GREAT SCOTT! 40 Years Behind A Mike - By Richard (Dick Scott) Pratz
CHAPTER: The Great White North (Continued)
I will state at the outset that CKSO-AM-FM-TV was the station at which I learned the most about radio and TV broadcasting in my 40-years behind the mike. I thought I had seen and knew it all when I went to work there, but I soon found I still had a lot to learn. CKSO was such a great training ground because I had the opportunity to wear so many different hats. In the six years I was there I anchored all the newscasts on the station’s AM morning show - performed and perfected all manner of zany comical characters for AM radio - hosted an FM classical music program five nights a week - hosted a classical music show Sunday nights - served as the chief voice-over announcer on TV - and hosted my own television talk show five nights a week! All this exacted a heavy toll on my family life because my work hours were long. The station paid me only one wage for these varied duties and really got their money’s worth out of me ... but it was all a labor of love. I had the opportunity to gather, write and air serious news ..... pursue a lurking ambition of being a classical music deejay.....laugh myself silly inventing comical characters and saying outrageous things on AM radio in a disguised voice other than Dick Scott ..... and take all of the above and more to the world of talk-television! I was in seventh heaven!
CKSO-TV went on the air October 25th, 1953 as Canada’s first privately-owned TV station. The station was backed by a group of Sudbury businessmen headed by George Miller, Q.C. along with Jim Cooper Q.C., and Bill Plaunt, President of CKSO Radio. The only Canadian stations on the air at the time were the three CBC stations in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. CKSO-TV, as a CBC network affiliate, received programs by kinescopes from Toronto by air except on the odd occasions when weather intervened and they would be rushed by car. Sudbury was the sixth largest market in Ontario. By the end of the first year there was a 36-percent saturation of homes with TV. That figure rose to almost 80-percent by the end of CKSO’s tenth year. In that first year of operation after sign-off at night, taking the lone studio camera up to the newsroom to take a shot out the window of the ‘tailings’ from the INCO smelter being dumped on the slag heap as the glowing embers cooled, made a spectacular way to close the evening accompanied by suitable background music. In 1971, CKNC-TV entered the Sudbury market and became a CBC affiliate, with CKSO-TV switching to the CTV Network as CICI-TV.
The most coveted air time for any radio station was (and still is) the morning drive shift. Although I had done other things, this had been my main shift at KBUR and WOC and it continued at CKSO. I was teamed with morning man G. Michael Cranston. I wrote and read all the radio newscasts on his morning show. A feature of his program was to announce birthdays. One day, Michael asked me if I would speak in a falsetto voice and appear anonymously as ‘The Birthday Fairy’ between newscasts reading off birthday greetings that had been mailed in. I agreed, and with each airing the segment grew longer. Besides birthdays, I began including pet birthdays, anniversaries and other occasions listeners requested. Michael and I slowly began bantering back and forth more and more as he questioned The Birthday Fairy about his lifestyle.
“Where do I live? What’s my favourite food? Do I have any fairy brothers and sisters?” He’d always get an unexpected reply that left him and the listeners laughing. So as not to lose any spontaneity, nothing was written down - it was all ad-lib! Our sense of humour was so similar we meshed like two peas in a pod. I felt that if Michael knew what I was going to say in advance his laughter wouldn’t be genuine, so whatever I sprung on him he was hearing for the first time. Half the time I wasn’t even sure of what I was going to say! The ‘landing’ of The Birthday Fairy grew to be a big deal, with me repeatedly slapping my chest to simulate the flapping of wings as I alighted. Mail began arriving requesting the character to say and do all different kinds of things. Fans even sent me teeny tiny pairs of shoes, tiny cloth sacks in which to carry the birthday greetings, tiny spectacles and so on. I accumulated quite a collection of items mailed simply to “The Birthday Fairy- CKSO Radio- Sudbury, Ontario”.
We thought if that little fairy guy was so popular, why not have another character read the weather forecasts? So again, in between newscasts, I ran into the control room to become ‘The Weatherman’. That character never had a real name but always referred to himself as the “weather-MAN” with the accent on “man” rather than the “WEATHER-man”. It was just a silly affectation that sounded goofy on the air when I announced “I am the weather-MAN!” He would supposedly ride his weather bicycle from the airport weather bureau to CKSO every morning through rain, snow, sleet and hail to deliver the “latest” forecast. This made for lots of entertaining talk between Michael and me. This was all ‘live’ of course, and sometimes we’d get to laughing at each other so much we found it hard to continue and Michael would have to play music until we recovered. Sometimes, we’d even go so far as to pre-record the Birthday Fairy so the little imp could carry on a conversation with the weather-MAN with me playing both parts.
Not knowing the meaning of the word “overkill”, we then invented a character I called Herman Trixx who supposedly worked in the mailroom at the station. Herman spoke in a gravelly rough voice and years later I had to stop doing this character because it was always hard on my vocal cords and it would make me cough. Herman would deliver silly make-believe memos to Michael from “the boss”, as well as station mail he just happened to open “by accident”. In this way, we got the opportunity to kid management and they loved it. The only person who was not enamored by all these shenanigans was my news director who felt all this extra-curricular nonsense was getting in the way of my news duties. This would prove to be a constant battle for the next 25 years between serious news types and program directors who enjoyed the comical rapport between the various morning deejays and myself which in turn translated into high ratings. I attended countless management meetings at which this was discussed. Sometimes I would be asked to concentrate on news and scale down “the characters” while other times I’d be asked to do just the opposite. In the long run we would eventually always revert to whatever suited the show best.
It didn’t stop with The Birthday Fairy, the weather-MAN and Herman Trixx. Every day there are countless news stories that appear on the newswire that are from “the lighter side”. I would rip these stories off the wire and telephone Michael in the control room, pretending to be a reporter on the scene. “Flemin Stirr reporting from the Pancake Flipping Derby in Yardleyshire, England” ..... or “Frank Fry (my old childhood buddy) from a Goldfish Eating Contest in Baltimore, Maryland.” I wouldn’t have to disguise my voice nearly as much as the other characters because the quality of the filtered phone call did that for me. On days when I was low on outrageous stories, I’d simply make them up! Eventually, with all these cut-ins for the morning show, I was on the air in one form or another as many as ten times an hour. Multiply that by four hours every morning and I was appearing 30 to 40 times on every morning show either in or out of character! The program eventually was called “The Morning Show with Michael Cranston and Dick Scott”. Michael and I often recorded some of these cut-ins and listened to them over and over when our two families would get together during our off-hours. Our wives got to know some of the routines better than we did. People we’d meet were always astonished that the appearance of all these characters on the show each morning was the work of just two men!
