That Wasn’t the Plan. Reg Sherren
speakers, an AM/FM radio and a record player with space to store the LPs, plus the large reel-to-reel tape recorder, complete with two microphones.
Dad would record us, coaxing us to sing songs or recite poems like “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert Service. It was my first introduction to a microphone, the first time I heard what I sounded like. Little pie-faced Reggie finds his voice.
Dad was also was a damn fine cameraman, recording pictures, if not sound, that chronicled our lives in the Big Land or on vacation across Atlantic Canada. He filmed us tobogganing in the bush, taking family road trips to New Brunswick, loading haystacks on a wagon or digging clams in Prince Edward Island. And usually in there somewhere was footage of Reg acting like a goof for the camera. I guess, in hindsight, Dad was inspiring my imagination. It would take me much further than I ever dreamed of going.
And Wabush, Labrador, was a great place to explore your imagination. It wasn’t as if we were distracted by television—at least not much. In the early days, television consisted of one channel that started at 3:45 in the afternoon with the soap opera The Edge of Night and ended around 11:00 at night. Half the programming was French and everything was black and white. Most programming was a week old with the exception of news and hockey games. They were flown in on rolls of film and broadcast the next day. Radio usually broke the final score of the hockey game the day before you watched it.
We had some American programming, such as Bonanza and The Wonderful World of Disney, but most of it was pure Canadiana—Chez Hélène from CBC TV and Bobino from Radio-Canada (CBC’s French-language service) or good old CBC Television programming like Country Canada or The Forest Rangers. That Forest Rangers theme song still plays in my head. I remember coming home for lunch one day to watch Stompin’ Tom Connors get married on Elwood Glover’s Luncheon Date. I thought that was pretty cool. It doesn’t get any more Canadian than that!
When I was in Grade 7, I badly broke my arm. Then they discovered a cyst was eating through the bone and whisked me off to Montreal for surgery, where I was on a ward with three adult men at the Royal Victoria Hospital. One fellow was in traction, the result of being sideswiped by a transport truck while riding his motorcycle; the second had had both his legs crushed while loading a giant roll of newsprint down at the docks. The third, an elderly gentleman, had cataracts. He and I would watch westerns together on a twelve-inch black-and-white portable TV. He couldn’t see the picture, so I would describe the action for him. It was my first gig as a commentator.
When I was in Grade 8, I entered a contest at our local radio station, CFLW. The idea was for contestants to sketch their version of the troglodyte, a caveman-type character from a hit song by a group called the Jimmy Castor Bunch. I drew this primitive-looking fellow in a tattered tuxedo with a bone through his nose and somehow managed to win an album by Three Dog Night called Golden Biscuits.
I still remember walking into the radio station, tucked into the basement of what was essentially a bungalow (the manager lived upstairs), to pick up my very first record album. I was twelve years old. The cramped space had posters on the walls from different performers, tiny studios with microphones, control boards, and panelling with little holes that the fellow showing me around said was something called “soundproofing.”
Banging away in a small room by itself was a big green metal monster called a teletype. The teletype was like an extremely early mechanical version of the internet, used to deliver news wire services to various radio, TV and newspaper organizations through a dedicated telephone line. Not that I knew any of that then. That machine hammered out stories from around the world twenty-four hours a day. They rolled off the top, still warm from the ink-stained keys, in one long, continuous river of newsprint containing entire newscasts, sports, entertainment bulletins and weather forecasts. It was a wondrous thing.
At home at night, I would listen to different stations on my crystal radio set. The radio kit was a Christmas present that supplied the hardware to build your very own radio. It also offered the ability to escape. Sometimes stations from faraway places would find their way skipping across the Labrador sky: CFGO Ottawa, WOR New York or WBZ Boston.
Three years later, when I was fifteen, I landed my first job at that same Wabush radio station as an announcer—and I use the term loosely. How I got the job I’m not really sure. My best buddy, Larry Hennessey, was already working there and put in a good word, but I suspect my father’s position may have also had something to do with it. Whatever the reason, I landed the noon-to-five time slot on Sunday afternoons.
I had absolutely zero training. For my first show I was given some very brief instruction by the fellow on the air before me, a guy who called himself Buffalo Bill Cody. He looked a little like Wild Bill Hickok with his long hair, moustache, cowboy hat and fringe jacket, and he wasn’t a very good teacher. He showed me how to turn on the microphone and which controls delivered sound from the turntables or the reel-to-reel machine, and then he left. I sat there facing a baffling array of switches and dials. I spent the next five hours apologizing for being on the air—when I could get on the air—and my broadcasting career was born.
Being on the air was just one of my duties. I also had to make sure all the garbage cans were clean for Monday morning, and I had to change the paper—those big rolls of newsprint—on the teletype. Sometimes the big green monster would jam up. Once, I recall, all that balled-up friction caused it to almost catch fire. There was a lot of smoke. Some years later, after college, my first story with my very own byline would be hammered out on the big green machine in radio and TV stations across the system.
CFLW, that first station brave enough to hire me, was part of the Humber Valley Broadcasting chain, started by Dr. Noel Murphy, an obstetrician from Corner Brook, Newfoundland. His vision eventually stretched across the western part of the province, and then north. CFLW (Coming from Labrador West) had gone on the air in 1971.
There was no real music format. You could play pretty much whatever you liked, and I did. Sometimes I would play hard rockers like Led Zeppelin followed by a sketch from Monty Python (I had all their albums) before rolling the tape on Back to the Bible, a half-hour religious program sent from the United States. They paid Humber Valley Broadcasting good money for that half-hour, I was told, and programs like it could be the financial bread and butter of smaller stations.
Often you were the only person in the station. Going to the bathroom meant rolling an extended version of Glen Campbell’s rendition of “Classical Gas.” For bigger jobs—say, if you needed to step out to pick up a pizza— “Alice’s Restaurant” was the song to use. It was over eighteen minutes long and the Hudson Restaurant was just a few minutes away. You got anything you wanted, thanks to “Alice’s Restaurant”!
Playing Glen Campbell or a new ABBA hit on the radio was fun for a while, but after a couple of years, even I had to admit it was time to develop some version of a career strategy. My interest in theatre continued. I had a blast acting alongside Labrador greats like the Doyle clan and Kevin Lewis, an immense talent, in the Carol Players theatre troupe. I was giving some serious thought to that possibility but didn’t have a clue how to go about it.
The big money in Labrador was made working in construction or in the local mine. I worked in both. Money was no problem. I made a lot of money for someone my age. The summer after I graduated from high school, 1976, I was making close to $2,500 every two weeks. So after I managed to save some of it, I decided I would travel.
The mine had a company plane that flew regularly to Montreal. Back then you could often hitch a ride and go on an adventure for a few days. I used to stay in a small tourist home on Sherbrooke Street just up from the Voyageur bus terminal. Now that I think about it, I can’t imagine my son or daughter doing things like that at the age of sixteen or seventeen, but I was already living on my own and thought nothing of it.
In 1977, I flew alone from Montreal to the Canary Islands, just because it was the most exotic-looking place I could find at the travel agency. I flew out of the old Mirabel airport and landed in Tenerife in January, just two months before the largest air accident in the history of aviation took place there. A KLM aircraft collided with a Pan Am flight on the runway, and 583 people died.
On another trip