When Allan Waters bought Toronto’s CHUM-AM radio station in 1954, it was a money-losing 1,000-watt sun-up-to-sundown operation serving mainly as a marketing tool for its owner, pharmaceutical manufacturer Jack Q’Part. Waters was a salesman for Part at the time, and though he was unfamiliar with the radio business, his desire to run his own company overrode any misgivings he may have had.

For three years, the staff tried to build an audience, but the station format of announcers spinning Bing Crosby records and broadcasting live race-track results was attracting neither listeners nor advertising revenue.

Instead, the station had to rely on local ethnic communities buying blocks of airtime for support. (One of those one-hour slots was bought by Johnny Lombardi, who produced a show of Italian music and brought with him a slate of advertisers. This gave him the experience he needed to launch CHIN in 1967.) Occasionally, even German and Chinese could be heard over the airwaves.

But while these efforts may have unintentionally reflected Toronto’s gradual change from a predominantly WASP community to today’s multiethnic mix, the money still wasn’t flowing in, and Waters realized that the station needed a complete overhaul. So, he imported a concept that was growing in the U.S. – Top 40, meaning playing the best-selling records of the day in a countdown.

The ideas were revolutionary: play popular tunes all the time, promote the station name constantly, keep the pace fast and hard-hitting, and punctuate with regular newscasts at five minutes to the hour.

In May 1957, CHUM relaunched as a 24-hour Top 40 station (or Top 50, to be exact), broadcasting at 2,500 watts.

At first dismissed as a passing fad and corrupting influence by the older population, the rock ‘n’ roll broadcast on CHUM was quickly embraced by teenagers and young adults alike. In the first few months, advertisers pulled out, unhappy with the sensational nature of Elvis Presley – whose single All Shook Up was the first number-one record on the famous CHUM Chart – and his gyrating hips in live appearances.

‘A lot of people thought my father was nuts [to bring rock ‘n’ roll to Toronto’s airwaves],’ says Jim Waters, currently the chairman of CHUM’s board. (His brother, Ron, is the vice-chair.)

In the years that followed, CHUM set about acquiring radio stations in other parts of Ontario, starting with Peterborough (CKPT-AM) in 1962, and eventually expanding beyond the province (Halifax’s CJCH-AM in 1965). Today, the company owns 32 AM and FM stations across Canada.

In the meantime, the emergence of FM was another development that CHUM was quick to react to. Despite the fact that FM receivers were a rarity at the time, CHUM applied for and got an FM licence, leading to the launch of 104.5 CHUM-FM in 1963.

CHUM-FM started out as a classical music station. But noting the growing interest in British-based ‘progressive rock’ on U.S. stations, CHUM again embraced a promising trend and switched over to the music of performers such as Yes and Genesis in 1969, becoming Toronto’s first underground music station.

‘It basically went from ‘fine arts radio’ right to an underground FM,’ says Waters, ‘which meant playing all the different cuts from an album – that was unheard of at the time.’ In 1984, CHUM-FM changed formats once more to become an adult contemporary station.

CHUM’s ability to be flexible is largely responsible for its longevity, and it has done so by conducting research on what its target audience looks for – not only musical genres, but also how much weather and news it wants to hear.

‘CHUM pioneered the use of research in local markets [about 20 years ago] to help determine how we should position our various radio stations, and now it’s something pretty well everyone does,’ says Paul Ski, EVP of radio for CHUM.

CHUM’s Toronto AM station has also gone through several incarnations, switching from contemporary hits to adult contemporary (‘Favourites of Yesterday and Today’) in 1986, soft rock in 1988 and ‘All Oldies, All the Time’ in 1989, attempting to increase listenership.

However, not everything CHUM touches has turned to gold. Its experiment in sports radio on a national level in 2001, for example, was less than a success. The Team Sports Radio Network was an attempt to resuscitate the low ratings that had befallen its flagship Toronto station and others across the country.

‘We were struggling, losing significant amounts of money [in other AM markets], so we asked ourselves, ‘What’s not being done?’ And really, there was only one sports station in all of Canada, and that’s The Fan [590],’ says Waters. ‘But we found out that people want to know more about sports in their own city – some places don’t care that much about what’s going on in Toronto and Montreal.’

Though the sports format remains on CHUM AM stations in Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver, it was abandoned in Toronto, Winnipeg, Halifax, Kingston, ON, and Kitchener, ON, in 2002. Programming in these cities reverted to their original formats – primarily hits from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

Developments such as online music-sharing and Internet radio have not shaken CHUM’s confidence in the viability of radio. Recent activity includes the acquisitions of C-FAX AM and CHBE-FM in Victoria, and its partnership with Milestone Media Broadcasting to launch Edmonton’s VIBE 91.7 FM, an urban FM station similar to Toronto’s FLOW 93.5, marking CHUM’s first major entree into Alberta radio. And CHUM’s recent success with the BOB-FM format (playing a mix of music from the ”80s…’90s… & Whatever’), developed in Winnipeg three years ago, also demonstrates its ability to meet the needs of a local market.

‘It was based on us trying to find a particular position for a radio station we’d acquired that was in the number-six position,’ says Ski. ‘So, through fairly intensive research and the programming aspect of things, we developed a BOB format, and it’s been number one in that market ever since.’

Going forward, CHUM is pinning some of its hopes on subscription digital radio. In November, CHUM and Astral Media submitted a joint application to the CRTC to operate a multi-channel subscription digital radio service, with plans to eventually offer 100 channels of Canadian content.

Its application emphasized that the new channels would reflect Canada’s multicultural, multilingual reality, and, more importantly to the company’s radio properties, they are intended to complement, not compete with, conventional radio.

Radio revenues for the year ending Aug. 31, 2004, totaling $122.9 million, comprise 22% of CHUM’s overall revenue, and represent a nearly 4% increase over revenues from the previous year. (By contrast, television accounts for 76%.) Not only that – profit margins in the radio division are at their highest level ever.

Allan Waters is now in his 80s. Although he stepped down as president and chairman of the company in December 2002, he sits as a director on the company’s board, alongside his wife, Marjorie, and daughter, Sheryl Bourne. The Waters family continues to control 88.6% of the voting shares of CHUM.

The former pharmaceutical sales rep and radio neophyte could not have predicted that his inadvertent foray into radio would lead to 30 more stations spanning the country, in addition to a television culture that, as a whole, have made an indelible mark on the pop culture landscape.