An unforgettable story of a giant - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

We attended a matinee performance of Radio Town: the Doc Cruickshank Story last week. It seemed like a full house, perhaps with visitors from the Thresher Reunion attending.

 

Looking back, I can’t figure out how it took 50 years for the Festival to celebrate Cruickshank’s work. This coming winter will mark the 100th anniversary of the stormy day when he put in time, when no customers were coming into his radio shop on Wingham’s main street, by cobbling together spare parts to make a transmitter and creating his first broadcast on the station he called JOKE.
He had sold only a few radios to well-off buyers and so he was surprised when one of these called to say he had received the signal. 

 

He struggled the first few years as he tried to operate part-time as a broadcaster. At one point memberships were sold to supporters to help fund his efforts. Finally, he applied for a commercial licence that was rejected since Wingham was so small. However, the local Member of Parliament threatened a filibuster if he didn’t get a licence, so it was granted.

 

Doc struggled at first, but eventually local news and entertainment won a loyal audience. I remember when I was a boy that our radio on the farm was tuned to CKNX in the morning, though my mother did change stations later in the morning to get American soap operas.

 

A popular feature of CKNX was the Saturday Night Barn Dance, featuring local country and western performers. Johnny Brent turned this into the “Travelling Barn Dance” that broadcast, with connection through the telephone, from a different location each week. I remember the excitement when it was announced that the Barn Dance would come from my hometown of Lucknow, and being there, with my friends, in the Lucknow Legion for the broadcast and the dance that followed.

 

As country music became more popular, Doc hired musicians who would also help out at the radio station, and later when Doc came up with his latest grand idea, at CKNX-TV. We didn’t have TV when he first began, but only got one late in the 1950s when my older sister gave my parents one for Christmas.

 

Doc regularly scheduled two local country shows: one with The Ranch Boys and one with Golden Prairie Cowboys. They created local stars like Don Robinson, Earl and Martha Heywood, Rossie Mann and Al Cherney. 

 

I remember the unforgettable story when the station, by then located in the old Wingham high school building, burned. Quick-thinking staff took the station’s mobile broadcast studio to the transmitter tower south of town and the radio station didn’t miss a beat, broadcasting the news of the fire and its effects to listeners.

 

The television station was knocked off the air as the fire raged, but in a remarkable story of the kind of community solidarity within the TV community, other stations, led by CFPL London, rushed spare equipment to Wingham. I remember an early broadcast from the new F.E. Madill Secondary School as Doc told the story.

 

Eventually CKNX built a new studio, the same one that still stands today. Doc retired and took over the Lyceum movie theatre. I recall seeing him when I went to movies.

 

But without Doc’s presence, there just wasn’t the creativity and stubbornness to keep the station going. The rest of his family sold the station to CFPL, owned by Walter Blackburn who promised to keep the full service going. Later, after he died, his family sold CFPL and CKNX’s TV station was closed. So there’s no local programming on CKNX or not much on CTV-London these days.

 

As for Doc Cruickshank and the connection to the Blyth Festival, though the others might not agree, I can’t help but think that it was the rural culture he created in southwestern Ontario that made me imagine that there could be a successful theatre in Blyth Memorial Hall after I discovered that magnificent building in 1972. I first connected with Paul Thompson, a native of Atwood, that summer when he directed The Farm Show near Clinton and tried to convince him to start a summer theatre here. After two years of waiting for renovations at Memorial Hall, he went instead to Petrolia. 

 

But, in the winter of 1974-75 a young Hullett Township native worked for him and asked about starting a theatre and Thompson sent him to me. James Roy chose work by a West Wawanosh native and early associate of Doc Cruickshank, Harry J. Boyle, and his memoir Mostly In Clover for the first play that made the Festival successful.

 

In 1996, Thompson created Barn Dance Live! about Cruickshank’s music, which brought J.D. Nicholsen, director of Radio Town: the Doc Cruickshank Story, to Blyth.

 

Such is the deep connection between the Festival and Doc Cruickshank.