For the FM radio station in Vancouver

Vancouver

Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...

, see CFOX-FM

CFOX-FM

CFOX-FM is a Canadian radio station in the Greater Vancouver region of British Columbia. It broadcasts at 99.3 MHz on the FM band with an effective radiated power of 75,000 watts from a transmitter on Mount Seymour in the District of North Vancouver. Studios are located in Downtown Vancouver,...

.

CKO/CFOX was an English language

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 AM radio station

Radio station

Radio broadcasting is a one-way wireless transmission over radio waves intended to reach a wide audience. Stations can be linked in radio networks to broadcast a common radio format, either in broadcast syndication or simulcast or both...

 located in Pointe-Claire, Quebec

Quebec

Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....

 from 1960 to 1989. The station's callsign was CFOX from 1960 to 1977 and it later operated as CKO, the Montreal station of the news network of the same name

CKO

CKO was a Canadian radio news network which operated from 1977 to 1989. The CKO call sign was shared by twelve network-owned stations, as listed below....

, from 1977 until 1989.

History

With studios based at 203 Hymus Blvd. in Pointe-Claire, the station went on air on March 15, 1960 as CFOX with an adult contemporary format with 1,000 watts of power, but was changed on February 5, 1963 to 10,000 watts. In 1964 the station format changed to country

Country music

Country music is a popular American musical style that began in the rural Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from Western cowboy and folk music...

, and in 1965 to a Top 40 station.

The station was originally operated by Lakeshore Broadcasting, which was owned by noted Montreal radio journalist Gord Sinclair Jr. (the son of Toronto radio/TV journalist Gordon Sinclair

Gordon Sinclair

Allan Gordon Sinclair, OC, FRGS was a Canadian journalist, writer and commentator.-Early life:Sinclair was born in the Cabbagetown neighbourhood of Toronto, Ontario. In 1916, before finishing his first year of high school, Sinclair dropped out to take a job with the Bank of Nova Scotia...

). It was sold to Allan Slaight in 1972, and he converted it to a country format. In 1975, the station went back to a Top 40 format until September 1977.

Later that year it was purchased by the CKO

CKO

CKO was a Canadian radio news network which operated from 1977 to 1989. The CKO call sign was shared by twelve network-owned stations, as listed below....

 news network, changing the call sign to CKO accordingly and converting it from Top 40 to an all-news

All-news radio

All-news radio is a radio format devoted entirely to discussion and broadcast of news.All-news radio is available in both local and syndicated forms, and is carried in some form on both major US satellite radio networks...

 format. The CFOX calls would later resurface in January 1979 at an FM station

CFOX-FM

CFOX-FM is a Canadian radio station in the Greater Vancouver region of British Columbia. It broadcasts at 99.3 MHz on the FM band with an effective radiated power of 75,000 watts from a transmitter on Mount Seymour in the District of North Vancouver. Studios are located in Downtown Vancouver,...

 in Vancouver

Vancouver

Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...

, British Columbia

British Columbia

British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...

.

CKO applied to convert from the AM dial to the FM dial to operate on the frequency 95.1 MHz. That application was denied on March 19, 1987. The 95.1 MHz frequency will be later used by CBF-FM

CBF-FM

CBF-FM-10 in Sherbrooke and CBF-FM-8 in Trois-Rivières were once full satellites of CBF-FM, but have been separately licenced since 2000 , despite still having rebroadcaster-like callsigns...

. On June 20, 1989, the CRTC approved an application by changing the frequency from 1470 kHz to 650 kHz. However, CKO's frequency change proposal was never implemented.

The station went off air when the network ceased broadcasting during a noon newscast in November 1989. The news was produced, but never aired. The broadcasting licences for the CKO network were returned to the CRTC in 1990. To this day the 650/1470 frequencies has not been reactivated in the Montreal area. Its transmitter site with three antennas in Châteauguay was demolished in 1992.

CFOX is perhaps most famous for getting exclusive access to John Lennon

John Lennon

John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...

 and Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono

is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...

's 1969 Bed-in

Bed-In

During the Vietnam War, in 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono held two week-long Bed-Ins for Peace in Amsterdam and Montreal, which were their non-violent ways of protesting wars and promoting peace...

 for peace in room 1742 at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel

Queen Elizabeth Hotel

The Queen Elizabeth Hotel is a grand hotel in Montreal, Quebec. Completed in 1958, it was built by the Canadian National Railway, but was later sold to Canadian Pacific Hotels, now Fairmont Hotels and Resorts...

, during which the song "Give Peace a Chance

Give Peace a Chance

"Give Peace a Chance" is a song written by John Lennon, originally under the moniker Lennon–McCartney, released as a single in 1969 by the Plastic Ono Band on Apple Records, catalogue Apple 13 in the United Kingdom, Apple 1809 in the United States. It is the first solo single issued by Lennon, and...

" was recorded.

External links

• Marc Denis' CFOX 1470 Radio Archive
• Historical information on 1470 CFOX from the Canadian Communications Foundation.