In 1978, CKST was licensed to St. Albert, an Edmonton suburb, on 1070 KHz with 10KW. The station began broadcasting on December 23rd of the same year. A local community initiative, the station faced financial and other issues for years. And may hold the Alberta record for most ownership changes. Today, CKST has morphed into Easy Rock Edmonton, CFMG-FM on 104.9 MHz with 100KW. The MG in the call letters are named after the British sports car that was once the station's logo during the period when it switched from Oldies on 1200 KHz AM to Adult Contemporary on 104.9 MHz FM. On FM, the MG was quickly dropped in favour of the Easy Rock branding, a thinly-veiled reference to CKRA's early 1980's K-Lite format ("Light Rock and Less Talk"), effectively capturing the Music At Work audience that CKRA created in Edmonton. By the time Standard Radio purchased Easy Rock Edmonton in 2002, the vast majority of music played was from that early '80s list of songs that K-Lite had played. Standard made a lot of changes, most notably making recent Adult Contemporary the largest component of the current playlist.
This morning's Today in History marks the 33rd anniversary of the birth (licensing) of CKST, the only station ever licensed to a suburb of Edmonton.
Ironically, it was just a couple of weeks ago that I received a profile of the man behind CKST, Dick Mather, who passed away in 1997. That profile, written by a member of the Edmonton Broadcasters Club, was placed on the Club's web site for all to see. Well worth a read, especially for someone like me, who really never knew of the man or even his name:
http://edmontonbroadcasters.com/ebc/col ... ther-dick/
This Edmonton boy was even a Newsman at the legendary Buffalo blowtorch, WKBW, before green card problems ended his stay in the U.S.