Turning the tables on genealogy writing.

( A long time ago, I was asked by someone who knew I dabbled in genealogy why I didn’t write stories about myself for future generations so they wouldn’t have to ‘guess’. Back then, I didn’t see the point – but now I have grandchildren. )

It was sometime back in 1983 – imagine. Every Breath You Take by The Police was blaring over the airwaves and the beautiful FM secretary sprinted out of her stuffy office cubicle and ran down the hall pumping her skinny arms over her head in a victory dance. She was simply over the moon: The stodgy radio station she worked for was entering the modern age!

I was employed as an advertising copywriter for the same easy-listening FM station as well as for its affiliate, a once-proud but struggling sports talk station on the AM dial.

The FM station was by far the more successful of the two stations, keeping the owners afloat with its middle-of-the-road Paul Mauriat instrumentals aimed at an older audience.

But their faithful clientele were retiring and moving away to live near their children in Ontario or just plain passing away. (Ironically, a retirement community just over the Quebec border in Ontario was a major advertiser.) Hence the jarring format change.

That day, I overheard a staffer callously joke about how the station’s geriatric listeners were now frantically stumbling out of their easy chairs to turn the radio dial back to ‘their’ station.

Back then I didn’t pay much attention to demographics or ratings but I did have a singular role in this FM station’s public profile.

I wrote dozens and dozens of their ‘lyrical’ hourly ID’s.

Originally penned by a veteran on-air personality, these ID’s were nothing but extra work for me and they came with no extra pay either, but I didn’t work in radio copy for the money (minimum wage) or for the praise (we got none). I worked for a chance to make a living, however meagre, as a writer and for the camaraderie among creatives and, yes, for the adrenaline rush.

(In those days, it seemed as if every advertising contract the salespeople brought into the copy office had to be conceived, written and produced “yesterday.” English Montreal radio salespeople were fighting over an ever-diminishing slice of the advertising pie – and in recessionary times. The clients were getting smaller and smaller – and pickier and pickier. These hourly ID’s allowed me to be creative (and corny) on my own terms – at my own rhythm.)

In the early 1980’s, our English FM Station was the “MUZAK” station of choice in Montreal, airing continuously in elevators all over town.

So, every lunch hour, when thousands of office workers spilled out of their own stuffy cubicles to score a coffee and sandwich and maybe a little city sunshine down below, they could not escape hearing one of my midday ID’s voiced in a warm creamy tone by one of our talented station announcers.

I kept these three “midday” ID’s for my portfolio.

Number 1: Midday in Montreal is when the babies come out. Winter newborns, bundled in their mother’s arms, rosy-cheeked cherubs, bright eyes wide in wonder. They are seeing the world for the very first time. The mystery of a budding flower, the majesty of a skyscraper, a lot for little eyes to take in. Midday in Montreal with the beautiful music of CICK. (I changed the name of the station, but you might know which one it is.)

Ok. I was 28, and although I strongly denied it back then, I was clearly wanting a family. But, if you consider I had held an infant in my arms only twice in all of my young life, both times while babysitting, I think I got it right. I know I got it right. I have a four month old granddaughter and she’s just as described.

Number 2: Midday in Montreal. School children straggle home from lunch in groups of two or three. Never taking the shortest route, they stop to pet a stray or to kick a stone around, forgetting as children often do, about time. Wandering home in zigs and zags,they finally arrive to steaming bowls of soup and fat sandwiches. Midday in Montreal. With the beautiful music of CICK.

This was a bit of a nostalgia, for sure. I, myself, in the 1960’s, had been a latchkey kid and I often had to make my own lunch, sometimes grilling POM bread over the blue flame of the gas stove. Yummy! By the 1980’s, I suspect even fewer kids went home for lunch. Still, judging from the meandering path my five year old granddaughter likes to take on our walks together, I think I nailed the dilly-dallying part.

Number 3: Midday in Montreal. The circular days are cut in half by the sound of a thousand clocks: ornate cuckoos in residential parlours, church bells and cathedral gongs, those quiet, creeping clocks in offices. As the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, a million pairs of eyes turn to the clock, acknowledging midday in Montreal, with the beautiful music of CICK.

I still like this one, although a smart-alek booth operator questioned whether cathedrals gonged at all. I directed him to Byzantium, my favourite Yeats poem. I had borrowed the phrase, you see.

The unpurged images of day recede;

The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;

Night resonance recedes, night-walkers’ song

After great cathedral gong;

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

All that man is,

All mere complexities,

The fury and the mire of human veins.

Midnight, with the beautiful music of CICK 😉

Do you think Yeats would have been a better radio copywriter than me? Would the insomniac crowd have been seriously disturbed by Midnight ID’s in the style of his poem?

Anyway, after a year of dutifully tapping out these hourly ID’s on my trusty IBM Selectric typewriter (the one with the snazzy white “Correcto-type” band that enabled me to churn out my 30 and 60 second commercial scripts apace) I asked to be relieved of the task.

Like so many of my colleagues, I quit my copy job to try my luck in Toronto. Somehow, I ended up back in Montreal with a family – just as the economy was improving. What bad timing! For the next decade, I mostly worked remotely as a freelance writer -for rather good pay- for sundry commercial magazines producing quote-anecdote-statistic style articles on non-controversial topics that didn’t scare off the advertisers.

Occasionally, I got creative and punched out a timely satirical piece like Beat the Biological Clock for Salon Magazine. That number was written, yikes, over 20 years ago. Time sure does fly!

I guess I should get busy writing more of my ‘ancient histories’ for the girls.

End