Alan Cross: Reflecting on 40 years in the radio business

If someone had told me in back 1981 that I'd still be doing radio 40 years later, I'd have laughed in their face. And yet...

This is a story that begins shortly after 9 a.m. on Saturday, April 6, 1968. It was my sixth birthday, a big deal according to my parents because that meant I would start Grade One in the fall. Among the presents I got, I only remember one: a Lloyds transistor radio from my grandmother. I hadn’t asked for a radio nor had my parents told Grandma to get me one. Yet there it was, complete with a 9-volt battery and single ear earplug.

Up until then, the only radio I knew was what Mom and Dad listened to in the car or what blared from the radio in the kitchen. To my astonishment, there were other radio stations, many broadcasting music 24 hours a day. I soon learned the call letters and dial positions of not just all the stations in nearby Winnipeg but also those from far away. At night, when the ionosphere cooled and thickened, it acted as a giant mirror for AM radio signals and I was soon using my little Lloyds to listen to broadcasts from Minneapolis, Denver, Chicago, Louisville and Cincinnati. Sometimes, frenetic Spanish could be heard, probably from some 250,000-watt border-blaster station in northern Mexico.

It was magical.

I started pestering my father to take me to some of the stations in Winnipeg so I could see radio being made for myself. And if we were driving around and heard that a station was broadcasting remotely at, say, a furniture store, I’d beg my parents to stop at the store so I could watch as the DJ bloviated about a great deal on bedroom suites.

By the time I got to high school, I had a pretty good idea that I wanted to work in radio. I saw myself becoming a capital-J Journalist, a dogged reporter, news anchor and foreign correspondent. As much as I loved their schtick, I was certainly not going to end up as one of those long-haired, fast-talking, dope-smokin’ DJs on the music stations.

My first taste of sitting behind a microphone came in 1980 in my first year at the University of Winnipeg. Back then, CKUW was a minuscule closed-circuit operation, broadcasting to one hallway and one cafeteria. My shift was 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. on Friday mornings, which guaranteed a listenership of pretty much zero. And since there was no newsroom, all I did was play records and occasionally work up the courage to talk about a song. Hey, it was a start.

More important was my part-time job at a grocery store. I learned through the local paper that a brand new FM radio station was going to open about 20 km away in Selkirk. What’s more, the owner of the station was from my little town and made a stop for milk every Friday afternoon at around 5:15 p.m., just as I was filling the dairy case. Target acquired.

I launched a full-on assault, begging for him to hire me. After many weeks, I got a letter inviting all staff to a pre-sign-on meeting. I’d been hired!