History
A Brief History of CFRC
Queen’s University surely has the longest continuous history in radio of any association in the world, except for the Marconi Companies. The first demonstration of wireless telegraphy on the Queen’s campus was given by the first Professor of General Engineering in the Kingston School of Mining, James Lester Willis Gill
(B.A.Sc. 1896; M.Sc. 1904, McGill), at a spring convocation lecture in 1902. Formal teaching of wireless telegraphy in the Department of Electrical Engineering began in 1912-13 session. Later, Professor Gill conducted experimental wireless distance test around Kingston, carrying the receiver in the back seat of his auto.
The Queen’s wireless telegraphs were licensed and used in training WWI army signallers at the Barriefield War Camp in 1915-17. After returning from the war in the fall of 1919, Prof. Gill founded the Wireless Club at Queen’s and provided them with some code equipment. In the late spring of 1922, a new generation of young professors, Douglas M. Jemmett (M.A. ‘11; B.Sc. ‘13) and Robert L. Davis (M.A. ‘21, MIT), designed and built experimental wireless telephone (AM radio) station 9BT in Fleming Hall, so that the Wireless Club could join the boom in public broadcasting of sports and live concerts. The only documented broadcast of 9BT was a post-game summary of a Queen’s Tricolour-Hamilton Rowing Club exhibition football game on October 7, 1922. With the donation of $500 by Dr. W.R. Jaffrey (Meds ‘13), Professor Jemmett purchased a motor generator set to upgrade the signal to listenability and CFRC- Canada’s Famous Rugby Champions - made its debut with the play-by-play of a Queen’s-McGill football game on October 27, 1923. For the next decade, CFRC was on the air for a few hours a week during the school year, broadcasting football, hockey (including women’s hockey) and basketball games, the occasional extension lecture, studio concerts, and convocations.
Young Lecturer Harold H Stewart (Elec. ‘26) built a new and modern crystal-controlled AM transmitter for CFRC in 1930-31, but it was destroyed in the fire that gutted Fleming Hall in the early hours of June 6, 1933. The transmitter was rebuilt and formal connections were made with the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission in 1934. CFRC became a full CRBC network member in a commercial partnership with the Kingston Whig-Standard, with the inaugural broadcast taking place on June 29, 1936. CFRC took feeds from the CRBC, soon to become the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but also produced a great deal of its own programming with local talent. The station helped bind the community to Queen’s University in a new way and was Kingston’s first listening post on the rest of Canada. One of CFRC’s triumphs took place on a summer day in 1938 when we supplied a feed of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s convocation address from old Richardson Stadium to every radio network on the continent.
Since CFRC was limited to 100 Watts of power at its campus location and since Queen’s would not allow patent medicine advertising on the station, the commercial partnership became strained. The venture was dissolved in August 1942, with the birth of The Whig’s CKWS, and radio at Queen’s again subsided to an experimental project of the Electrical Engineering Department.
CFRC was revived in 1945 under Dr. William Angus for the Summer Radio Institute, a joint venture with the CBC for training broadcasters. That fall, the Radio Workshop, a branch of the Queen’s Drama Guild, began to do weekly broadcasting on CFRC and soon the Electrical Engineers joined in to put the station on the air two and then three nights a week during the school year. In 1957, concerned that CFRC was not producing programming worthy of a university, Dr. Arthur Lower and an informal committee of faculty and staff advised the Principal that CFRC should emulate Minnesota Public Radio’s educational service and that Margaret Angus, who had extensive experience with the CBC, be appointed Director of Radio at Queen’s. From this point, the students were formed into the CFRC Student Radio Club.
The station was brought up to state-of-the-art in 1958 when the old studio in Fleming Hall was closed and new broadcasting facilities were opened in the basement of Carruthers Hall. Westinghouse donated an FM transmitter (FM 1) to Queen’s in 1952, and it went on the air in 1954 on 91.9MHz. The recently retired AM transmitter, an RCA BTA-250M, was donated by CKLC in 1961 and broadcast on 1490KHz.
The dream of broadcasting in stereo every day coalesced some time in the early 1960’s. It almost happened in 1972, but was finally sparked around 1977, when Mrs. Kathleen Ryan (Arts ‘26) made a substantial donation in memory of her husband, a CFRC pioneer, to begin the “GO STEREO” fund. In recognition of the fact that a purely student club could not handle seven day a week broadcasting year round, faculty, staff, alumni and community members were welcomed, and the name of the club was changed. Most of the rest of the $107,000 necessary to complete the “GO STEREO” project was soon raised by the CFRC Radio Club and, after clearing many hurdles, CFRC-FM stereo at 101.9MHz went on the air on February 3, 1990, capping 68 years of radio broadcasting from the campus of Queen’s University.
(This information is taken from “In the Shadow of the Shield”, a fully documented history of radio at Queen’s University and in Kingston, Ontario, 1902-1957. The 657 page book was written by Dr. Arthur E. Zimmerman.)
