You didn't see this on the radio: Behind-the-scenes stories from a bunch of On The Go's 50 years
OTG has featured thousands of interviews, premiers, pop stars ... and even a little dynamite
On The Go is celebrating its 50th birthday this week. I have a deep history with the show, having spent the majority of my career working on the program that's been on every weekday afternoon since Joey Smallwood was premier.
In the fall of 1985, I was new to the CBC — a freelancer, they called us then, brought in when needed, paid by the day or by the item.
My first assignment — handed to me by Diane Humber, who was On The Go's producer then — was to cover the arrival of that fall's Beaujolais Nouveau.
Remember that, when people used to line up at the old liquor store in the Murray Premises to buy bottles — and in some cases, cases — of the fresh French wine? I talked to some of the customers and interviewed Dr. Dixie Dingle, renowned local surgeon and head of the St. John's Opimian Society, about the quality of this year's offering, and then our liquor corporation hosts starting serving samples.
Unlike the wine itself, the rest of that evening remains a bit cloudy to this day.
Art Rockwood and Cindy Wall were the hosts then, together every weekday afternoon almost 900 kilometres apart, with Art in St. John's and Cindy in Happy Valley-Goose Bay.
In those days OTG had a crew of seven: a producer, two associate producers, two hosts, a technician and a production assistant. There are four of us now.
One of the production assistant's duties was to take the scripts written in St. John's — on electric typewriters, the latest technology — and type them over, word for word, on the Teletype machine so that we could send them to Cindy to print off in Goose. No emails or internet then! That was one of the downside of the old ways.
One of the upsides for a young scribe like me was that when you went out in the field — let's say for a three-day trip to St. Lawrence, as I did once — no one could track you down on your cellphone.
You weren't expected to tweet or post or anything like that. You were left alone to talk to people and gather tape.
It was uncovering the news, as opposed to covering it, as the late John Furlong used to say.
Back to On The Go
I worked for most of the local, and some of the national, CBC shows for a couple of years and then, in 1990, returned to OTG as its new producer.
My first job, on Day 2, was to sit on the hiring board to select our new co-host.
The candidate on the phone — calling us from the radio station at the Canadian Armed Force base in Lahr, Germany — stood out from all the others.
And that's how Jeff Gilhooly began his long run on On The Go, first co-hosting with Cindy and then Theresa Blackburn, and finally on his own.
I'll never forget his first day on the air, showing Cindy and the OTG audience the photos he took on his ferry trip along the south coast of the island.
I'm pretty sure Jeff's the only person in modern times to arrive in St. John's via Burgeo, Grey River and Terrenceville.
It didn't matter that neither Cindy nor the audience could actually see the slides because Jeff was so descriptive.
It was a short, funny bit that said "we're doing things differently now."
Vikings ahoy
In August 1991, Jeff was aboard a very different boat on the tip of the Northern Peninsula. On The Go and The Fisheries Broadcast went to L'Anse aux Meadows to greet the Gaia, a replica of an ancient Viking long boat that some hardy Norwegians had sailed across the Atlantic. Our promos said, "The CBC missed the first Viking landing but we'll be there for the second."
On the day we arrived, Jeff and Kathryn King, then one of the hosts of the Broadcast, took off to gather tape and line up interviews while I did my producorial best to help CBC Corner Brook technician Jim Gash set up our broadcast station.
By "station," I mean Lloyd Decker's basement.
Jim set up our four-channel mixer on the Decker's chest freezer just inside the basement door. He then disconnected the Deckers' phone and wired us straight into the line.
We now had a solid copper link back to CBC Radio HQ in St. John's.
Jim then ran two microphone cords and two headset cords out to the Deckers' mailbox at the end of their lane. That's where Jeff and Kathryn would be hosting the show, using the mailbox as a mic stand.
The scary part was that for our jury-rigged system to work, Jeff and Cindy — who was in the studio in HV-GB — had to be able to hear each other but had we no way to see if it would work on the radio until the show started and Jeff said, "Welcome to OTG, live in L'Anse aux Meadows."
His voice had to travel back to the mixer duct-taped to the freezer, down the line to St. John's, up another line to Labrador, where Cindy could hear him.
Then she said, "I'm Cindy Wall…" and her voice had to come down the broadcast line to St. John's, then back out to our radio transmitter on the Northern Peninsula where, after a bit of a lag, she showed up in our headsets.
Jim Gash broke out in a big grin when we heard the loop work, and I relaxed just a little.
The boom heard from Fogo
The next summer, it was Cindy's turn to host a remote, with Kathryn King in tow again with OTG's then technician, the late, great Rob Butt.
It was a great radio moment — and my one and only use of dynamite in broadcasting.
We were broadcasting from the Roman Catholic parish hall in the town of Fogo. As luck would have it, the town was laying new water and sewer lines right next to the hall and there were backhoes and bulldozers everywhere.
Oh, and — Fogo being as rocky as many other places in the province — there were explosives.
One of the members of our crew said that maybe, as producer, I should talk to the work crew and make sure they didn't set off an explosion while we were on the air.
I think it was Kathryn who said, "Oh no, we should make sure there is an explosion while we're on the air."
I thought, "Yes, absolutely."
So we worked it out with the crew. At one point during our show, Cindy says to Jeff, who's co-hosting from the confines of the studio in St. John's, "Hey Jeff, listen to this."
She points at me, I wave to the explosives guy and he sets off the charge. A second or two later there's a huge, satisfying boom — not just in Fogo, but echoing over the CBC airwaves across N.L.
As the noise of the explosion faded the audience in the hall could hear Jeff's laughter coming out of the speakers.
It was a great radio moment — and my one and only use of dynamite in broadcasting.
Coming back for a 3rd time
As much fun as days like that were, I left OTG in 1994 to become the CBC's network producer for Newfoundland and Labrador and didn't find my way back for nine years when on Labour Day 2003, I became the show's new host.
Less than two months after I started, Danny Williams and the PCs swept to power, ending 14 years of Liberal governments and bringing a whole new tone to provincial politics.
That got us used to the hurly-burly, which was a good thing considering what happened during OTG's live broadcast from the 2010 Juno Awards at the Delta Hotel in St. John's.
We had some big-name musicians lined up to perform on the show — Johnny Reid, Alex Cuba and others — but bad weather delayed or cancelled many flights from central Canada. A couple of hours before show time, we were short three of the four musical guests we'd promised and the seats in our audience were already filling up with people there to see Mr. Reid who, we knew, was going to be a no-show.
OTG's producer at the time Ingrid Fraser, turned out to be a miracle worker, running around the hotel trying to scare up talent. She landed Carly Rae Jepsen — still two years away from releasing her global hit Call Me Maybe. Her guitarist's flight didn't make it in but she bravely went on, accompanying herself on a borrowed guitar.
As the show entered its last half-hour, it was clear we were going to come up short until Ingrid found Sherman Downey — young and relatively unknown then — in the bar.
"Hey," she said, "do you want to be on the radio?"
"Sure," said Sherman, "When?"
"In about 10 minutes."
"But I don't have my guitar with me," he said.
"We've got one you can borrow," Ingrid replied.
"No, I want mine," Sherman said. "I'm going to grab a cab and be right back."
And he was, with a guitar and his kazoo player in tow. Sherman brought the house down, and not for the last time.
Joys and privileges
Fortunately, most days hosting OTG aren't as exciting as that, but every day is a joy and a privilege.
We've had the province's best musicians performing live in our studio. We've celebrated N.L.'s incredible arts scene.
By my rough estimate, I've done more than 12,000 interviews, involving hundreds of mayors and university profs, more musicians and authors and RCMP officers than I can count, and every premier from Brian Peckford on.
What I've learned in my 20 years with the show is something that lawyer and inshore fisheries advocate Cabot Martin told me years ago is true.
Martin said Newfoundland and Labrador is an idea as much as it is a place, that there are so many reasons for us not to be here, you have to want to be here, you have to believe in the place.
Each and every weekday afternoon, that's what we try our best to help our listeners do.
Read more from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador
How do you get On The Go? It's easy!
You can listen to On The Go on CBC Radio every afternoon from 4 p.m. NT (that's 3:30, as Ted frequently says, in most of Labrador). You can stream it online via CBC Listen, or through the CBC Listen app.
You can also subscribe for on-demand highlights of the show. Just click these buttons.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
