By Doug Thompson

On October 31, 2003, Bob Laine retired from CHUM after having been with the company for over 45 years. The first project he wanted to tackle in retirement was the CHUM archives. Dozens of tapes of jingle packages, station promos and DJ airchecks were scattered all around the CHUM building. In the summer of 2003, Program Director Brad Jones had an intern gather up all the 1050 CHUM tapes, label them and put them in one place (the former AM library). I came on board to assist Bob and starting dubbing the tapes to CD. I had been a long-time listener to CHUM from 1960 until I started working there as an op in February of 1965 where Bob became my mentor. It was a wonderful experience getting to hear many of the early CHUM jingles that I’d listened to as a teenager growing up in Oakville.

While many of CHUM's master tapes had vanished over the years, there were still a good number left. We also were able to track down several of the missing packages. One amazing discovery was the original 12” acetates of the first jingles CHUM put on the air in May, 1957. They were from CRC (Commercial Recording Corp.) in Dallas and were in a filing cabinet in excellent shape. Thanks to Charlie Ritenburg we were able to de-click and de-crackle the discs and transfer them to CD.

Since we now had the first CHUM jingles and most of the rest, Bob and I decided to create a montage featuring some of the better-known CHUM jingles and a few people had never heard before, including the full one-minute mix of TM’s “Winning Score”. The original jingles had been edited into shorter ID’s and never aired as the long mix. The jingles on this montage come from CRC, Futursonic, IMN Productions, PAMS, Johnny Mann, TM Productions, Otis Conner and JAM.

One final note: the jingle montage is exactly thirteen minutes and thirty-one seconds long. Trivia buffs will note that the address of the CHUM building in Toronto is 1331 Yonge Street.

Enjoy.

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