May 11, 1922: CJCA blamed for spreading radioitis bug

Less than two weeks after the Journal’s CJCA — the first radio station in Alberta — hit the air waves May 1, many Albertans were suffering from radioitis “in its most virulent form.”

A story in the Journal told of boys taking parts of their “homes, barnsand out houses to build radio masts” used to support radio antennas.

“Some otherwise lovely parts of our town are beginning to look like an oil boom with derricks in view,” the story said.

“It seems almost a necessity for the town fathers at city hall to take up the gauntlet and get our town, which lacks telephone connection with the outside world, in touch by radio with at least the Journal’s station.”

CJCA initially broadcast twice a day from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. and from 8:30 p.m. to 10 p.m., providing listeners with music, news bulletins, weather updates, market reports and results from sporting events.

“It would appear that in two short weeks, the Journal’s radio, from being an interesting but doubtful experiment, has jumped into the front rank of those marvellous inventions that link up the man on the frontier of civilization with the man in the city, and there is now no room for doubt that the radio must be a never-growingf actor of importance in the lives of the people of Alberta,” another Journal story said.

The station staged evening radio concerts in various country towns throughout the province, attracting crowds to listen to broadcasts they couldn’t yet get at home.

The day after the Stettler concert, a story told of the town being “inoculated with the radio germ.”

In Wetaskiwin, “never before in the history of the city was such a large crowd of (500) citizens assembled as that which filled seating capacity and every inch of available standing room in the theatre to hear the Journal’s radio program,” the Wetaskiwin correspondent reported.

Long before the start of the show, the lineup to get in was more than a block long and people rushed to find seats when the doors opened.

The management of the Empress Theatre in Ponoka reported the concert there attracted the largest audience in eight years.

The Journal sold CJCA in 1934. It has been a gospel station since 1994.