CFTR (AM) - History of CFTR

History of CFTR

The station launched in 1962 on 1540 kHz as CHFI-AM, simulcasting the beautiful music of CHFI-FM, one of Canada's first FM radio stations. Since 1540 was a clear-channel frequency assigned to stations in the United States and the Bahamas, CHFI-AM was authorized to broadcast only during the daytime. In 1963, it sought to pay CHLO in St. Thomas, Ontario to move from 680 to another frequency to free up 680 for CHFI-AM's use. No deal was finalized, but, by 1966, the stations reached an agreement to share 680, and CHFI-AM moved to twenty-four hour operation at that frequency.

In 1971, it changed its call letters to CFTR, a tribute to Ted Rogers, Sr., radio pioneer and father of controlling shareholder Ted Rogers.

In 1972, it abandoned the simulcast of CHFI and adopted a Top 40 format. For many years, it was the primary competition to Toronto's original Top 40 station, 1050 CHUM.

In 1973, programmer Chuck Camroux upped the ante in the Toronto radio "Rock and Roll Wars" by tweaking CFTR's notoriously bad signal, adding some reverb, and hiring a new morning man named Jim Brady, to rival 1050 CHUM's Jay Nelson. Both stations hovered near one million listeners per week. Although Brady finally topped Nelson in the ratings in 1979, over-all, CFTR surpassed CHUM in the Toronto BBM ratings by 1978. CHUM dropped Top 40 in favor of an Adult Contemporary formatin 1986.

Other announcers included Duke Roberts, the late Paul Godfrey (*Host of his own TV show, "Boogie" ), Dick Joseph, Peter "Red Knight" Thompson, Bobby Day, Tom Jeffries, Bob Saint, Big "G" Glenn Walters and "Big Don" Biefer. The newsroom was headed by Robert Holiday and included Larry Silver, John Wilson, Ted Bird, Clint Nickerson and others.

Among the station's only major errors was hiring John "Records" Landecker away from Chicago's powerhouse WLS in 1981 to replace Jim Brady. Replacing Landecker a year later with well-known personality "Shotgun" Tom Rivers mitigated the error.

On June 1, 1993, CFTR announced they would be discontinuing their Top 40 format. For the final few days, the station aired a jock-less countdown of "the top 500 songs of the (then) past 25 years" titled "The CFTR Story." At 6 AM on June 7, after playing Phil Collins' "Against All Odds" (which was the #1 song in the countdown) and Starship's "We Built This City" (which also ended CHUM's Top 40 era in 1986), CFTR adopted its present all-news format. It was the first all-news radio station in Canada since the end of the former CKO network in 1989. With the Toronto station's success, Rogers later expanded the format to stations in Vancouver (CKWX) in 1996, Calgary (CFFR) in 2006, and Ottawa (CIWW) in 2010.

In addition to these stations, Rogers owns news-talk stations in Kitchener (CKGL), Halifax (CJNI-FM), Saint John (CHNI-FM), and Moncton (CKNI-FM). All of these are branded similarly to the company's all-news stations, and use a similar all-news wheel during morning and afternoon drive.