Legenday CBCer the last of a breed

It may have been 43 years ago, but Don Connolly, the CBC radio legend, remembers meeting Don Tremaine, the public broadcasting luminary.

It happened in 1976. And Connolly, then in private radio in Ottawa, had made the trip to Halifax to audition for a spot on the then still-newish CBC radio show Information Morning.

At one point Tremaine, who was there when CBC Nova Scotia signed on in 1954, emerged from the control room.

“I could tell he was underwhelmed,” said Connolly, who then possessed a reddish afro to go with his cowboy boots and denim-heavy wardrobe. “Here's another guy who looks like he should be in the Grateful Dead.”

Connolly got the spot. But from Day 1 he felt he had one job: to change the mind of “Trigger” Tremaine, so-called from his days co-hosting a country and western music show on CHNS radio.

So the new guy did the interviews while Gerry Fogarty did the sports and Reid Dexter the weather, while Tremaine, with his smooth basso profundo voice, hosted the show.

Otherwise Connolly kept his head down. He spoke when spoken to.

It worked out well enough that six weeks later Tremaine took Connolly aside after the show. “I think this can work,” he said.

Thus a beautiful, professional and personal friendship began — one which ended on the weekend when Tremaine died at 91.

Connolly, and some past and present CBC staffers, visited Tremaine a few days before his death.

“It was almost all old CBC talk,” said Connolly. As it should have been.

Monday, in his kitchen, Connolly told me a few things about his old friend.

How he was a good painter. And how no one had any colourful barroom stories about Don Tremaine because, the moment he was finished work, he headed for home to be with his wife, kids, and, more recently, grandchildren.

Connolly told me how Tremaine's language outside of the broadcast booth could be surprisingly salty.

But inside it, the gentlemanly broadcaster possessed a lovely voice, cadence and command of the language.

His performance, moreover, was marked by a “naturalness and genuineness” that made even a young broadcaster in cowboy boots think that there was a future in the broadcast booth for someone interested only in being themselves.

Since Tremaine never aspired to some big national job in Toronto, he could be sufficiently blunt with management when bluntness was required.

His old friend, moreover, was devoid of ego, Connolly said. Tremaine always considered himself a “broadcaster” not a “journalist”.

He shunned the limelight during his long life and career. When Tremaine went out in public, his fame was such that he would always be recognized.

People would inevitably ask him about two things, said Connolly: the cancellation of Don Messer's Jubilee, which Tremaine MC'd; and how Rube Hornstein, the meteorologist on Gazette, the old TV show on which Tremaine worked, was doing.

The last time the Dons spoke the conversation inevitably turned to the CBC and how much had changed from the pioneer days when Tremaine got his start down here, and Connolly followed.

Generational change seems everywhere at our public broadcaster. The old rabbit warren where the two of them plied their trade, at the corner of Sackville and South Park, is a condo development.

Just the other day, Leon Cole, the beloved Halifax host of the RSVP classical music program, died.

Increasingly, the push at the big glittering CBC studio, located not in the centre of the city but looming over the Armdale

Rotary, is free digital content, which competes directly with the subscription-based material we, at The Chronicle Herald, produce. (As a staunch supporter of a publicly owned broadcaster, I'm displeased to see my tax money going into an endeavour that takes revenue from my employer, but I guess that is a matter for another column.)

But that is simply the way the media world is going as we enter the sure-to-be-challenging 2020s. Near the end of our conversation, Connolly wondered whether broadcasting lives like Tremaine's — intimate and close to the audience, but unencumbered enough to make up the future as they go along — are possible in this day and age.

Then he told me a last story about his friend. About the time, upon the direction of CBC head office, a pair of Californian broadcasting "experts" showed up in the Halifax newsroom to help them with their delivery.

As part of their program they instructed the staffers to sit in chairs and bend forward at the waist. Tremaine and Connolly were seated side-by-side as the trainer exhorted them to breath deeply, in the manner, perhaps of a yoga practictioner.

"I'm looking over and there's 40-year broadcaster Trigger Tremaine," he said, "with his head down between his ankles, breathing deep, and looking at me as if to say 'really?'"

He shunned the limelight during his long life and career. When Tremaine went out in public, his fame was such that he would always be recognized.