Category: Radio Geekery || By

I suspect that a lot of people in the Almanac readership enjoy listening to radio on the Internet. I know I do; I'm especially fond of oldies stations.

A couple of my favorites are Cincinnati's WDJO; Hamilton, Ontario's CKOC; and Toronto's legendary CHUM.

Two years ago, I got to visit and spend some time at WDJO, which is located in a former elementary school in Cincinnati's Queensgate neighborhood, along with two of the city's TV stations. It's a neat little station with a lot of Cincinnati's legendary DJs pulling regular air shifts.

I've never been to CKOC, though I've been to Hamilton. It's a city where many Mon Valley residents would feel right at home; one of the major employers is a big Dofasco Steel complex (including three blast furnaces and a battery of coke ovens) on the edge of town that would bring tears to the eyes of anyone from McKeesport.

I even have a hat from the Hamilton Tiger-Cats football team, whose colors are black and gold. And just to make the picture complete, Hamilton was at one time the headquarters of Westinghouse Electric's Canadian subsidiary, and it's still home to a Siemens (ex-Westinghouse) operation.

All they're lacking is a Primanti Brothers and maybe a Giant Eagle, and it would feel just like home. (Er, Hamilton's also a very nice city in its own right. Well worth a visit. I digress.)

I haven't visited CHUM in Toronto, either, but it was a huge station in its day. Like KQV in Pittsburgh, CHUM was a Top 40 rock station in Toronto during the 1950s and '60s, but it stayed a Top 40 station much longer --- as late as 1986 --- and CHUM had a much bigger influence.

For one thing, CHUM's signal covered a bigger city, and for another, Canada's smaller population meant that a relative handful of large, urban radio stations controlled which records became national hits. Along with the playlists at CKLW in Windsor and CKGM in Montreal, CHUM's legendary "CHUM-charts" defined pop music in the Great White North.

The charts are still being issued by CHUM-FM, but the AM granddaddy is all-oldies these days, with a healthy dose of Canadian rock songs that weren't widely heard here. As long as you don't mind hearing BTO and the Guess Who every hour, and you don't mind hearing temperatures given in Celsius, it's a nice change of pace.

Well, for nearly 50 years, CHUM has been located in a building on Toronto's Yonge Street with a giant flashing neon sign out front. It's one of the most famous addresses in North America, and gold records literally line the hallways.

But CHUM is scheduled to move soon, and they're going to hold some sort of special open house for visitors before they vacate. (The details haven't been announced yet.)

Toronto's not that far away. I was thinking about asking for a vacation day, gassing up the sleek, gray Mercury, and taking off.

But it just dawned on me --- I haven't been to Canuckistan since 2001. Is a trip across the border a big hassle, and do I need to get a passport? According to the U.S. State Department's website and the Canadian government, it looks like a birth certificate and driver's license will do the trick.

So, should I bother to get a passport? Or should I risk getting trapped in Canada when the border guards on the U.S. side refuse to let me back in?

I know how to use the metric system, understand parliamentary government, and could even get used to putting a "u" in "color" and "labor."

But football with three downs just ain't right.