Sixty years ago, in a small corner of the old Risteen Building in downtown Fredericton, Ross Ingram was the first person to speak live on CBZ, the CBC station established in Fredericton in 1964.

“I remember that until 10 minutes before our first broadcast, we didn’t know (if) we were going to go on the air or not,” he recalls, citing a problem with the authorization to broadcast this show . he and his manager, Harold Hatheway, were waiting.

Ingram said it was about 6:57 a.m. before Hatheway got the green light to air at 7 a.m.

He said the whole operation was different from what people at CBC were familiar with at the time.

“We were pioneers,” Ingram said.

“I mean, we were doing things here that CBC had never done before.”

Ingram said he worked 28 years for the public broadcaster, starting in Halifax in 1958.

The Fredericton station opened from a temporary space on Queen Street during construction of the permanent headquarters on Regent Street, which the team moved into three years later.

At first, the station had about 20 people, including two journalists, six on-air presenters and four technicians.

Ingram said that initially there were issues with audio interference from another station on the dial, leading people to call the CBC for help tuning their radios.

“Some of these radios were from the 1930s, you know, and you really couldn’t do much with them… It lasted a whole year,” Ingram said, until the signal shifted.

WATCH | “Oh man, what a change”:

60 years later: the two men who broadcast the first words on CBC radio in Fredericton return

On March 4, 1964, Ross Ingram and Joe Wood launched CBC radio in the capital. They recently stopped by Regent Street Studios to see how times have changed.

Joe Wood was another of the first voices to be broadcast on the new station, which bore the call letters CBZ.

Just 22 at the time, he hosted the local afternoon show for a time, which lasted only about 15 minutes – just enough for a short newscast and two pieces of music .

When he wasn’t doing that, he was out in the field with a technician and a portable tape recorder, looking for people to talk to.

At that time, Wood said, they were on the air 24 hours a day.

“You would start a shift at 11 p.m., finish it at six in the morning, go home, sleep in, get up the next day. You would do this for seven days straight, take a few days off, work the weekend, doing a morning show on Saturday, etc. And then it was like a three-week rotation.

In 1970, Wood said Information morning started, and there was a full team covering what was happening in the community and across the province.

“Oh, by the way, the Prime Minister hates you”

Wood said everyone who worked at the station had a desire to do their best and, given the feedback they received, he believes they made an impact.

Wood said his team sometimes interviewed the sitting prime minister, which was not a usual tradition at the time.

Once, after interviewing a political scientist, Wood was told: “Oh, by the way, the Prime Minister hates you.” »

Surprised, he asked why and was told that the Prime Minister was not happy to continue asking questions and not taking “the words of his ministers as gospel”.

Wood recalls an interview he once had with the Minister of Highways. He asked a question and received an answer that had nothing to do with what he asked.

“So I asked the question again. I did the same thing with a different answer. I asked the question a third time. There was dead silence,” Wood said.

“He said, ‘Mr. Wood, are you looking for a fight?’ And I said, ‘No, sir, I’m looking for an answer.’ And he finally answered the question a third time.”

The future of radio

Ingram said he has watched the advancements in broadcast technology over the years. He remembers the time when CBC chartered a plane for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and developed the film on the way back to Halifax.

At the time, he said it was as close as you could get to live television, but now there is 24-hour live coverage of major events, he said, emphasizing the coverage by CNN of the recent hurricane in Florida.

Yet, he added, despite progress, radio “will always be with us.”

“It really doesn’t take a lot of participation to listen to the radio. You can do your housework, you can be in the yard mowing the lawn – you can be wherever you are now,” Ingram said.

Wood agrees. He retired at 55, but looking at the radio industry today, he said there was a lot of competition because of the ease of getting information online and on networks social.

But, he said, the question is: Is this information the right information?

“One thing I know from our history about radio and television is that if it’s not good, it doesn’t get aired, and if it is, we apologize more late,” Wood said.

“So I think radio as we know it may change, but I think it will continue.

“I think the future is pretty good.”