CKLW
CKLW is a commercial radio station in Windsor, Ontario, serving Southwestern Ontario and Metro Detroit. CKLW is owned by Bell Media and has a news/talk radio format. It features local hosts in morning and afternoon drive times, with syndicated Canadian hosts in middays and evenings, plus Coast to Coast AM with George Noory overnight. Evening newscasts are simulcast from CHWI-DT Channel 16 CTV Windsor.
CKLW is a 50,000-watt Class B station, using a five-tower array directional antenna with differing patterns day and night. Despite its high power, it must protect Class A clear-channel station XEROK in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and other Canadian and U.S. stations on 800 AM. The transmitter is off County Road 20 West in southern Essex County, between Amherstburg and Harrow, only a few kilometres from the Lake Erie shoreline.
History
Overview
CKLW was an internationally known Top 40 station in the 1960s and 1970s. During this era, CKLW used a tight Top 40 format known as Boss Radio, devised by radio programmer Bill Drake. However, CKLW never actually used the handle "boss" on the air, just the style. Rather than a Boss 30, CKLW's weekly music survey was known as a Big 30. And instead of calling itself Boss Radio, CKLW called itself The Big 8.During this period it was the top-rated radio station not only in Windsor, but across the river in Detroit, and even in cities as far away as Toledo and Cleveland.
Before the "Big 8": Gentile and Binge
CKLW first came on the air on June 2, 1932, as CKOK on 540 kilocycles, with 5,000 watts of power. Originally, the original proposed callsign was CKWO, but it changed to CKOK due to confusion. The station was built by George Storer and was sold to a group of Windsor-area businessmen led by Malcolm Campbell, operating as "Essex Broadcasters, Ltd." CKOK became CKLW in 1933, when Essex Broadcasters, Ltd. merged with the London Free Press and its station CJGC, and became "Western Ontario Broadcasting", which was co-owned by Essex Broadcasters, and the London Free Press. The "LW" in the callsign is said to have stood for "London, Windsor", considered the two chief cities in the station's listening area. When the station's power increased to 50,000 watts, its listening area increased accordingly. In 1934, when London Free Presss station CJGC pulled out of the agreement, the station became wholly owned by Western Ontario Broadcasters. CJGC later evolved into today's CFPL, while CKLW moved from 840 to 1030 kHz in 1934, before settling on its present frequency of 800 kHz in 1941, thanks to a shuffle of frequency allocations.CKLW for most of its history had a distinctly American accent to its programming, and for a number of years served as the Detroit affiliate of the Mutual Broadcasting System, an affiliation that began with its switch from CBS to Mutual September 29, 1935, and which would last from then until its purchase by RKO General in 1963. When Mutual was restructured as a cooperative in 1940, CKLW was one of the major shareholders in the network. Alongside its affiliation with Mutual, it also gained a dual affiliation with the CBC in 1935, replacing its CBS Radio Network affiliation with that of Mutual/CBC. In 1948, it became an affiliate of the CBC's Dominion Network as well as the main network which became known as the Trans-Canada Network. The Trans-Canada Network affiliation would last until 1950, when CBE 1550 launched and the Dominion Network affiliation remained until 1962 when the network dissolved. The Mutual System's owner, General Tire and Rubber Company, purchased a controlling interest in CKLW and its owner at the time, Western Ontario Broadcasting in 1956, along with RKO General. RKO would later increase its stake to 100% in 1963.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, CKLW was home to Happy Joe's Early Morning Frolic with Joe Gentile and Toby David, which was one of the first popular comedy-oriented radio morning shows in Detroit. The show continued strong after David left CKLW for Washington, D.C., in 1940, and was replaced by Ralph Binge. The duo kept listeners entertained with an endless stream of comedic sketches and situations. The show's sponsors got in on the fun as well, as Gentile and Binge's trademark was their ability to turn a standard 60-second commercial announcement into a comedy sketch that could run for three minutes or longer. A typical three-and-a-half-hour Gentile and Binge show might feature such comedic commercials for as many as fifty legitimate products, and some imaginary ones as well. Sometimes listeners didn't get the joke. For example, according to popular legend, after promoting a miracle weight-loss aid called "Dr. Quack's Slim Jim Reducing Pills" with the story of an obese woman who got stuck in a telephone booth, Gentile and Binge received over $3,000 from listeners requesting a $1 trial of the pills as advertised, and the station had to hire a clerk to return the money.
Gentile and Binge were a fixture on CKLW until moving to WJBK radio in 1948, attracting audience ratings as high as 80% at their peak. The duo disbanded their partnership in 1956, and Gentile returned to CKLW. Toby David also eventually returned to AM 800 to host the morning show in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Both Binge and David were also stars of early Detroit television kiddie shows: Binge was "Pirate Pete" on WJBK-TV in the mid-1950s, and David became CKLW-TV's "Captain Jolly" later in the decade.
As television's popularity boomed, CKLW, like many other stations, coped with the changes by replacing the dying network radio fare with locally based disc-jockey shows. Throughout most of the 1950s and into the mid-1960s, CKLW was basically a "variety" radio station which filled in the cracks between full-service features with pop music played by announcers like Bud Davies, Ron Knowles, and Joe Van. For a few years in the early 1960s, CKLW also featured a country music program in the evenings called Sounds Like Nashville. This ended in 1963 when WEXL 1340 became Detroit's first 24-hour country station.
“The Big 8” and the glory years
After RKO General took over the station and its FM sister in 1963, CKLW began to shed the variety-format approach and, as "Radio Eight-Oh", began focusing more aggressively on playing contemporary hits and issuing a record survey. Davies, Knowles, Dave Shafer, Tom Clay, Tom Shannon, Larry Morrow, Terry Knight, and Don Zee were among the "Radio Eight-Oh" personalities during this time. The station did well thanks to its huge signal, and beat the local competition in Cleveland, Ohio, though in the local Detroit ratings CKLW still lagged well behind competing hit outlet WKNR.However, on April 4, 1967, CKLW got a drastic makeover with Bill Drake's "Boss Radio" format, programmed locally by Paul Drew. Initially known as "Radio 8" with PAMS jingles, within a few months the station's final transformation into "The Big 8," with new jingles sung by the Johnny Mann Singers, was complete, and the station was on a rapid ratings upswing. In July 1967, CKLW claimed the number one spot in the Detroit ratings for the first time, and WKNR was left in the dust, switching to an easy listening format as WNIC less than five years later.
In addition to Dave Shafer and Tom Shannon, the lone holdouts from the "Radio Eight Oh" era, "Big 8" personalities during the late 1960s and through the mid-1970s included Gary "Morning Mouth" Burbank, "Big" Jim Edwards, "Brother" Bill Gable, Pat Holiday, Steve Hunter, "Super" Max Kinkel, Walt "Baby" Love, Charlie O'Brien, Scott Regen, Ted "The Bear" Richards, Mike Rivers, Duke Roberts, Charlie Van Dyke, Johnny Williams, and newsmen Randall Carlisle, Grant Hudson, Byron MacGregor, and Dick Smyth.
The station had strong talent behind the scenes as well, most notably longtime music director Rosalie Trombley, who ascended to that position in 1968 after having worked as the station's music librarian for five years and became famous for her apparent hit record-spotting abilities. Trombley consciously made an effort to choose the right R&B and soul songs to create a station that would appeal equally to black and white listeners. As a result, CKLW was sometimes referred to as "the blackest white station in America", and many believe the integrated music mix helped bring Detroiters closer together in racial harmony, especially after the riots of July 1967. The "Rosalie Trombley Award" honours women who have made their mark in broadcasting. Another female employee of CKLW who helped break down gender barriers was reporter Jo-Jo Shutty-MacGregor, the first female helicopter traffic/news reporter in North America.
The Windsor-based station maintained a sales office in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan, where it picked up numerous sponsors for U.S. consumer products, some of which had to use the disclaimer and live announcer end-tag "Not available in Ontario". Possibly the best known of sponsors was Merollis Chevrolet, known for its comedic 30-second spots and the campy Al Jolson-styled jingle "Gene Merollis what a great great guy!"
Another feature of the "Big 8" was its "20/20 News", so-called because it was delivered at 20 minutes after the hour and 20 minutes before the hour - scheduling that allowed CKLW to be playing music while other stations were airing newscasts at the top of the hour or on the quarter-hour. The CKLW newscasters — including Byron MacGregor, Jon Belmont, Bob Losure, Dick Smyth, Grant Hudson, Joe Donovan, Mark Dailey, Randall Carlisle, Keith Radford, and Lee Marshall — delivered imagery-laden news stories in a rapid-fire, excited manner, not sparing any of the gory details when it came to describing murders or rapes. This was an attempt to make the news sound as exciting and gripping as the music. The "blood and guts" style began with Byron MacGregor's promotion to news director in 1969. Another memorable feature of the 20/20 newscasts was the incessant clacking of the teletype in the background, which gave the newscasts a unique sound.
CKLW's newscasts were acknowledged for more than just their "flash," however; the station won an Edward R. Murrow Award for its coverage of the 1967 riots, helmed by Smyth. This was the first time that this particular award had ever been given to a Canadian broadcaster.