Economy: Putting a Very Public Face on It

TORONTO, ONTARIO - At long last, the mainstream media in the United States has started to focus occasionally on the long-term unemployed. I found it especially significant to hear a systems engineer from California as a guest on the NPR talk show On Point when it explored the topic, as that could have easily been me with slightly different life decisions. Yet, it was another radio show that provided an example that may resonate with just about anyone that's lived in northern California in the past generation.

On Brian Copeland's Sunday morning talk show on KGO in San Francisco, he took a call twenty minutes into his third hour from a Mike in Vallejo. The Mike was soon revealed to be Mike Pechner, the well-known meteorologist who worked at rival KCBS in San Francisco for forty years. I even knew Mike Pechner's name before I moved to the area from listening to the station at night from Seattle and while visiting the area--for people that grew up listening to KCBS for news, Pechner was an absolute institution. Probably nobody was more closely identified with morning weather forecasts in the Bay Area than Pechner, certainly not for as many years as Pechner was on the air.

Furthermore, I had met Mike Pechner. Besides being a radio personality, he is a railroad enthusiast, a member of many of the fan groups that I also participated in while in the Bay Area and especially active surrounding any railroad in the north bay where he made his home. He has been an outspoken advocate of the restoration of service in that region, all the while providing expert forecasts to railfans who wanted to check out train action on Donner Pass around snowstorms.

So, needless to say, I perked up when it became clear that it was Mike Pechner calling in. It turns out that since he was laid off by KCBS, he has become a member of the long-term unemployed. He described how he has unsuccessfully tried to pursue alternate careers to broadcasting but that his age--he is now 64--was proving to be a major problem. About the only way he had found to earn a partial living was substitute teaching--but with the rash of teacher layoffs in California, this was becoming less and less frequent.

Anyone that has met Mike Pechner knows that he is a hard worker--and I suspect most people who heard him on the radio don't have much difficulty imagining that. While I haven't seen him since I moved out of the area, I had heard second-hand even before this radio call that he is nearly as vigorous today as I remember him from a decade and a half ago. He is a classic example of an older worker with a lot to offer the world--but in this economy, he's just another member of the long-term unemployed.

If a man that more than a generation grew up listening to as their weatherman can end up without a job for more than two years, just about anyone can. Besides being a quality radio conversation between two pros in Pechner and Copeland, this segment of a radio program provided the most compelling example of just how bad this economy is for so many people. If everyone in northern California had been listening to the Brian Copeland program and heard the call from Mike Pechner, there would be almost nobody there left not supporting the extension of unemployment or some other assistance to the long-term unemployed. I encourage everyone to listen to it before it disappears from the KGO archives next Sunday.

Photos: Toronto's Santa Claus Parade 2010

The Lowe's-sponsored float in the 2010 Santa Claus Parade in Toronto, Ontario had a bird theme on 21-November-2010

TORONTO, ONTARIO - This week's update to my photo site looks back at the Santa Claus Parade. The holiday season has traditionally started in greater Toronto, Ontario with this parade. Held this year in moderate temperatures on 21-November-2010, a record number of floats and bands created a bit of a varied and very long experience for those that stayed until Santa Claus at the very end.

Margin Notes: Tiger, German Market, Redwood

A tiger was noted displayed for the holidays in Toronto, Ontario's Koreatown on 4-December-2010

TORONTO, ONTARIO - One of the disadvantages of doing most commuting underground in the subway is that one is completely oblivious to what's above ground. Apparently, the holiday light display shaped like a tiger pictured above has graced Koreatown here in Toronto near Christie Pits Parks each December since 2008. I didn't notice it until this year, and I have to say it may be my favorite lighted sculpture in the city.

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The crowds were so thick it was difficult to move near the performance stage during the opening of Toronto Christmas Market on 3-December-2010

Genuinely new this year is the German-style Christmas Market in the Distillery District of Toronto. I arrived late to the opening ceremonies on Friday night to discover that so many people had shown up that it was almost impossible to move around the stage, as shown above. This event is the best approximation of a German Christmas Market that I've seen in North America; I'll have more to say about it in a future post as I plan to go back at a quieter time--but it only runs through next Sunday.

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Winter will probably arrive in Toronto by next Sunday. We haven't had significant snow accumulation yet this season, but there were snow showers off and on all day today, and for the first time I decided to pull out my warmest winter hat to deal with a wind chill factor approaching -10 C even at mid-day. Of course, in a month, that will probably seem warm.

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It's warm inside the John Street Roundhouse this winter, the first season with interior heating in the museum stalls. The roof of a 1931 Canadian Pacific sleeping car is currently under restoration in those stalls, including the replacement of rotten wood. The kind of wood found on that roof was not what I would have expected--the restoration contractor, Tom Murison, identified it as California Redwood. If California Redwood was used on Canadian passenger cars in the 1930's, its use must have been quite widespread in the industry!

Radio Pick: Female Entrepeneurs

TORONTO, ONTARIO - A show that I regularly listen to but hasn't risen to the level of being a pick has finally become my weekly radio pick. Radio has been trying to hard to reach a younger audience. Interestingly, the programs that seem to be surviving while succeeding in that endeavor are not those who jump frenetically from one topic to another, but ones that emphasize production values and sound and try to take on topics of interest to younger people. A classic example is CBC Radio One's Spark. This week's 53-minute show was an especially good case study, taking on relatively heady topics like the small number of females leading start-up companies and copyright law, but making extensive use of production gimmicks and a focus on practical consequences to a tech-savvy audience to create a great listening experience anyway.

Listen to MP3 of Spark "Female Entrepreneurs"

Holiday: Sounds of the Season 2010

All the artists from the live broadcast of CBC Radio One Toronto's "Metro Morning" Sounds of the Season broadcast were on-stage for the finale on 3-December-2010

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Once a year, CBC Toronto holds an entire day of live and studio audience tapings of its programming at the national headquarters building in Toronto, Ontario. For the second straight year, I chose to get up early to be down in the Glenn Gould Studio in time to watch the taping of "Metro Morning," the morning drive-time show on CBC Radio One which airs from 5:30 to 8:30.


Host Matt Galloway took a moment before the show opened to send a picture of the audience to Twitter on 3-December-2010

While he had done plenty of live "Sounds of the Season" broadcasts as host of Here and Now, this was host Matt Galloway's first year doing the "Metro Morning" live broadcast. Galloway can hardly be accused of not being technologically adept--as we awaited the beginning of the show, he took a picture of the audience with his phone and posted it to the Internet via Twitter. As luck would have it, I happened to sit just a row away from Galloway's parents who had come to see their son at work!


Denzal Sinclaire performed the "Little Drummer Boy" during the Metro Morning Sounds of the Season live broadcast on 3-December-2010

The real draw of live broadcast is the musical artists that perform. This year, the Metro Morning broadcast featured the Toronto Mass Choir, Pavlo, and Daniela Nardi. Probably the most unusual performance was Elizabeth Shepherd and her Swedish husband Johan Hultqvist (of Mr. Something Something) who did a duet of a Swedish traditional holiday song. However, two performances really blew me away--Denzal Sinclaire, dressed
in jeans, singing the "Little Drummer Boy" with a great jazz sensibility, and Shakura S'Aida doing a wonderful rendition of "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch."


Shakura S'Aida performed the "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" impressing the audience in Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto, Ontario on 3-December-2010

For radio fans like myself, the other big draw of "Sounds of the Season" is the chance to actually see all the radio personalities who are normally just voices. As a past attendee, such broadcasters as traffic reporter Jim Curran, news reporter Jill Dempsey and business commentator Michael Hlinka were familiar faces, but medical columnist Peter Lin was a new face to me and it was equally fun to watch him tease Matt Galloway as it is to hear it on the air.


Dr. Peter Lin shared a lighter moment with host Matt Galloway during the live broadcast of "Metro Morning" on 3-December-2010

At one point, I pulled out my walkman to discover that the there was absolutely no delay in the broadcast--exactly what was happening in front of our eyes was going straight out to 99.1 FM without any buffering. In an age of digital broadcasting, that was remarkably refreshing.


Daily Bread Food Bank Executive Director Gail Nyberg spoke with Matt Galloway about fund-raising totals during the "Sounds of the Season" broadcast on 3-December-2010

Of course, the whole point of the broadcast was to raise money for area food banks including the Daily Bread Food Bank. It doesn't take a special day for that--donations are accepted anytime.

More coverage of the Sounds of the Season Metro Morning broadcast will be forthcoming in an update to my photo site

Radio: Dr. Dean Edell to Retire

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Other talk show hosts from Larry King (leaving his daily CNN show on 16-December) to Dr. Laura Schlessinger (leaving her daily syndicated show for satellite radio at the end of December) have received more publicity for their retirements this year, but the most significant announcement may have come yesterday. Dr. Dean Edell, the long-time medical advice talk show host, has stated that he will be retiring at about the end of the year.

While I first encountered Dr. Dean Edell when he appeared on KVI in Seattle as a weekend tape-delayed show along with Rush Limbaugh, he didn't really become significant to me until I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. There, he has aired live at 1 pm (or noon, for some years) on his flagship station that gave him one of his first big breaks in broadcasting, KGO Newstalk 810 in San Francisco. Edell's show has been a fixture on KGO since 1978. Whenever I didn't have class or work as an undergraduate, Dr. Edell would be my after-lunch education and entertainment, and always seemed worthwhile. Generally, my class schedule allowed me to hear at least one day of the broadcast a week.

Yet, Edell's significance is not so much as an early doctor on the radio or even as a long-term host on one of the premier talk radio stations in the world, but as a pioneer in syndication. In the late 1970's, local content was considered essential in radio, and there was great resistance to airing the same program in multiple markets. While network programming (including at the time Larry King) did air in multiple markets, that was a different, centralized model intended to air on all stations in a network. Syndication was about providing a program that individual stations could independently choose to air or not. Edell's medical show and his handling of callers was so unique and compelling that it broke through. It was syndication that brought him to WGY in Schenectady, New York--the station on which I used to hear Dr. Edell on Sunday afternoons when I lived in Boston. It was in fact the syndicated network founded by Edell that started to distribute Rush Limbaugh and created the conservative talk radio revolution in the 1990's.

After making his announcement on Wednesday's program, Edell discussed some of his broadcasting and syndication history. However, his impact on people's lives soon came front and center. Former producer Daphne Brogdon (who was Edell's producer during my undergraduate years and until 1999; successor Heather Hamann is largely credited with Edell's high ratings in recent years) called in and emphasized this point. Edell's scientific method-based and often leading-edge opinions on topics like homosexuality, circumcision, vaccination, and over-prescription of medication have pushed his audience and attracted the most educated listeners amongst syndicated hosts in the United States.

The relation between KGO's recent scheduling changes which were moving Edell's show to tape delay and Edell's retirement is not clear--the host mainly cited a desire to be a more active grandparent. While Edell announced plans to find a successor host during the Wednesday show, those listeners all across the United States will still inevitably find a big hole even if a syndicated medical advice show in the current time slot continues. No longer we will be greeted with "Hello Friends" and told to "Be Well" each weekday.

With the retirement of Dr. Dean Edell, the radio world is losing not just an old, comforting friend. It's losing one of the most significant figures of his generation.

Holiday: Canadian Pacific Holiday Train 2010

The CN Tower was also decorated in holiday colors in the background as the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train arrived for its performance in Toronto, Ontario on 29-November-2010

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Toward the beginning of the holiday season, communities across the northern United States and southern Canada receive a special visit. The Canadian Pacific Holiday Train rolls along its home rails, stopping in communities large and small to introduce Santa Claus, provide some musical entertainment, and raise money for local food banks.


The smoke cleared after the stage door opened for the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train's performance in Toronto, Ontario on 29-November-2010

For the third straight year, the Toronto performance of the train took place at the West Toronto Yard in The Junction neighborhood. The train was again decorated along its entire length with Light Emitting Diodes of shifting holiday scenes, with an emphasis on this "Canadian" train (a second train mostly visits communities in the United States) on packages and sleds, along with the famous four boxcars writing out "Canadian Pacific Holiday Train" in large lettering.


The locomotive of the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train was decorated with packages and bells as seen at West Toronto Yard in Toronto, Ontario on 29-November-2010

The main entertainment this year came from The Odds. They opened their performance with their most popular hit, "Someone Who's Cool," so it was instantly clear what band was playing. I found their performance especially amusing this year, as they intentionally mixed up Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman and otherwise tweaked holiday traditions. At one point, they brought a Canadian Pacific employee on-stage to play the harmonica with them, which was a nice way to connect with the audience, heavy on railroad employees.


The Canadian Pacific's Scott Nelson played the Harmonica with The Odds during the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train's performance in Toronto, Ontario on 29-November-2010

Of course, the main purpose of the train was raise money for local food banks. In Toronto, that means the Daily Bread Food Bank, and executive director Gail Nyberg was on hand to collect an oversized check from Canadian Pacific. Outgoing city councilperson Bill Saundercook was also part of the presentation in what may prove his last public appearance as an elected official; he talked about continuing the event next year as if he were not leaving office.


City councillor Bill Saundercook and Daily Bread Food Bank executive director Gail Nyberg held an oversized check from the Canadian Pacific on 29-November-2010

For the first time in recent years, the Holiday Train did not have to rush off for another performance in Vaughn, Ontario, the same night; the train instead backed up to overnight at Toronto Yard in the Agincourt neighborhood. Still, the performance was only about a half hour, and that actually felt way too short to me, though it's tough to complain about free, quality entertainment.


The rear of the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train was quiet as the train sat in Toronto, Ontario on 29-November-2010

The Holiday Train continues west, stopping for more performances every day, until it finishes in Port Moody, British Columbia on 17-December-2010. See the Canadian Pacific web site for schedule information.