by Judi McLeod
april 26, 2004
Don’t know if it’s because my high rise apartment, which faces south overlooking Bay Street gets interference from downtown towers, but the reception for my favourite radio station aM 740 continues to be static plagued and scratchy.
So fond am I of the station touted as "Prime Time Radio", it’s my daily habit to turn the radio up in the living room before retiring to my bedroom closet to write stories for Canada Free Press.com. That way the music I long to hear can be picked up over the static from the distance from my bedroom `office’. Friends who come for dinner, think it’s journalist eccentricity that I refuse to give up trying to tune in aM 740.
I have tried moving the antenna in every direction possible on my stereo, which is about the same age as aM 740. Infuriatingly, no antennae angle brings the station any closer. No one I’ve ever asked has been able to help, and I do not believe the salesman in the outlet where I bought my stereo when he says, "all aM radio stations are like that. Tune in to FM."
Why do I go to such painstaking efforts to get closer to the Burlington-based radio station? It’s mostly the music and the soft-spoken, interesting-to-listen-to station personalities. as Helen Reddy would say, "Nobody does it better."
Some of the songs catapult me back to the days when my best teenager friend Carol Swinnimer and I were teaching each other to dance in Halifax.
The nostalgia coming over the airwaves is heart-warming, as I pound away at stories on my PC. So much of the music motivates me. In short, it’s my kind of radio.
Launched on January 8, 2001, aM 740 is formally known as CHWO-aM. My very first inkling of its existence came when I was driving to Washington, D.C. with CFP associate editor arthur Weinreb. art and I have the same taste in music as we do journalism.
Starting off in pre-dawn hours, aM 740 entertained us all the way. Mistaking it for an american station, art who was already a fan told me it was broadcast from Burlington. Utterly hooked, the first thing I did when climbing back into the car for the return trip to Toronto, was ask to have the radio on.
after listening to aM 740 for the last year and a half, or should I say trying to, I found myself on their website only last week.
Not surprisingly I discovered that yours truly is only one of 534,000 loyal listeners. according its homepage, "aM 740 is Toronto’s `all Time Favourites’ station. Its coverage area is huge, extending throughout southern Ontario, from Windsor to Kingston, north to Parry Sound and south deep into the U.S."
During evening and overnight hours, aM 740 can be heard at much greater distances, extending east to New York City, south toward Washington, D.C. and west to Chicago--everywhere it seems, except in my apartment.
With access to the largest active music library in Toronto radio, aM 740 features a wide range of specialty programming, from big bands and 50s crooners, to the early rock’n’rollers, folk singers, country cross-over artists and many of today’s top artists specializing in `retro-sounds’.
attesting to its popularity, the station now ranks number 8 among Toronto’s 20 radio stations, and not just with babyboomers like me but with all age groups. (BBM ratings, Fall 2003).
Featuring Flashback with Brian Peroff from 7 p.m. to midnight on Monday nights, the station has the best on-air personalities anywhere, including Barry Morden and Bob Sherman. Silver-voiced DJ’s who don’t lecture like the talking heads of competing radio stations. all imbue good taste in their humour.
While there’s always the hope that it will someday come in clearer, I’ll take 740 aM-- static and all. It’s magic.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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