Hard as it is to believe, it’s now been more than half a century since Jamaican airwaves were treated to a new sound, embodied in the phrase “This is Charlie Babcock, the Cool Fool with the Live Jive!” Charlie Babcock, a tall, lanky young fellow from Peterborough, Ontario, arrived in Kingston in May 1959 as a disc jockey on the station we then called Radio Jamaica and Rediffusion. He was part of a Canadian invasion instigated by the station’s management to fight off the new kid on the block – the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation.

That organisation was the brainchild of Norman Manley, who was premier at the time. He had long felt that Radio Jamaica, which was owned by a big British conglomerate with stations strewn across the empire, was not doing a good enough job in developing a national culture and character. He asked the Canadian government for help, and they sent a man who not long before had completed a stint as head of the publicly owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Davidson Dunton examined the then skimpy media landscape and submitted a report which formed the basis of the JBC. It was patterned on the CBC, which received an annual subvention from the government but was also free to sell commercials to augment its budget. Its first general manager was a Canadian, Peter Aylen, on loan from the United Nations public affairs division. Among its early staffers was another Canadian, William Strange, a retired Canadian Navy captain. The CBC also sent a veteran radio drama producer, Esse Ljungh, who trained the new station’s cadre of producers.

Strange produced and presented some memorable programmes, including Great Wide World, Argosy and Beautiful Jamaica. When Aylen completed his assignment, Strange was tapped to replace him as station head. He was still there for a short while after I joined the station as a rookie in 1962. By all accounts he was a good enough boss but it was in the studio and on the air that he shone. I can still remember his calm voice and measured delivery in those broadcasts which we sadly have no recordings of.

Another Canadian was a regular in those early days. Lloyd Bryden possessed a classic radio voice which he used to maximum effect. He did a late-night programme called After Dark, when he played soft, laid-back music and spoke quietly and close to the microphone to accentuate the bass. When I worked at the Gleaner before joining JBC, a woman colleague once remarked: “Can you imagine lying in bed and hearing a voice like that right beside you?”

Over at Radio Jamaica, Charlie Babcock had a fair amount of Canadian company. The company had also hired Al Brooks, George Antaya and Hal Burns. There was another young Canadian, Peter Ince, whose father was manager of one of the Canadian banks which had branches here. When Radio Jamaica had the game all to itself, it provided a fairly wide range of programming in the straitened, limited bounds the BBC had bequeathed to the world. But this new lot gave the system a well-needed high-voltage jolt.

They livened up delivery, employed vocal and other gimmicks which the public lapped up. It was George Antaya who morphed the old Radio Jamaica and Rediffusion call sign into “AAAAAR-JAY-AAAAAR!!” and the station never looked back. An interesting footnote about Antaya: his son became a pilot with the Canadian Forces and signed on for a stint with the aerobatic squadron, the Snowbirds. Flying nine trainer aircraft, they perform to delighted crowds at air shows across North America. In September 1989, Shane Antaya, an air force captain at the age of 24, was killed when his plane crashed into Lake Ontario during an air show in Toronto.

Babcock made the biggest splash of the crew, especially with his Platter Parade late-night show Night Train. He made his way into local folklore with a phone call (probably apocryphal). The Chinese gentleman at the other end of the line is said to have responded that the Cool Fool was nothing but a “Damn Fool” and his “Live Jive” deserved a swift kick to the nether region. He and his brother Bob were familiar visitors to various entertainment spots and watering holes. They had developed a strong attachment to the liquid refined from cane juice.

Charlie also developed a considerable following among his listeners, whom he constantly surprised with zany antics. He drove a bright red sports car and once rode a horse to work. When he married a local beauty, Betty Holtz, mobs obstructed traffic outside the church in Half-way-Tree. Years after leaving the air he appeared in Trevor Rhone’s movie Smile Orange, about the vicissitudes of the tourist trade. Eventually he returned to his hometown, where he suffered a stroke and spent many years in a nursing home before he died just less than a month ago.

Canadians were here well before the horde of 1959. Al Ponman, who I believe was Canadian, presented a programme every Saturday afternoon featuring new hits and old favourites. I still have a very good LP copy of his theme song, Cheerful Little Earful, by the Swinging Sweethearts, Jackie Cain and Roy Kral, who had taken the jazz world by storm in the late 1940s.

Fred Wilmot was born in Toronto nine decades ago to a Jamaican family. He arrived with his wife Cynthia in 1951 and they very quickly established themselves in the media scene. They did a variety of programmes on the old Radio Jamaica, sometimes with their two older sons Freddy and Greg. Fred has many talents – he wrote for Public Opinion and worked with Ken Maxwell on scripts for Poppy Show – a lively comedy unabashedly employing broad Jamaican dialect and introducing such comedic talents as Alma Hylton (now MockYen), the late Charles Hyatt and Louis Marriott.

Fred was one of the early hires when the government set up the Jamaica Tourist Board in an old Spanish-styled building at the eastern end of Harbour Street in Kingston. He wrote features, developed promotions, made pitches to travel conventions and looked after visiting luminaries. He hosted a weekly programme about travel and did commercials for a prominent tourist firm, Martin’s Travel Service.

The Wilmots remained active over the many years since then, with Cynthia about a decade ago undertaking a survey of the labour movement in Jamaica going right back to the days of slavery. They have recently eased off considerably in recognition of the physical toll those years have taken.

One other personality from the mid-50s was the product of a Canadian-Jamaican family. I recall hearing Carl Magnus on his game show sponsored by a popular brand of shampoo explain that he had learnt his French on the streets of Montreal.

The Canadian connection has indeed been long and influential, but Jamaicans also returned the favour. After the disastrous JBC strike in 1954, many talented broadcasters from the presentation, production, technical and clerical side of the business left the country. A few went to Britain, but most ended up in New York and Toronto, major broadcast production centres in their respective countries.

Poetic justice indeed!

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca