphone stand, we borrowed a flower stand from the florist across the street from the arena and stuck that close to the podium.  The place was crowded, so Mary Ellen Smith gave me a signal to go on the air.  It was a bloody nuisance.  King didn't stay at the podium.  He came over the mike, because it was closer to the audience, and emphasized his points by hitting the mike--ping, ping!  So I sent a little note to Mary Ellen Smith: "Please ask him to stand further away." Then he stood too far away, so I sent another note:  "Move closer." After he was through, he looked for us with real anger and she followed him and whispered in his ear.  When he came over to us, he just patted our heads and said, "Better luck next time."  And I almost screamed, "You won't even be in Parliament unless you paly attention to what's going on!"

         In the Evening Sun the next day, an item credited the broadcast to the Radio Corporation of Vancouver, and said that it was "acknowledged by experts to be one of the most successful broadcasting feats essayed in the Canadian West."   In 1925 or 1926, CFYC enterted the final phase of its life under the International Bible Students Association, which later became the Jehovah's Witnesses.  As a boy, John Avison played the piano for Bible Students' programs at a studio on Hastings Street. 

JOHN AVISON: I used to be amused by the fact that the manager of the station was a man with, I think, not suitable name for a radio station manager: his name was W.J. Tinney.  They had a group called "The Choir of a Million Voices." Of course, they couldn't accommodate a million voices, but this was premised on the fact they they sold the hymn books.  They assumed that everybody who bought a hymn book, all across the country, would be joining in.  I played the piano for the choir and played solos.  The religious part, outside of playing for the choir , was not part of my knowledge of the station at all.  CFYC moved out of the building on Hastings Street to a very large house on Kingsway near Central Park in Burnaby.  I think that was just about the end of the operation of the station.

        In addition to CFYC, the International Bible Students Association was also operating radio stations in Edmonton and Saskatoon and two stations in Toronto.  These stations were the focus of a dispute that had a profound effect on the future of Canadian broadcasting.  In 1928, the Department of Marine and Fisheries refused to renew the licences of the IBSA religious groups.  Although the government was acting in response to complaints from the public, the number and credibility of the complaints received were questionable.  The only significance case of defamatory broadcasting involved two anti-Catholic lectures by a Ku Klux Klan spokesman who had purchased time on the Saskatoon IBSA station.  Nevertheless, the licences were not renewed.  CFYC Vancouver and its sister stations went off the air in March, 1928.  The whole issue was vigorously debated in Parliament and in the press.  The government was accused of religious discrimination in the matter, and received a tide of letters and petitions in support of the Bible Students.  The controversy led, in the same year, to the creation of a royal commission on Canadian broadcasting led by Sir John Aird.  The Aird Commission's recommendations pointed the way to the establishment of the CBC some years later.  The role of Roy R. Brown in the latter half of CFYC's history is not clear.  He worked briefly for two other early Vancouver stations, CNRV and CFDC.   His own firm, Commercial Radio Ltd., is listed in the 1928 city directory as operating CKWO, an otherwise unknown station.  Milton Stark later encountered Brown running the radio repair service of a Seattle department store.

Author, Dennis Duffy
Published in 1982