by Glen Livingstone » Tue Jul 14, 2015 2:29 pm
I was having a pretty good weekend up until around 7:30 last night when Ted phoned to tell me the news that a long time mutual friend of ours had died in an Ontario hospital earlier that morning.
I'm still not entirely sure what happened, all I know is that Eldon Luoma, a pal I've known for almost fifty years is gone at the age of 64. It had been a while - quite a while - since I last saw or spoke to him.
He had moved from Langley, B.C. to Coburg, Ontario three years ago. There'd been occasional phone calls back and forth and we kept in touch through Facebook but that was about it.
Every once in awhile a birthday card would arrive in the mail with a cheery hand-written message from Eldon; often there'd be a Top 40 chart from some long forgotten radio station tucked inside, or perhaps a ticket for one of the upcoming Ontario lotteries.
It's odd that you expect people that you've known forever to always be around until one day - suddenly, they're not.
Knowing that I was interested in radio, a neighbour of my grandparents gave me Eldon's phone number sometime in 1967 or '68 and suggested that I get in touch with him. I called him and we hit it off. He had set up a low-powered 'pirate' radio station in a shack in the backyard of his parents North Surrey home and invited me around to check it out, and that's exactly what I did.
Eldon had chosen the call letters CFAY for his radio station and spray-painted them on the shack's front door.
"This is fantastic" I thought - it was something I'd always wanted to do myself and Eldon already had his extremely illegal operation up and running. I wanted in.
He'd built the transmitter and studio himself using a combination of old World War II army surplus gear and various parts he'd purchased from Radio Shack. He already had a full roster of on air 'talent' comprised mostly of friends from the neighbourhood but he promised to give me few weekend shifts to do when they became available. I was thrilled.
As if this wasn't already about the coolest thing ever, I found out that Eldon had written to Elektra Records in Los Angeles and somehow managed to con his way onto their mailing list to receive free promotional copies of the latest 45's.
He had copies of "Down On the Street" by the Stooges, "Break on Through" by The Doors, "My Little Red Book" by Love, and "Run Out Of Time" by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The CFAY playlist was completely unrestricted and we played whatever the hell we wanted.
In addition to the CFAY library, all of us were bringing in our own records from home to augment the playlist so my show featured a lot of music by Canned Heat, the Velvet Underground, the Deviants and Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. It didn't really seem to matter to Eldon, he loved it all.
We were constantly giving out the CFAY 'Love Line' phone number which happened to be Eldon's parents personal home phone number. I'm sure they couldn't have been more thrilled.
After a couple of years of this the real world reared its ugly head. It was time to get a job, time to move on and that's what I did. After almost fifty years my memory of those days is a little vague but I think Eldon managed to keep CFAY on the air sometime into the early seventies.
Eldon was a dedicated hobbyist who collected records, radio station Top 40 charts, bumper stickers and coverage maps and eventually turned his love for radio into a career, building customized loop antennas which he marketed to enthusiasts across North America. Over his lifetime he maintained a strong interest in low power and small market community and campus radio stations and became quite an expert on the subject.
Throughout his life Eldon cared passionately about his love for his family and friends, and everyone he encountered along the way is a better person for having known him.
“On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world.” ― Henry David Thoreau
Farewell old friend, you will be sorely missed.