Election Night — 1953

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Around Your Radio Dial
By DICK DIESPECKER
[Vancouver Province, Saturday, June 6, 1953]
The accent this coming Tuesday night will be on the B.C. Provincial Elections. Most stations have made elaborate plans to give election results full coverage.
CKWX will start with the 8 o’clock news, Tuesday, June 9. It will carry messages from political party leaders. Under the direction of CKWX news chief, Bert Cannings, 42 radio announcers and tabulators will cover 11 key points throughout the seven constituencies in the Greater Vancouver area. They will be linked by 150 miles of land lines to the CKWX election coverage headquarters in the station’s playhouse in downtown Vancouver.
CKWX men will also assist in staffing remote pickups in the Greater Vancouver and southern Vancouver Island areas. The station will also have access to seven coverage points established by CJVI, its affiliated station in Victoria. Central re-write desk will be manned by Mr. Cannings and four former newspaper men now engaged in public relations work. Color throughout the evening will come from four outside broadcasting points where CKWX announcers will describe the events from the central headquarters of each political party.
Arrangements have been made with Premier W.A.C. Bennett to broadcast directly from his campaign offices in Kelowan.
CKWX intends to give special attention to two of the hottest election spots . . . Vancouver-Point Grey and Oak Bay, where party leaders are fighting it out with cabinet ministers.
CKWX commentator Sam Ross will process and voice party standings and trends from Vancouver. The same job will be done from Victoria by veteran press gallery reporter Fred MacNeill. Production will be under the control of Laurie Irving with studio microphones manned by news announcers Neil Nisbet and Ken Hughes.
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CJOR will attack the problem in a somewhat different fashion. While they will have crews in local party headquarters and all the station names such as Ross Mortimer, Vic Waters, Myron Balagno, Art Welch, Wally Peters and Al Jordan will be on deck, concentration will be on speed of results.
Dorwin Baird, who will be in charge of the entire election night broadcast, which commences at 8:15 and carries on until midnight, has been involved in every civic and federal election broadcast by CJOR since 1939. Few men in British Columbia have had as lengthy experience in such broadcasting. As a matter of fact, this will be the first since back in 1938 that I have not been involved in an election broadcast and I am going to miss it. Dorwin and I have done many of them together and I know of no one in the broadcasting business who can work faster or is more alert to the changing picture on election night as vote tabulations pour in. Dorwin will be the “slot” man at CJOR (to use a newspaper expression) and with his know-how and CKWX’s greatly enhanced facilities, I am afraid you listeners are going to have a hard time in deciding which station you will tune in. What you will probably end up by doing, as most of us will, is switching back and forth between the two of them.
CBC also starts their election coverage at 8:15. They will, of course, use their B.C. network facilities, bringing in commentator James K. Nesbit of Victoria and Stuart Keate, publisher of the Victoria Times. They also plan to have a commentary from Blair Fraser from Ottawa.
CBC reporters will be stationed at party headquarters in Vancouver.
CBC news editors will be Don Smith, Bobbie Patrick, Pat Lewis and Reg Jessup. Laurence Duffey will be in charge. Announcements will be handled by Marce Munro and Tom Robinson.
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TONIGHT’S RADIO HIGHLIGHTS
11:00—Bellman’s Choice. Bill Bellman with some fine records and quiet friendly talk. You’ll enjoy it. CBU.

[jon]

Bellman’s Choice. Bill Bellman with some fine records and quiet friendly talk. You’ll enjoy it. CBU.

When I was at CHQM in the early 1970s, it was "A Man and His Music" that people mentioned as Bill Bellman's show at CBU. Obviously, that may have been what Bellman's Choice became in later years. But I just wondered if you'd run across any other Bill Bellman program titles.

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Bellman’s Choice. Bill Bellman with some fine records and quiet friendly talk. You’ll enjoy it. CBU.

When I was at CHQM in the early 1970s, it was "A Man and His Music" that people mentioned as Bill Bellman's show at CBU. Obviously, that may have been what Bellman's Choice became in later years. But I just wondered if you'd run across any other Bill Bellman program titles.

Yes, Jon, I did. Just yesterday in fact as I was going through some summer 1952 reels down here at the library. There was a note from Diespecker regretting "A Man and His Music" would be going off the air because Bellman got a job with John Lovick. It appears ad agency work didn't appeal to him, so I'm guessing he went back to the CBC and picked a new name for his show.

cArtie.

[jon]

This is great! Just the info I was looking for to update Bill's info.

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This is great! Just the info I was looking for to update Bill's info.

Sorry, Jon. If I had known, I would have made a notation of which month he left to go into advertising. But Dick was down to weekly columns at that point. They were fairly short and he spent most of his time bleating about CBC's live drama or what his actor cronies like Bernie Braden were doing that week at TUTS. They're completely uninteresting to me (other than the mentions of Dolores Claman who later wrote the Hockey Night in Canada theme. She also wrote a production library we used at CKO, using several aliases).

I've been whipping through reels from summer 1952 and '53 looking for Eric Whitehead columns and will likely finish today so I won't be posting any more of Dick's stuff after that for the foreseeable future. I plan to look through fall 1953 onward, but it won't be for a couple of months.

cArtie.

[Jack Bennest]

Keep looking - its a part of history