CFXC New Westminster/CJOR Vancouver
Like CKWX, CJOR Vancouver began its
career in another municipality and under a different name. It was
started in 1924 by Fred Hume of Hume and Rumble Ltd. in New
Westminster. Hume was then a New Westminster alderman; he served
a mayor from 1933-1942, and was mayor of Vancouver from 1950-1958.
HOWARD HUME: My father had a store in New Westminster. He was an
electrician, and in the store they sold electrical appliances, lighting
fixtures and so on. He was persuaded to sell radios, and he found
that he couldn't sell radios in New Westminster because there was
no local station. So he got a licence and started a radio
station called CFXC. The studio was in the top floor of the
Westminster Trust Building. The deal was made with the Trust
Company was that if the radio station mentioned the name of the
building, they got their rent free. (The Westminster Trust
Company also held the licence for CFXC.) The rooms in the Trust
Building consisted of one large room and what I think was a coat
closet. The transmitter was in the coat closet and the large room
was the studio, where they had a piano and some chairs. The
station was on for two hours a night. All the entertainment was
live--piano, violins and so on. The performers were amateurs;
they liked to broadcast just for fun. In the early days of radio,
it hadn't developed its own technology. The first microphone, for
example, was the mouthpiece of a telephone. The broadcasting
apparatus itself was breadboarad style; the electronic components were
mounted on a wooden board about a foot wide and three feet long.
The tubes were all sticking up in the open all the wiring was in the
open, which is the traditional breadboard style. It was very low
wattage; I think it was only 5 or 10 watts. It could only
reach Vancouver after dark. After a couple of years of operation,
my father decided that radio broadcasting wasn't for him. It was
thought that he could stimulate the sales of radio sets with the
broadcasting station, and it apparently didn't work out. In 1926
he sold the radio station and the licence to the Chandler brothers in
Vancouver. They bought what equipment there was, and they named
it CJOR.
ROSS MacINTYRE: George Chandler bought it for $350--$50 down and $25 a
month, the months he had $25. Nobody made money with radio
stations in those days. That's why they could buy one for $350.
DON LAWS: George Chandler bought it from Fred Hume for something like
$600--$300 cash and $25 a month. He moved it from Westminster as
close to Vancouver as he could in the electoral district which he had
to be in, which was New Westminster. The closest he could get to
Vancouver was just across the north arm of the Fraser.
CYRIL TROTT: At the time, George asked me to help him install the
transmitter. We did this out on Sea Island. We installed
the transmitter and antenna system at the entrance to the bridge going
east from there over onto the mainland. We were able to throw
part of our grounding sytem in the water to make a good grounding
system. Their transmitter was installed in a building that was
sitting on piles over the water. When the tide came in, we had
water under us.
DON LAWS: He went from 50 watts, I think, to 100. The first
antenna out there was a flat-top antenna. Apparently, Chandler
couldn't afford to buy two poles, so he bought one pole and the other
end of the antenna was an old cottonwood tree. Of course, when
the tree blew in the wind, our signal would be affected because of the
movement of the antenna. The studio was in the St. Julien
Apartments down on Georgia Street; they've changed the name to the
Ritz. They had an apartment there. They slept in the
bedroom; the kitchen was the engineer's office, with the soldering
irons; and the living room was where they broadcast from.
JOHN AVISON: I think that the first job I had with a radio
station was in the St. Julien Apartment Hotel. I remember they
used to charge batteries for something or other in the kitchen.
The gramophone was a wind-up type, and we played recordings by putting
the microphone down on a piano stool in front of the gramophone.
They had an Ampico player piano in there. On program I remember,
where George Chandler's two sisters sang duets and I played piano, was
for the Goodwill Industries. That was an operation to
employ unemployed people in repairing boots and shoes and
clothing. George's mother, who I think very likely owned the
station, came around very often. She was the sort of head lady at
CJOR; a very charming lady.
DON LAWS: George Chandler's interest in the station was the
transmitter. Anything else was superfluous. You'd go in
there and ask him a question about the transmitter and he'd talk for an
hour, bring out his slide rule, talk double-talk until you didn't know
what he was talking about. You'd go in and talk about a program,
he just wasn't interested. But he was a marvelous man, very smart
and very well-versed technically. He received an award from
Canadian General Electric as the man who had contributed the most to
Canadian radio. He was the first person to get that award who
wasn't a qualified engineer. He was a self-made man; he never
went to university. He was quite a character to work for. I
used to say I knew him better than anybody. I didn't know him at
all, you know.
In 1930, CJOR moved its studio into space
above the Alexandra Ballroom, and later to Howe Street. For a
number of year, its 500-watt transmitter made it the powerful
commercial station in Vancouver. CJOR remained in the hands of
the Chandler family until the mid-1960s.
Author, Dennis Duffy
Written in 1982.