Seeking radio listener for long walks on beach...

Here’s an archival treasure you won’t find on the CBC Archives site: The As It Happens Personal Classifieds.

For a brief period in the mid-70s, the venerable AIH actually solicited voice message from Canadians and broadcast their odd personal requests nationwide.

Here's how they described it:

From across canada, personal messages from one listener to another. Messages of need, distress and greeting. An exclusive free service of As It Happens which will transmit private messages over 80 stations across canada to over 400 communities.

The process was a little clumsy: write a letter to CBC, mail it, and hope they call you back to record your voice and eventually put it on air. (The show reserved the right not to air some messages, “to exercise control over taste and legal matters.”) Most messages even included the full mailing address of the person making the request.

A few of the personal messages from June 17, 1975 (underscored with instrumental porno disco):



(I'll post a 30 second audio sampling if I figure I can get away with it...)

• A man from Willowdale, Ont. is looking for information on 1940s hand-powered flashlights (funny, these are all the rage again in 2006)
  
  
• A woman from St. John, N.B. wants to return a photo album that a French tourist left in the Ottawa post office seven years earlier
  
  
• “Gabrielle” from Quebec (5’ 4”, 129 lbs, divorced, with "blond hair and ‘azel eyes") wants to meet a “nice gentleman” who is “honest, tall, sincere and gay” (I image in the old-fashioned sense?) for companionship and a relationship. “Absolutely no heavy drinker.” (Listeners wanting to contact Gabrielle could write to AIH staff and they’d pass it along. Producers as pimps!)
  
  
• A man from Quebec is looking for an old army buddy. “We crossed the rocky mountains in the winter of ‘44-45, testing equipment for the army.” (Innocent enough, though it evokes Brokeback just a little. )

Bizarre stuff. I can’t tell if this experiment was a giant leap forward, or an embarassing stumble backward. The whole concept behind As It Happens was to connect Canadians by phone, and I suppose this was one way to do it. Connecting individuals has come a long way since the 70s… It’s sort of like they couldn’t wait for the Internet to be invented, so they went ahead and used an awkward mashup of telephone and radio technologies instead.

The idea of broadcasting personal messages wasn’t new, of course - it's as old as radio. It worked like gangbusters during the Second World War, where messages from troops would be recorded overseas and played at home. Check out Greetings from the Beaver Club for a sampling (“Hiya Mom! Send cigarettes.”) CBC used the same tactic in Canada’s north, before everyone had telephones. But the system worked because everyone knew to listen. They had a vested interest in staying glued to their radios.

(By the way, CBC stopped broadcasting messages from the troops midway through the war. There were too many men overseas, and a few nasty instances of recorded messages being aired from men who had just been killed.)

I certainly can’t fathom scattershot person-to-person radio messages working 30 years later, nationwide. I’ve heard two or three of these segments in the CBC archives, but none had any follow up. You’d think if the producers beat the odds and managed a successful hookup, they’d brag about it. Then again, the show had moved to its 90 minute format, and must have had a lot of airtime to fill.

Tags: cbc, cbc archives, as it happens, classifieds, radio, gorbould, gor[b]