CKLW (AM)

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CKLW is a 50,000 watt AM radio station broadcasting at 800 kHz located in Windsor, Ontario. CKLW first came on the air on May 31, 1932 as CKOK on 540 kHz with 5000 watts of power. CKOK became CKLW in 1932. THE "LW" in the callsign is said to have stood for "London, Windsor", considered to be the two chief cities in the station's listening area. When the station's power increased to 50,000 watts, of course, its listening area increased accordingly.

1 The "Big 8"
2 The decline and death of the Big 8
3 CKLW today
4 CKLW-FM and CKLW-TV
5 External links

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The "Big 8"

In the late 1960s and early 1970s CKLW was one of the top radio stations in the world, using a very tight Top 40 format known as Boss Radio, devised by legendary radio programmer Bill Drake. During that period it was the top-rated radio station not only in Windsor, but across the river in Detroit, Michigan, and even in cities as far away as Toledo and Cleveland in Ohio.

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 (who had a rock-and-roll show on AM 800 as early as 1957), and Joe Van. After RKO General took over the station and its FM sister (93.9) 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 (as "Duke Windsor"), the late Terry Knight, and Don Zee were among the "Radio Eight-Oh" personalities during this time, and helped raise the station's ratings to the point where it was beating longtime hit station WXYZ (1270) by the summer of 1966 (though WKNR "Keener 13" was still a solid number one). But it took Drake's format and a roster of legendary personalities such as Shannon, Shafer, Mike Rivers, Ted "The Bear" Richards, "Super" Max Kinkel, Walt "Baby" Love, Scott Regen, Steve Hunter, Johnny Williams, Pat Holiday, Scott Miller, Dick Purtan, and newsman Byron MacGregor (who had a million-selling single with his reading of Gordon Sinclair's commentary "The Americans" in 1973) to raise the station - newly dubbed "The Big 8" - to number one in the ratings starting in April 1967. Before long, the station's top-of-the-hour ID, sung (as were all of its jingles) by the Johnny Mann Singers, was on everyone's lips: "C-K-L-W, The Motor Cit-eeeee." WKNR would never recover, but put up a good fight against the awakened CKLW for five more years before switching to an easy-listening format as WNIC in 1972. Initially, CKLW called itself "Radio 8" after the "Drake"-style format was adopted (later lengthened to "Fun Radio 8") and used jingles from PAMS which sang "Radio 8, CKLW," but by the end of the summer of 1967 the Johnny Mann jingles were in place and the transformation into "The Big 8" was complete.

Long-time music director Rosalie Trombley was also legendary for her ability to spot a potential hit record, and became the subject of a song by Bob Seger, titled "Rosalie." Rosalie Trombley began working at CKLW as a part-time switchboard operator on Labor Day Weekend of 1963, and was, a few years later, offered a full-time position in the station's music library. As CKLW's popularity boomed and Rosalie became more and more influential, her job title was changed to the more prestigious-sounding title of "Music Director." Trombley was unique in that she garnered much respect in a time where there were not many influential women in the radio business. Recording stars - both established and aspiring - regularly visited Rosalie to personally promote their latest single releases, and the walls of Trombley's office were lined with gold records. Trombley also made an effort to fashion a station that would appeal to black as well as white listeners by playing lots of soul and R&B product, especially the Motown sound for which Detroit was famous. This was perhaps one of the earliest examples of what would today be called "Rhythmic CHR," and it united both white and African-American listeners behind the banner of a single station. As a result, CKLW has been called "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.

Along with the current hits on the station's weekly "Big 30" lists, CKLW also featured lots of rock oldies dating back to the mid-1950s, which helped cement the station's appeal to adults as well as teenagers. The "Big 8" featured oldies especially heavily on its "Million Dollar Weekends," during which every other song played was a golden classic. The station used special jingles to introduce oldies: "CKLW - Golden."

Another female employee of CKLW who helped break down gender barriers was traffic reporter JoJo Shutty-MacGregor (the wife of Byron MacGregor), the first female radio-station helicopter traffic reporter in North America. She now works for AAA Michigan and continues to provide traffic reports for radio stations on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border.

Another legendary 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. The thinking behind the scheduling of the news was that while other stations featured news at the top of the hour or on the quarter-hour, CKLW would be playing music. To hold the audience's attention, the news would have to be presented in a style that was as exciting as the music the station played. Hence, the "Big 8"'s newscasters - including Byron MacGregor, Grant Hudson, Joe Donovan, 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. "20/20 News" had actually been a fixture of CKLW for a few years before the station adopted the Drake format, but when Byron MacGregor became the station's news director in 1969 (replacing Dick Smyth who had left for Toronto), the sound of the station's newscasts took on the familiar sensationalized "blood-and-guts" style that most listeners remember. 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, the first time that this particular award had ever been given to a Canadian broadcaster.

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The decline and death of the Big 8

Some say that CKLW started to decline in popularity after Canadian content regulations went into effect. Certainly "CanCon" was a factor, particularly because many of the soul records on CKLW's playlist had to be sacrificed to make room for the Canadian content and because competing stations reacted by eliminating the "CanCon" songs from their own playlists and filling the holes with oldies or often stronger, American-originating new hits. Still, CKLW dealt with the new regulations as best it could, breaking records by Canadian acts such as Gordon Lightfoot, the Poppy Family, Anne Murray, Joni Mitchell, the Stampeders and the Bells and helping them to become top 10 hits across the United States. And even with CanCon, CKLW remained a solid #1 in the Motor City through 1973, so probably the biggest reason for the decline was because listeners in North America as a whole were abandoning AM radio in favor of the clearer audio available on FM radio stations. WDRQ (93.1 FM) grabbed away much of CKLW's teenage audience in the mid- and late 1970s, while older listeners migrated to FM album rockers like WWWW (106.7) or WRIF (101.1) or to FM adult contemporary stations like WNIC (100.3) or WMJC (94.7). The listening audience was becoming fragmented as music formats continued to splinter to appeal to narrower and narrower demographics, and a mass-appeal station like CKLW could no longer afford to be "all things to all people." For many younger listeners by 1978, CKLW was the station they listened to only if they had an AM-only radio in their cars.

As a result, CKLW attempted to hold on to its adult audience by softening its playlist to a more adult-oriented sound (an early version of what would today be known as Hot Adult Contemporary) and hiring Dick Purtan from WXYZ-AM (which transitioned from its own AC format to all-talk around the same time) to host the morning show in 1978. By 1979, CKLW had dropped all jingles (having already phased out most of the famous Johnny Mann Singers jingles, except for the fast "shotgun" jingle, starting around 1973) and changed its on-air name from "The Big 8" to "Radio 8," and had also begun to make use of "dead segues" (two songs played back-to-back with no station ID, announcement or jingle in between), which would have been a definite no-no on the station even five years earlier. Soon afterward, the station adopted the name "The Great Entertainer," with new jingles to go along with the change. Purtan's strong numbers in morning drive helped keep CKLW's ratings respectable if not spectacular into the 1980s, but Purtan was basically the station's last line of defense, and after he left for WCZY-FM 95.5 in early 1983, the station's already-diminished ratings (CKLW's last appearance in Detroit's Arbitron top 10 was in 1981) fell further.

Meanwhile, the already-fragmented listener pie got even more fragmented thanks to a new slew of FM competitors in the early 1980s, including album-rocker WLLZ, top 40 WHYT, the resurgent WDRQ (now an Urban Contemporary station after a disastrous try at all-disco from 1978 to 1980), urban WJLB (which moved from AM 1400 to FM 97.9 in 1980), and Dick Purtan's new home, "Cozy-FM" WCZY (which was reinventing itself as an adult-leaning Top 40). In an attempt to go after longtime "full service" powerhouse WJR, CKLW converted to AM Stereo in 1982 and even got the rights to broadcast University of Michigan football and NASL soccer, but in this it was also unsuccessful.

CKLW decided to jump on the FM bandwagon and made an attempt to put the contemporary hit format on its FM station (93.9) as CFXX, "94 Fox FM," in 1984, but it failed when the CRTC refused to approve the format change from big band music. The CRTC allowed the FM station to broadcast the "Fox" format for only four hours a day - two in morning drive and two in afternoon drive. The CRTC's rationale in this was that rock music belonged on AM and that FM was for classical, jazz and easy listening music. Meanwhile, CKLW-AM continued to plod along with a low-key mix of soft rock hits and oldies and with many of the live announcers replaced by automation, as ratings and revenue continued to drop. By this time, the station had once again begun to call itself "The Big 8" and had brought back some of the Johnny Mann jingles, but was merely a shell of its former self.

The final death knell for the "Big 8" came in October of 1984, when the station fired 79 staffers (including most of the remaining announcers and Rosalie Trombley), closed its American sales office in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan, and announced that it would soon change format to Al Ham's "Music of Your Life" format of pop standards and big-band music and go completely automated. The "Big 8" was finally laid to rest on January 1, 1985, and the station soon dropped AM Stereo since most of the big-band and standards music in its new format was in mono anyway. CKLW's FM sister adopted a beautiful music format with the calls CKEZ.

CKLW was known as "K-800" during its "Music of Your Life" days and also became the radio home for the Detroit Pistons, and got good ratings albeit with much older listeners than the station had targeted during the 1960s and '70s. Longtime "Big 8" jock and Detroit radio veteran Dave Shafer was the CKLW program director during this time.

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CKLW today

CHUM, which already owned CKWW-AM (580) and CIMX-FM (88.7, formerly CJOM) in the Windsor/Detroit market, purchased CKLW-AM/FM in 1993 and subsequently swapped the formats of CKWW and CKLW, moving the nostalgic music down to 580 on the AM dial and planting CKWW's news-talk format on 800, and thus ending the music on AM 800 for good. Today CKLW combines local talk with national syndication programs (including Dr. Joy Browne and the famed Coast to Coast AM with George Noory) and those produced by CHUM, which some people consider a waste of a high-powered station with a signal that reaches far beyond its immediate local area. Nevertheless, the current news/talk format enjoys good ratings in Windsor, though it now hovers near the bottom of the Detroit Arbitron reports.

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CKLW-FM and CKLW-TV

In 1948, CKLW started CKLW-FM on 93.9 MHz (now CIDR). Despite a powerful 100,000-watt signal, CKLW's FM sister has never been able to attract a sizeable audience, at least not on the American side of the border. In the 1970s, CKLW-FM programmed a country format, and then big band and jazz as CKJY in the early 1980s. After the failed "Fox" format, the station became beautiful-music CKEZ in 1985, and then in 1986, the CKLW-FM calls were restored and the station made an attempt to mimick the sound of the classic "Big 8" formula with a playlist spanning the 1950s through 1980s and with many of the original jingles, features and personalities, but it lasted only a few years. In the early 1990s, CKLW-FM again tried the "Big 8"-style oldies format, as "93.9 The Legend." Though the sound was again very faithful to the original CKLW-AM, it once again did not last long, as there was a lot of competition for the oldies market in Detroit at the time, with WOMC-FM (104.3) eventually emerging as the most popular oldies station. The station is now CIDR-FM, with a Hot Adult Contemporary format as "93.9 FM, Today's Best Music".

The operation also included CKLW-TV, Channel 9. For years, one of the TV station's most popular shows was an American Bandstand-style show called Swingin' Time (and later, The Lively Spot), hosted by Robin Seymour (and also Tom Shannon for a time) and featuring performances by national and local recording artists and teenagers demonstrating the latest dances. (In fact, as early as 1956, Bud Davies hosted a "bandstand"-style show on CKLW-TV called Top Ten Dance Party.) For the most part, though, CKLW-TV was overshadowed by its powerhouse sister radio station and mainly aired low-budget local shows along with CBC (and also CTV) network fare.

When the Canadian government requested RKO General divest itself of its Canadian holdings, the stations were sold to a consortium of the CBC and Baton Broadcasting. Baton ran the radio station for several years, before selling to CHUM. When the CBC took full ownership of the television station, it changed its call letters to CBET. CKLW-AM-FM then moved from the TV station's 825 Riverside Drive West location to its own studios and offices at 1640 Ouelette Avenue. CBET continues as Windsor's CBC English affiliate to this day, although recent budget cuts at the CBC have meant less local programming and more simulcasting of programming from Toronto.

CHUM continues to own CKLW and CIDR today, along with alternative rock station CIMX (88.7 FM, "89X") and oldies/nostalgia station CKWW ("AM 580 Motor City Favorites"). All four stations are located at the Ouelette Avenue address.

The 2004 film Radio Revolution: The Rise and Fall of the Big 8, produced by Michael McNamara and aired on The History Channel in Canada and public television in Detroit, chronicles the history of CKLW's top 40 years.

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