The Rural Voice, 1977-11, Page 5A snow storm
started 51 years
of service
One February day in 1926 'Doc' Cruickshank fiddled
with some parts and ended up with a radio station that's
been serving Western Ontario ever since.
It was one of those traditional snowbelt winter days, cold,
blustery, not fit for man nor beast. It certainly wasn't fit for
trudging out trying to convince people they should buy radios.
Radios were a luxury in February 1926 and it could take some
persuasion to convince someone to buy one. It wasn't the kind of
weather to try that persuasion.
So the young man, the only radio retailer and service man in a
50 mile radius, sat in the rear of his little shop on Main street in
Wingham and idly examined a copy of Popular Mechanics
magazine. He came across a story on how to build a simple radio
transmitter, and decided to give it a try. He had all the needed
parts around the shop and within an hour had. put the thing
together. A telephone mouthpiece was utilized fora microphone
and some storage batteries provided the power.
The young man didn't even know the set worked until
tinkering with it a day or two later he had a telephone call from a
citizen to whom he had earlier sold a radio set to say that the
signal was coming in fine. Almost by accident Wilford Thomas
"Doc" Cruickshank had stumbled onto the career that was to
make him a legend in Western Ontario and in the Canadian
broadcasting industry. That day, February 20, 1926 became the
beginning of a broadcasting business that is now one of the
major industries in the town of Wingham and is still growing.
That experimental radio set was eventually to become CKNX
radio and later lead to CKNX television, today providing jobs to
about 80 people.
Of course, Doc didn't have any delusions of grandeur on that
day. Radio, was still an unknown quantity. There were few
stations in Canada at all. The nearest station to Wingham was in
Detroit, 150 miles away. Even American stations were on air for
short periods of time. Radio receivers were also scarce. It
seemed like a hobby.
It was to remain that way for a good long time, an expensive
hobby at that. First Doc soon learned he needed a licence if he
was to continue his fiddling with the little apparatus. He was
assigned the call letters 10 BP (he'd earlier called his station
JOKE).
The power of the first broadcast, he was later to estimate, was
probably about two watts. The licence gained him the power of
10 watts and the frequency of 1200 kilocycles.
But 10 BP was strictly an amateur arrangement. The licence
didn't allow for sale of advertising. Things were pretty rocky
financially because Doc was not a rich man. He'd been born in
1897 about two miles south of Wingham in Morris township and
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