Vic Waters passes

[radiofan]

From Gord Lansdell's Northwest Broadcasters ...

08/19/08 - Former CJOR Vancouver personality and program director Vic Waters died this morning. He was 89. Vic was unique among broadcasters, in that he only ever worked at one radio station. He was a wireless operator, engaged to copy Trans Radio news for CJOR and the Chicago Daily News Foreign Service for The Daily Province in 1939. He was a studio operator/announcer at CJOR in 1941-42, breaking for duty in the Canadian Army from 1942-46. He returned to CJOR following the war and later became program director. He retired from radio in 1969. He became a member of the B.C. Entertainment Hall of Fame Starwalk at the Orpheum in 1998 and a member of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters Half Century Club in 2002. There will be no service by his request.

Vic Waters Bio from Jack Bennest's BC Radio History

[Jack Bennest]

thanks to red robinson for the picture






thanks to Jim Bennie for this one published here some time ago:

Around Your Radio Dial—TONIGHT
[Dick Diespecker, Vancouver Daily Province, Monday, May 1, 1950]
THAT MONSTER IS HERE AGAIN

One of Vancouver’s most recent additions to the disc jockey tribe is a fellow named Vic Waters of CJOR. Impossible as it may sound, he became a disc jockey by way of a program known as the Concert Hour.
Waters is not really a monster, of course, but he rather liked to have people think he is. By all the rules of radio, he should be building radio transmitters or crouched over a wireless key in the cabin on the top deck of some freighter, for Waters is essentially a technical man.
I don’t know what he did in school, but back in 1939 he turned up at CJOR’s transmitter as a qualified wireless operator. He was engaged to copy Trans Radio news for the station and Chicago Daily News Foreign Service for the Daily Province. He was one of those remarkable people who can listen to those dit-dit-daas in earphones and translate them into English on a typewriter at a rate of 40 words a minute.
Unfortunately, Mr. Waters also has a fiendish sense of humor. He used to tune in the Domei (Japanese) wireless broadcasts, and knowing that the Trans Radio copy would be delivered at the studio by messenger only just in time for this writer to use it on the air without any previous reading, the monster came out in him. Morning after morning, I would be reading a very serious dispatch concerning world affairs, only to suddenly find myself reading a lot of gibberish in the middle of a sentence. Fortunately, for all of us, the war put a stop to these shenanigans.
In 1941, the management commuted Waters’ sentence and allowed into the studio as a studio operator. It was then that Vancouver listeners were introduced to Waters’ peculiar brand of humor. Two announcers handled a program called Studio Party and Waters was their operator. When he did not like what they were saying . . . he would simply cut them off the air and entertain the customers himself, leaving the announcers gasping like fish out of water.
The management had an answer for this, too. They made Waters an announcer. He thought that was too much to bear, so he joined the army, and immediately found himself listening to Japanese broadcasts again . . . first at Esquimalt and later in Australia.
In 1946, he presented himself at CJOR again and was put to work as a studio operator. It took him four years to stop talking about the “Big Walk Abouts” and other assorted Australian phenomena. In his spare moments as a raconteur, he operated most of the big network shows from this station, and still operates the coast-to-coast chuckwagon.
During a shortage of staff, Waters was pressed into service as a newscaster and finally was sent to radio’s Siberia by being given the late night shift which included the Concert Hour. This, he conducted for several years, using what he called the special “concert hour voice” for the purpose.
Actually, Vic Waters knows a great deal about classical music and did a sound job on the Concert Hour. But the sales department, like all radio station sales departments, thought the concert hour was a waste of time. The thin edge of the wedge was a disc jockey show, conducted by Mr. Waters every Saturday night. The public seemed to like it, Waters enjoyed it himself and it was not long before a few sessions in the back room with a strong light and a rubber truncheon convinced him that good music should go and pop music take its place.
Now Mrs. Waters' little boy Vic spins discs and yak-yaks in between six nights a week. His yakking is as good as any on the air, and a great deal better than some, and his selection of discs is excellent with some exceptions. Like all listeners, I have my favorites. I hate Waters when he makes nasty remarks about Vaughn Monroe, but fortunately he is saved by the fact he like Louis Armstrong and Dixieland jazz as much as I do. So with that thought in mind, we say farewell to this monster of the turntables, his beady little eyes following us hungrily as we depart and his hunting cry reaching us faintly as we move on . . .”That fo hguone thats” which freely translates means “That’s enough of that.”



thanks to the Vancouver Sun

[Jack Bennest]

Use this link to hear Vic speak with Jack Webster in a 1976 Broadcast celebrating CJOR's 50th Year on the air


http://bcradiohistory.com/jukebox/myjukebox_files/1976%20CJOR%2050th%20Birthday%201.mp3