Last Updated on: 15th August 2023, 11:38 am
The writing had been on the wall for quite a while especially once Evanov signalled that they had totally given up on the thing by dumping a religious format there and moving the country station to FM, but I was still a little surprised when I read that Brantford’s 1380 CKPC had shut down as of August 4th.
CKPC, in its AM or FM flavours, was never my first choice station. But during the years I spent in Brantford attending the school for the blind, it often made for decent enough company.
I figured out pretty early on that if I wanted a good newscast (I was one of the only little kids I knew who was interested in the news), that CKPC was where I should go. Arnold Anderson did the best sports reports around, and pretty much all day long you could count on CKPC to fill you in on whatever else was happening in the city and beyond. This was a huge help whenever I had a teacher who assigned us current events, so just for that I’m grateful.
In my later years there, living in one of the houses where a small handful of us got to learn life skills more independently, 1380 was almost always on the kitchen radio. It was what I heard while I made my tea and breakfast in the morning, and the soundtrack to supper at night. Those were some fun times, and to this day I still keep in touch with a couple of those people.
I mostly lost track of 1380 once I left the city, because it wasn’t the easiest signal to pull in. But my brother, who ended up staying in Brantford, kept it as his go to kitchen station until management started nailing its coffin shut.
It would be a much greater loss to the community if it still actually did anything like radio is supposed to do at its best or even when it’s putting in a half assed effort, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be missed at all. It’s sad to see another old AM station go.
Just shy of marking 100 years on the air, CKPC AM 1380 is no more.
Without any formal announcement broadcasting the shutdown, the Brantford radio station signed off just after midnight Friday, leaving just silence.
“I stayed up in my pyjamas because I felt it was an historic event,” said Pete Byerlay, who began his 37-year career at CKPC AM in 1963. “They played O’Canada at midnight and that was it.”
It was a quiet end to a century of local radio broadcasting.
In a social media posting, Evanov Communications announced its decision to shut down AM 1380.
“The broadcasting sector today is operating in a challenging environment, from which no broadcaster is immune,” said the post. “After careful consideration and evaluation of ECI’s current situation, local market conditions, and changes to the radio industry more broadly, we have made the difficult but necessary decision to streamline our Brantford operations and focus on our two commercial FM stations in the market.”
