I was born near Rockton Ont. On Nov. 5, 1918, on the family farm. I went to local public school, Rockton and went to high school at Dundas Ontario. To get some upper school subjects I went to Gault Collegiate. I always had an interest in radio, and I suppose to-day one would laugh when I say I used to be an introvert, but in any event my mother was a great pusher and anyway through her interest in music, I started to play a little bit of guitar, ukulele and so on. I used to play with a chap who played a good violin and we played at a lot of house parties. Back in those days, of course, radio was very much in its infancy, there was no television, and you provided basically your own entertainment and this chap and myself auditioned up at Kitchener at C K C R and we used to play up there. This would be back in the early thirties. I decided then and there I wanted to be in radio. Back in those days you could buy an accessory to put on your domestic receiver. You could buy a microphone that you could wire into the radio, which I did with the help of my father, and I started broadcasting at home. As a result I decided, then and there that radio was a career for me. I started working at Kitchener in 1934, on their staff. One thing lead to another and I worked at a number of stations, but that's how I got started in radio.
I guess the first station I ever remember listening to was in 1923. My father, even though he was a farmer, was fairly progressive, and he bought a Marconi battery radio with ear phones. We were the first people in the community to have radio. We used to listen to C K D A, and CKNC-CKGW in Toronto, the Goodeham and Worts station and I started in radio basically as a singer. When I went to Kitchener to audition I got the job as an announcer because I could sing Country and Western tunes and I was known then as the Canadian Wood Chopper. I got a program which the station sold and... I have to be careful how I describe it... today we would call it a great native Tonic but in those days it was called Muskeke, the great Indian Herbal tonic. Now it never cured anybody, but it relieved all the tensions of the stress of being ill because it had a forty percent alcohol base, this was prohibition time so eventually, the Department of Health and Welfare was formed and they put a lot of the Herbal tonic's and the early remedies of that type off the market. They went out of business so I lost my sponsor. but that's how I got started and I can remember back, in those days the station in Preston C K P C and Cyrus Golf, who owned the Eastern Steel, had this station in his home and his daughter eventually married J. D. Buchanan of Brantford and the station was moved to Brantford and it's still there. CKPC and the CKCR originally started at St. George, Ontario, and their studios, this is back in the Thirty's, their studios were in the Bank of Montreal in St. George and eventually it moved to Waterloo and became C K C R.
That lasted for several years and then I had a chance to audition and went to CKPC Brantford and worked as a morning man and a general announcer, copy writer etc. and then I went to North Bay and worked for Lord Thompson or Roy Thompson at C F C H and they were going to move me to Timmins which was their headquarters and I thought that if I ever got there I'd never make enough money to get moved south again where the future was as far as I was concerned. So I quit there and went down and worked at C K O C at Hamilton. Did the morning show and write copy.