‘ THE ONE VOICE THAT EVERYONE KNOWS’: TOWN RALLIES AROUND HOST FACING CANCER.
COMMUNITY RALLIES AROUND ‘UNSUNG TREASURE’ CARROLL, NOW BATTLING CANCER
From noon to 2 p. m., no one at this cottage country radio station wants to speak much on air anymore. It is James Carroll’s slot and he isn’t here to fill it.
“We just let the music go now,” Jeff Carter, the station’s managing director, said recently. “We’re waiting for him to return.”
For six years, Carroll, 60, has lived a second life of sorts, as the voice of the community- run radio station in Huntsville, Ont., 2 1/ 2 hours north of Toronto. He moved here to be close to his young daughter, giving up a stage and screen career that saw a lead role on the long- running CBC series Wind at My Back and parts in a few feature films.
But enduring f ame didn’t come for Carroll in that time — and he never really courted it, anyway. In Huntsville, however, he’s become something of an icon.
He started off managing a bar at the Empire Hotel downtown, booking musical acts, until the place burned down in 2009. At that time, a few blocks away, four men were trying to start a radio station, fed up with the mix of music the commercial stations were playing. They were crammed i nto the basement of a century home, the former headquarters of a logging company, with an old desk from a local bank eating up much of the space.
By 2010, they needed a new personality to work the afternoon drive show. One of the guys at the station knew of this journeyman actor — Carroll — who was looking for a new gig after the hotel fire.
“He started out working a few hours, that’s really what we wanted him for,” Carter, the station director, said. “But he just would not go home.”
Soon, Carroll was coming in to the fledgling Hunters Bay Radio at all times of the day, helping out with production, pitching in on segments on the morning show, coming up with new shows to host — a Motown Monday show, the Top 20 countdown, a Sunday showcase for local talent.
“We sort of came to depend on him,” Carter said. “It was to the point where I started calling it the James Carroll radio net- work.”
“He is the one voice that everybody knows.”
Hunters Bay Radio steadily grew its following online, until in 2014 it got CRTC licensing and moved to broadcasting on 88.7 FM. It took over the upstairs of the old house and ballooned to 60 staff and volunteers — all of whom were mentored in some capacity by Carroll.
Carroll was hospitalized in early April, months after his lung- cancer diagnosis sparked a wave of support in this town, where everyone seems to know the man personally.
Until recently, Carroll walked to work along Main Street from his apartment most days — a short trip made long by his tendency to stop for conversations with people, most of whom he knows by name.
Actor Kathy Greenwood saw Carroll on one of those walks. She was driving with her sketch comedy troupe through Huntsville on their way to a show.
“We stopped at a stop light and there he was,” she told the National Post. “I just sorta ran out of the van.”
“This is too much,” Carroll said when he saw her coming toward him.
More t han a decade earlier, the two worked together for five seasons on Wind at My Back. And in the 1980s and’ 90s they came up through Toronto’s storied Second City improv club, him as a stage manager, her a performer.
When she got her first major television role on that CBC series, Carroll was like her “security blanket” on set.
“A lot of times, people like James will go under the radar, a little bit,” she said, “Because the squeaky wheel gets the grease and James isn’t a squeaky wheel. . . . He makes sure everything works and he doesn’t care about taking credit for it.”
Carroll was born in the United States, “a devout stutterer,” as he put it — a challenge that was never evident to his co- stars on set. In the 1970s, he came to Toronto with a theatre show and never left.
“I loved doing scenes with James,” Greenwood said. “If you start faking it, if you start pushing too hard, you’re gonna feel it because James is just centred and grounded and real.”
After five seasons on Wind at My Back, from 1996 to 2001, Carroll acted in commercials, and took a small part in the Hollywood movie Death to Smoochy. In 2008, he played opposite Shirley MacLaine in Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning. On that film, he found himself away from Huntsville and his daughter, Emma, who was with her mother, and decided he was finished.
“I had just about done every- thing I had wanted to, goals-wise,” Carroll said in a recent radio interview, before his phone rang and he left to get his daughter from the school bus.
“I’m in awe,” said Kevin Sullivan, the Canadian producer, writer and director who cast Carroll in Wind at My Back and two movies, including the Anne of Green Gables film.
“He’s kind of an unsung treasure. He’s just good, really, really good. You could put him in a major feature film or you could put him on a radio show and he’s just solid all the time.
“We take that for granted, it’s so rare. ... He’s such an everyman, and I say that with the greatest praise.”
Since Carroll’s cancer diagnosis in December, a fundraising campaign to help with his medical expenses has raised more than $22,000.
“There is so much love in this town,” he told the Post earlier this year. “The overwhelming thing is sadness, but it’s important to see joy and the beauty of the world and the love that emanates from every one of my friends and angels.”
In January, there was a show at Huntsville’s Algonquin Theatre in his benefit, bringing together Carroll’s old acting colleagues with members of the local improv troupe he started. At the end, as the crowd gave him a standing ovation, Carroll rose in the audience, wearing his green toque, and bowed.
“Tears streaming down my face as I absorb yesterday,” Carroll wrote after the performance, in a post to a tribute page on Facebook, where more than 600 friends and fans have been posting photos, stories and encouraging messages.
In between rounds of chemo, he was still going into the station with his oxygen tank in tow, working in his office, where photos of his daughter are perched around the room, and a framed royalty cheque from his acting days sits in the corner — worth 26 cents.
With Carroll in hospital, that office goes unused most of the time. But driving through town, or south through the rugged Muskoka terrain to Washago, or north past South River, Carroll’s voice is still on 88.7 FM, pretaped, plugging the Top 20 countdown.