Vintage DJs pay homage to CFUN’s hippie heydays
In 1963 CFUN ruled the rock ’n’ roll airwaves. So somebody had the bright idea to photograph its disc jockeys outside the CFUN building at 1900 West Fourth Ave.
Red Robinson, Fred Latremouille, Brian (Frosty) Forst, Ed Kargl, Al Jordan and Tom Peacock all donned C-FUN “Good Guy” T-shirts and lined up on a curving staircase on Fourth.
The hairdos, Jiminy Cricket logo and cigarette butt jutting out of Jordan’s left hand will make anyone who grew up in the era smile. As will the photo of Latremouille, who was only 18 and looked it.
Some 56 years later the CFUN call letters are long gone — the station is now Bloomberg radio. In a few months the physical building will be toast as well, torn down to make way for a condo project.
Last week, several DJs from CFUN’s past got together at a semi-annual lunch for old radio personalities at the White Spot on West Georgia Street in downtown Vancouver.
About 80 people turned up at the event, which featured a 15-minute tribute to CFUN that included some hilarious old promos and a roundtable discussion about the station. Afterwards, the CFUN alumni piled into a stretch limousine for a ride into Kitsilano, where they replicated the 1963 shot.
Sadly, three of the six DJs in the original photo have died — Latremouille, Jordan and Peacock. But Robinson and Kargl were joined by several more CFUN DJs who were legendary in their own right: Terry David Mulligan, John Tanner, Doc Harris, Chuck McCoy and Tom Jeffries.
They even invited Roy Hennessey, who was CFUN’s arch-enemy during his time at CKLG.
It was a serious rivalry. Hennessey and McCoy are friends, but didn’t speak to each other for several years when they were running the rival stations. Years later, Hennessey said he found out CFUN had a spy on the payroll at CKLG who fed them info about LG’s plans.
McCoy retorted: “He wasn’t on the payroll — we didn’t pay him.”
CFUN was originally called CKMO, which took the 1410 frequency on the AM radio dial in 1928.
The station was rebranded CFUN in 1955, but Robinson said it didn’t really pick up steam till Dave McCormick changed it to a rock ’n’ roll station in 1960.
CKWX had been the top rock station, but CFUN passed them by the summer of 1961.
“Dave hired a bunch of young guys, and CKWX was old-time announcers, even when I was there, and they couldn’t relate to it all,” said Robinson, 82.
McCormick left in 1962 and Robinson came on as program director, hiring many of the DJs associated with the station: Latremouille, Mulligan, Tanner and Darryl B (for Burlingham).
It was a great time to be working at a radio station on Fourth Avenue, the epicentre of Canada’s hippie culture.
Tanner said the DJs often smoked wacky tabacky in CFUN’s parking lot, which was underneath the station.
“We’d park over in the far corner, roll up the windows, smoke a joint and then wander up (to go to work),” said Tanner, 76, who manned the midnight shift in 1964 and ’65 before moving to afternoons in ’66.
Unfortunately, CFUN was a victim of its own success.
“What killed CFUN was the sales manager sold too many (ad) spots, and we couldn’t compete,” said Robinson.
“It’s true. The sales department sold so many commercials, it was goodbye to the audience.”
Many of CFUN’s DJs wound up being poached by CKLG. Tanner left for CKLG in September 1967 when CFUN was sold and went to an easy-listening format.
“At one point they were playing The Sound of Music,” said Robinson. “Operatic music, symphony music. It was weird.”
Tanner went back to CFUN about 1970 when it went back to rock, with the call letters CKVN. But he bounced back to LG-FM after that.
“It was back and forth a lot,” he said. “If you look at anyone’s resume (from the 1960s and ’70s), you’ll see they were all over the place.”
Latremouille returned to CFUN as a morning man in the 1980s when the station adapted an oldies format.
But AM radio was fading, and so did the station. In 2009 it was rebranded TEAM-1040, a sports radio station, and in 2018 became Bloomberg radio, a business station.
We’d park over in the far corner, roll up the windows, smoke a joint and then wander up (to go to work).