THE KÜTNE READER

It’s one thing to be told that a band was really good. It’s another to hear it for yourself. And in the case of Trail’s Serenaders, now you can!

I was delighted to find in my disorganized storage locker last weekend a box of cassette tapes – one of which contained some radio newscasts that I had given up for lost, and previously detailed in a post about Holy Grails of local history . Both were recorded on Oct. 24, 1999. The first is the KBS 8 a.m. cast read by Jayne Garry, who you can still hear every day on EZ Rock. I saved it because it includes a story I filed about the 75th anniversary of the train explosion that

On Sept. 29, 1958, CJAT Trail opened a new studio in the former post office at 1300 Cedar Ave. They also marked their 25th anniversary as a commercial station (they first went on air on Christmas Day 1931 as an amateur station known as 10AT). To commemorate the occasion, several Capitol Records artists and others recorded greetings to air on the station between music and commercials. CJAT broadcast centre, 1958 (Greg Nesteroff collection) Ken Hughes, who worked at CJAT, kept

In 1962-63, the American jingle house of Richard H. Ullman Associates produced a series of cheesy but oh-so-catchy songs to promote radio and television stations and the towns they served. They presumably aired on those stations and were also issued as 45 rpm singles. The music was virtually identical; only the lyrics were tailored to fit the town. Some were embraced as civic anthems (notably in Regina) but in the pre-Internet world, people probably had no idea that their son

A previous post enumerated historical finds I have made only to lose track of them or fail to document their discovery, to my everlasting chagrin. Here are a few more. WIHL reunion photos The Western International Hockey League, which existed from 1946 to 1988, included teams from Nelson, Trail, Rossland, Cranbrook, Kimberley, Spokane and Fernie — plus at various times Los Angeles , Portland, and Calgary. In 1999, former players held a gala reunion in Trail. I did impromptu

Here are a couple of radio newscasts from the same day in July 1995. The first is Erica Waters reading the 8 a.m. news on the Kootenay Broadcasting System (now EZ Rock), with reports by Graham Currie and Renee Bernard. Morning man Dan Szabo is heard briefly in the beginning. Click on the play button below to hear it. I like that it contains the lengthy legal ID giving the station’s many frequencies. The news stinger itself was used into the early 2000s. I can’t remember if we

Here’s a snippet of a countdown show on AM 1230 CKQR in 1974, recorded off air. This is an excerpt from a longer air check that I have sadly lost. Now we’ll never know what was No. 1 in Castlegar that week! I don’t know who the announcer is and it’s probably for the best, because he’s terrible. (Although in his defense, it was undoubtedly his first on-air job and he had no way of knowing someone would record it, much less put it on something called the Internet 44 years later

Here’s a newscast that aired on KC Radio in Nelson and Creston on Jan. 21, 1975, read by Ray Zinck, who sent it to me quite a few years ago. Ray worked there from 1973 to 1975 and went on to become co-owner, president, and general manager of CJLS in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. He sold that station in 2015. Ray Zinck in the news studio at KC Radio in Nelson, mid-1970s. Note the ashtray, giant speaker, spare mic, and sideburns. Ray did a daily phone-in show from 9 to 10 a.m. from t