CKLW and WJR Radio

[nightfly61]

What's in the old CKLW studios now, anything?
What was a yearly salary for a full time 1975 Teddy "Bear" Richards or Johnny Williams?
I often wondered if the jocks or the News Dept. made more $ since CK was such a monster when it came to reporting & traffic.
I saw pics of Terry Kath & Chicago while visiting CKLW before he died. Looked pretty wired. Any old stories of drug use by jocks or by celebrities visiting while on the air back then?
I'm also curious if there are still any old outdated billboards around Detroit that have CKLW on them. Deep in the bowels of the city on some alley wall of a building half crumbling away!

[gr8oldies]

This site is required reading for any Big 8 fans: www.thebig8.net. This will answer a lot of your questions. An crumbling old billboard? Amnything's possible..there's one covered up by greenery in Springfield OH with "WBLY-FM" on it which has to be at least 25 years old. I thought I had heard that the CBC has facilities in the RFiverside Drive location but I could be wrong.

[radioman148]

>>What was a yearly salary for a full time 1975 Teddy "Bear" Richards or Johnny Williams?>>

Is that the same Johnny Williams that worked at KHJ?
What did those guys make? I didn't see it on the website.

[gr8oldies]

CKLW and KHJ's Johnny Williams were not the same. I believe WRKO also had a Johnny Williams. No clue on salaries.

[radioman148]

CKLW and KHJ's Johnny Williams were not the same. I believe WRKO also had a Johnny Williams. No clue on salaries.

Ok, so Johnny Williams was like Johnny Dark--there were alot of them.

[cklw800]

Great reflections on CKLW.  I think the Windsor and Detroit time of day was the same.  But when they gave the temperature there was a difference.  82 degrees, 28 celsius or something like that.  It sounded weird but it was interesting to hear it.  The music was overwhelmingly good, even the unknown songs they sometimes played.  A lot of times it seemed they played records right out of the box. Some songs I heard weeks and months before it hit on my local stations in Ohio.  I remember the names of the DJs but I can't remember anything they said that stood out.  They didn't talk long at all.  They just kept that great music going.  What a radio station! 

[radioman148]

They did seem to play alot of music before it got popular elsewhere.

[Goldilocks94941]

Even tho' I hated the station when I was growing up (because you just couldn't get away from it - on the school bus, in stores, even coming off electrical wires!), I paid an unannounced visit one afternoon to their studios in Windsor shortly after graduating high school with a friend who was also starting out in radio at the time.  One of the announcers showed us around, and we even got to meet Rosalie.  (My not-so-sophisticated friend suggested they got payloa for playing something as out-of-character as Minnie Riperton's "Loving You." )

We were, like their many pilgrims and visitors, impressed by their studio layout - they had a central hallway which all of the studios and conference rooms bordered, with triple paned windows thru-out, so that they could easily show people where all of the magic happened on a walk-thru without actually interrupting folks from their jobs.  Smart studio design on Ouelette Avenue.  And, unlike the small stations we worked at right out of high school, they not only had a board op as well as the DJs, but had duplicates of everything on carts so that there would never be dead air from anything misfiring.   Two sets of cart machines with two sets of commercials, songs, jingles, ready to fire without delay. 

My own first appearance on radio was actually on CKLW, probably in 1970, as a pre-teen who phoned in a report of a refinery fire in Toledo (which I had heard about on WOHO and could see from my bedroom window in Point Place).  They edited the heck out of my call (impressive in the pre-digital days, no?) and used it on 20-20 news a few times that night.  (Note:  newscasts - and at night - on a commercial music station!)  Otherwise they rarely had any news, crime reports or otherwise, about anything happening in their massive coverage area in Ohio.   But at least Ohio and Ontario both observed daylight saving time when Michigan stayed an hour behind. 

I bought the DVD of the "Radio Revolution:  The Rise and Fall of the Big 8" a few years ago - the one that's mentioned on the audio clips from 2002 that are included with an earlier posting.  Decent memories, tho' I think the bitching about the Canadian content being a "problem" for CKLW's success is a cop-out. 

One thing the video producers got wrong, however, is that when they show a radio dial scanning to AM 800 in their graphics, they neglected to capture the unmistakeable sound of CKLW's massive sidebands.  Big honking muttonchops, as it were.  Even a blind person could instantly know when you had dialed AM800 within 150 miles of their transmitter by the louder splatter on either side of their main carrier.   I think it even carried thru on the skywave, if I recall, from hearing them at night in West Virginia and New York.  One of the transmitter engineers explained to me that they had rigged up a device to modulate the side carriers at 150%, which made it impossible to not notice them, and made you stop to listen to them  when dialing around. 

The station disengaged that technology some years ago.   Since they didn't have to play by FCC rules, they were able to enhance their signal to actually be stronger than 50kw by modulating at such a loud volume.   And no distortion!  Gotta respect that level of technical ingenuity, actually.   Sorry to say that, unless I'm interested hearing the latest screed from right wing wackos or fundamentalist business preachers, there's nothing much left on my AM dial in Seattle that's worth dialing around the listen to anymore.

Thanks for the great radio memories.  Let's see if we can come up with some new ones today, eh?

-- GL

[nightfly61]

At least in 1970 Windsor & Detroit were still an hour apart(Canada an hour later). If you listen to one of the airchecks of Walt "Baby" love his 1st talk break is proof talking into Ronnie Dyson's "Why Can't I Touch You" from '70... very cool that he sent Bread's "Make It With You" out as a request to CLEVELAND OHIO.

http://www.thebig8.net/wblove.mp3

...39 years later he's syndicated & turned religous.

[gr8oldies]

CKLW's processing would cut through about anything. I remember Boy Scout camp one year in Defiance, OH. First, unlike where I lived further south in Ohio the night signal was good, second, at the little camp store the radio was tuned to CKLW but just off frequency, so any "c" "s" 'K" sound coming from the announcer would be very loud. There were two occasions when Windsor and Detroit were an hour apart, in opposite directions. One was before Michigan started observing DST "It's 8:00 in Windsor, 7:00 in Detroit". The other was in the winter of 1975, when the U.S. attempted to move to year round DST, then it was "7:00 in Windsor, 8:00 in Detroit", In the winter there's not enough daylight to save, and sunrise was at 9am, so that idea was abandoned.