Some Radio Retirements

Seriously, I’m getting old. The last few years have really driven that home. Everyone I grew up on seems to either be retirement age or dead now.

New to the retirement pile is Eddie Matthews, who has spent the last two decades or so as the morning guy at CJCS or Juice FM or whatever they’re calling it these days, but who I remember best from his time doing evenings at FM 96 in London during the 80s and 90s. He doesn’t hold the record (that belongs to either Joe Bowen or Tom Cheek I’m pretty sure), but for a while there his voice was quite often the last one I’d hear before falling asleep at night. He’s getting out of what’s left of the radio business to become the general manager of the Stratford and District Chamber of Commerce.

And then there’s Darryl Dahmer, who has announced his retirement from CFTR, where he had been doing traffic reports since 1973. My first memories of him and the also retired Russ Holden are as a very small child hearing them on my transistor radio and marveling at how cool it was that they got to fly helicopters and be on the radio at the same time.

I also learned something while I read a few articles about the two of them. Apparently the call letters CFTR stand for “Canada’s First Ted Rogers”. Makes sense, I guess.

Unfortunately, I do have to round this out by mentioning a dead guy. Doug Cameron, who did news in Hamilton for years before winding up his career on CKPC in Brantford, passed away a couple of weeks ago. I remember him best from his time at 820 CHAM. His voice always makes me think of driving around with my folks. I didn’t care for much of the country music CHAM played, but they had quite a few voices I was drawn to, including his.