MONTREAL —The terms “legend” and “pioneer” are often loosely bandied about, but not in Sidney Margles’ case.
Charlotte Bell, chair of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, inducts Sidney Margles into its Hall of Fame in Ottawa.
Margles, along with Rick Leckner and Peter Shurman, during the 1960s and 1970s comprised AM radio station CJAD’s “Jewish mobile squad” – as they were dubbed – hustling from fires to floods to FLQ bombing sites 24/7, helping to define the era when commercial AM radio was king.
It was Margles who, in 1961, became the first full-time radio reporter in the city at CJAD.
It was Margles who was first on the scene on Nov. 29, 1963 – one week after U.S. president John F. Kennedy’s assassination – when a Trans-Canada Airlines DC-8 jetliner bound for Vancouver went down in Ste. Thérèse, killing 118.
It was Margles who helped develop the key elements in enabling radio journalists to transmit stories from the scene, making reporting more immediate and compelling.
And it was Margles who, on Nov. 30 in Ottawa, was inducted into the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) Hall of Fame in recognition of his singular contributions to the industry over some 30 years.
(Another native Jewish Montrealer joining the Hall of Fame that night was the late Charles Dalfen, former chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission).
It was the equivalent to winning a Lifetime Achievement Award, MC and veteran journalist Rosemary Thompson told him.
“To be recognized by your peers is something that doesn’t happen every day,” acknowledged 70-year-old Margles in a recent telephone interview from Florida. “Legend? Some people say that. I think I did leave a mark.”
A “mark” belies the reality.
For those of a certain middle-and-more age, some of the people Margles worked for and with from the time he first started writing news in 1957 at CJAD – then on Mountain Street – are a Who’s Who of broadcasting.
Besides Shurman and Leckner (who in 1969 took over traffic duties from Len Rowcliffe in the CJAD helicopter), they included station manager H.T. (Mac) McCurdy (who first hired Margles), news director Doug Williamson, Al Cauley, Ned Conlon, Danny Gallivan, Doris Clark, George Balcan, Bill Roberts, Hamilton Grant, Lymon Potts and Paul Reid.
“Sometimes,” replied Margles when asked if he ever gets nostalgic thinking about the heyday at CJAD, “when you sit back.”
The thing is, Margles never seemed to “sit back.”
Growing up around Kent Park in Côte-des-Neiges with two older brothers, the late Max and Phillip, now 81, Margles knew he “had the bug” for reporting.
Because he ended up attending the downtown High School of Montreal on University Street, now the Fine Arts Core Education (FACE) school, Margles got out at 2:30 p.m. and would hop over to CJAD on Mountain Street for the late Bob Harvey’s Club 800 show – named after CJAD’s frequency. “I would read Coca-Cola commercials as part of the audience participation,” Margles said.
He then began to hang out in the newsroom and eventually to write news, securing a part-time paid job while attending McGill University in 1957. In 1959, he began to write news full time and was a full-time reporter two years later.
But it was pretty basic stuff, with little staffing. “In those days, the radio stations never sent anybody out except for big events,” Margles said.
“Let’s say there was a bank robbery. You would call the bank and the police and that’s how you got your information, and you wrote the story.”
That changed as the 1960s broke and television began to come into its own and challenge radio. “It became an opportunity,” Margles said. “People felt we had to be competitive, and that’s when radio news started to have its own reporters.”
Indispensable was “a little Hillman car” with a telephone that CJAD acquired and Margles started to use to cover stories. “I was out full time,” he said. “I covered everything from accidents to fires to floods to political events.
“For umpteen years we called it News in the Making,” Margles continued. “It was a great opportunity. I was enjoying what I was doing and that was half of it. I knew I wasn’t going to get rich, but it was a fulfilling life.”
Then came stories that would make – and mark – Margles’ career: the TCA crash, which he said gave the impetus for CJAD engineers to develop carrier-operated relay systems that allows reporters to send stories from the scene, no matter where they are; Expo ’67, when Margles would change clothes for an evening event at an apartment CJAD rented at architect Moshe Safdie’s Habitat complex; the 1970 October Crisis, when the FLQ murdered Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte.
And over the years, hundreds upon hundreds more stories.
“I was aggressive, I was curious,” Margles said. “I saw my role as the eyes and ears of the listener. If I could put you in my place by you listening to me, then I did my job.”
Margles reported on air in Montreal until 1974, when he was asked to go to Ottawa and take over the operations and expand the network of CJAD’s parent company, Standard Broadcasting.
In Ottawa, even while doing that job, Margles continued to be on air, delivering a daily commentary back to CJAD and hosting a program on “morals and ethics” with a rabbi, minister and priest, all the while overseeing the construction of a brand new Standard station, CJSB.
Margles returned to Montreal in 1984 with his wife, Merle, and three daughters to run Standard Sound Systems and continued to be on the air with a similar type of “morals and ethics” show until he gave up the mike for good during the mid-1980s.
Still, Margles stayed active. The Canadian Communications Foundation commissioned him to write the history of news broadcasting in Canada since 1952, and Margles became involved in local and federal politics, serving as a TMR city councillor and with the federal Liberal party (his wife worked for 15 years for the late Mount Royal Liberal MP Sheila Finestone), as well as with the Jewish community.
Most recently, Margles served as an unpaid consultant for the all-Jewish Radio Shalom and is incoming president of the Cote St. Luc Senior Men’s Club.
What does the future hold for AM radio?
Margles did not know for sure, but he was certain “local radio will continue to exist,” whatever its form, on AM or otherwise.
“When television started to evolve, people said radio was going to die, but that didn’t happen. Radio evolved and changed.”
Despite the advent of satellite radio, “you cannot get your local traffic report on satellite radio, or local news story.
“Local radio will continue to exist, whether it remains on the AM dial or converts fully to digital.
“It’s all part of the challenge AM will have to face.”
