Special thanks to Ray Robinson & Jeff White for sharing this weeks Wavescan program script.
Jeff: In North America, the mention of 800 kilocycles in the standard AM broadcast band usually brings back memories of one of three major stations. On the island of Bonaire in the Netherlands Antilles, Trans World Radio launched a station on that frequency on October 1st, 1964, with programming beamed both north and south in Spanish, Portuguese and English.
In Mexico, there was a border blaster on 800 kHz in Ciudad Juárez, XEROK, just across the Rio Grand from El Paso, Texas.
And in Canada, there was the famous CKLW in Windsor, Ontario, which also served the metro Detroit area. Today that’s a news/talk station, but many people remember it fondly from its Top 40 era in the late 60’s and 70’s. And that’s the subject of Ray Robinson’s tribute today – CKLW, “The Big 8”.
Ray: Thanks, Jeff. CKLW first came on the air on June 2, 1932, as CKOK on 540 kilocycles, with 5,000 watts of power. The station was built by George Storer and was sold to a group of Windsor-area businessmen led by Malcolm Campbell, operating as "Essex Broadcasters, Ltd." CKOK became CKLW and moved to 840 kHz in 1933, when Essex Broadcasters, Ltd. merged with the London Free Press and its station CJGC. The "LW" in the CKLW callsign is said to have stood for "London, Windsor", considered the two chief cities in the station's Southern Ontario listening area. When the station's power increased to 50,000 watts, its listening area increased accordingly. In 1934, CKLW moved from 840 to 1030 kHz, before settling on its present frequency of 800 kHz in 1941, thanks to a shuffle of frequency allocations under the North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement, or NABRA.
For most of its history, CKLW had a distinctly American accent to its programming, and for a number of years served as the Detroit affiliate of the Mutual Broadcasting System, an affiliation that began with its switch from CBS to Mutual on September 29, 1935, and which would last from then until its purchase by RKO in 1963.
Alongside its affiliation with Mutual, CKLW also gained a dual affiliation with the CBC in 1935. In the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, CKLW was home to Happy Joe's Early Morning Frolic with Joe Gentile and Toby David – one of the first popular comedy-oriented radio morning shows in Detroit.
As television's popularity boomed, CKLW, like many other stations, coped with the changes by replacing the dying network radio fare with locally based disc-jockey shows. Throughout the 1950’s and into the mid-1960’s, CKLW was basically a "variety" radio station which filled in the gaps between network features with pop music played by announcers like Bud Davies, Joe Van, and Ron Knowles (who had a rock-and-roll show on AM 800 as early as 1957). For a few years in the early 1960’s, CKLW also featured a country music program in the evenings called Sounds Like Nashville. That ended in 1963 when WEXL 1340 became Detroit's first 24-hour country station.
On April 4, 1967, CKLW got a drastic makeover with Bill Drake's "Boss Radio" format, programmed locally by Paul Drew. The station became known as "The Big 8," with new jingles sung by the Johnny Mann Singers, and the station was on a rapid ratings upswing.
In July 1967, CKLW claimed the number one spot in the Detroit ratings for the first time, and its major competitor in the Detroit market, WKNR, was left in the dust. That station switched to an easy listening format as WNIC less than five years later.
It is said that CKLW became the hum of the region. Walking down Woodward Avenue, in Detroit, it could be heard blasting from just about every direction – from passing cars, businesses and the open windows of homes. But of course, Detroit’s #1 station was, in fact, not in Detroit. Its 50,000 watts of AM power, which blanketed southern Ontario and more than a dozen states, was instead situated on the southern shore of the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario.
It’s actually a ‘Class B’ 50,000 watt station, with a five-tower array directional antenna with differing patterns day and night. Despite its high power, it must protect Class A clear-channel station XEROK in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and other Canadian and U.S. stations on 800 AM. The transmitter is off County Road 20 West in southern Essex County, between Amherstburg and Harrow, a few kilometres from the Lake Erie shoreline. When Trans World Radio launched their station in Bonaire in 1964 with 525,000 watts on the same frequency, it caused significant interference to CKLW at night. But, CKLW was, and is, under no obligation to protect TWR, as that station signed on long after North American allocations were settled, and the Netherlands Antilles didn’t honour such international agreements.
But in the primary markets of Windsor and Detroit in the late 1960’s, the exciting, bold, new style of ‘The Big 8’ revolutionized not only how radio and media would be delivered, but also how it would be consumed. Its format relentlessly pumped out the hits in assembly-line fashion. Its newscasters made the news as exciting as the music, and the “audio wizardry” of its engineer, Ed Buterbaugh, pushed the capabilities of the AM frequency, sonically separating the station from all others on the dial. CKLW resonated with the rising power of a youthful, new generation that demanded to be listened to just as much as the station did itself. Music was the backbone of CKLW. This was “hit radio,” and key to its reign supreme in the trend-setting Detroit radio market was its ability to integrate Black R&B or soul music (‘the Motown Sound’) seamlessly with white rock ‘n’ roll in a way that most American stations wouldn’t touch.
The Big 8 established Windsor as a “gateway radio market” for breaking Canadian recording artists into the United States. Few acts felt the station’s impact greater than The Guess Who. While already enjoying national success in Canada, once CKLW picked up on ‘These Eyes’ in 1969, the band’s career was forever changed. Overnight, they were signed to an American record deal with RCA Victor and within the year had a #1 hit on the Billboard charts with the single ‘American Woman’. CKLW got behind numerous Canadian acts, giving their careers a significant boost in the process – Steppenwolf, Bachman Turner Overdrive, The Poppy Family, Gordon Lightfoot, Anne Murray, and numerous others. Here are some airchecks from the late 1960’s:
Besides the music, another 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 - scheduling that allowed CKLW to be playing music while other stations were airing newscasts at the top of the hour or on the quarter- or half-hour. The CKLW newscasters 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. This was an attempt to make the news sound as exciting and gripping as the music. Another memorable feature of the 20/20 newscasts was the incessant clacking of the teletype in the background, which gave the newscasts a unique sound.
But the station’s ability to compete within the Detroit market was significantly compromised when the newly mandated Canadian content (or ‘Cancon’) regulations, which required 30% Canadian content, went into effect in 1971. Still, even with those constraints, CKLW continued to hold the #1 spot in Detroit well into 1973. The effects of Cancon, combined with an increasingly fragmented radio listening audience as a result of the rise of FM radio throughout the 1970’s, meant CKLW’s ratings would inevitably decline.
The Canadian government's initial unwillingness to license FM frequencies with pop or rock music formats stranded Canadian stations on AM while an entire demographic of listeners began the exodus to US-based FM outlets anywhere the signals were in range. For many younger listeners by 1978, CKLW was the station they listened to only if they had an AM-only radio in their cars. (I had one of those in an old Lincoln Continental in 1985.)
The station did implement AM stereo in 1982 and even got the rights to broadcast University of Michigan football and NASL soccer, but it wasn’t enough. In 1984, the Canadian Radio and Television Commission (CRTC) declined the station’s application to relaunch as an FM hit radio station, and that spelt the end. On January 1st, 1985, CKLW raised the white flag. The station laid off its entire staff of 79 people, closed its American sales office in Detroit, and re-branded as ‘K-800’ with a fully automated ‘Music of Your Life’ format of jazz standards and big band music. And, since most of those recordings were mono, the AM stereo was switched off.
On March 1st 1993, the format was changed again to news/talk as ‘AM 800 – The Information Station’, which it still is to this day.
On May 1, 2017, a fire broke out at the transmitter site, knocking the station off the air. Programming was temporarily moved to sister station AM 580 CKWW, while both stations' internet feeds remained unaffected. The cause was never made public, and the station was able to return to the air on reduced power by mid-afternoon the following day.
The story of ‘The Big 8’ was one of the most exciting and unique radio stories of the 20th century. It happened in a small border city that’s typically seen as living in Detroit’s shadow rather than being a major cultural mover and shaker itself. But, for a time, Windsor hosted one of the most listened to and influential radio stations in North America.
Back to you, Jeff.
(AWR/Wavescan)