Starting at 0:39 on this video, you'll hear some rare early radio air checks from Dick Peplow, who started spinning records part-time at CJIC-AM in the early 1960s when he was still in Grade 12 at Sault Collegiate Institute.
Dick gave me my first full-time news job at CJKL-AM Kirkland Lake in 1977.
He later hired me to work for him as news director at CHLO-AM in St. Thomas, Ont.
In 2002, Dick brought me to Sault Ste. Marie. He’d started a coupon-clipping website here and pulled me out of a dark depressive episode to relaunch SooToday as an all-digital news service that has since exploded into the multinational Village Media Inc.
Another well-known local broadcaster, Russ Hilderley, arranged for the moving van that brought my belongings to the Sault.
Dick was known for his ability to spot early talent and his generosity to help promising-but-stalled careers.
He told me on more than one occasion that, while working in Thunder Bay in 1966, he paid for the bus ticket that a stranded Neil Young used to leave Canada behind and restart his now-legendary musical career in Los Angeles.
One little-known chapter in Dick’s life was his stint working in the early 1970s as a deckhand on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
If he’d stayed much longer on that ill-fated boat, I doubt there would be a SooToday or a Village Media, and I would probably still be selling sandpaper and skateboards at retail legend Peter Forcellini Sr.’s Home Hardware store in Kirkland Lake.
A little SooToday history:
Starting at 0:39 on this video, you'll hear some rare early radio air checks from Dick Peplow, who started spinning records part-time at CJIC-AM in the early 1960s when he was still in Grade 12 at Sault Collegiate Institute.
Dick gave me my first full-time news job at CJKL-AM Kirkland Lake in 1977.
He later hired me to work for him as news director at CHLO-AM in St. Thomas, Ont.
In 2002, Dick brought me to Sault Ste. Marie. He’d started a coupon-clipping website here and pulled me out of a dark depressive episode to relaunch SooToday as an all-digital news service that has since exploded into the multinational Village Media Inc.
Another well-known local broadcaster, Russ Hilderley, arranged for the moving van that brought my belongings to the Sault.
Dick was known for his ability to spot early talent and his generosity to help promising-but-stalled careers.
He told me on more than one occasion that, while working in Thunder Bay in 1966, he paid for the bus ticket that a stranded Neil Young used to leave Canada behind and restart his now-legendary musical career in Los Angeles.
One little-known chapter in Dick’s life was his stint working in the early 1970s as a deckhand on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
If he’d stayed much longer on that ill-fated boat, I doubt there would be a SooToday or a Village Media, and I would probably still be selling sandpaper and skateboards at retail legend Peter Forcellini Sr.’s Home Hardware store in Kirkland Lake.