NorthEast Radio Watch 12/2/2024: Wingham’s Main Radio Man Retires

In this week’s issue… Saluting a small-town radio vet – Bell moves CP24 – Scott heads west – Burlington gets Air 1, “Experimental Radio” – Family Life heads down I-86

By SCOTT FYBUSH

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*We don’t often write about Wingham, Ontario, way up there north of London on the way to the Bruce Peninsula – but in a holiday-shortened week on this side of the border, we lead with  small-town CANADA news this week because of a very rare change there: after 34 years, Phil Main signed off Friday morning at Blackburn Radio’s three-station cluster.

After starting in college radio in London at Fanshawe College’s CIXX in 1977, Main tried a career at his family’s hardware store in Goderich but found himself bitten by the radio bug. He started at CKNX (920) and CKNX-FM (101.7) as a fill-in in the early 1980s, went back to the hardware store, then turned a demo tape for a summer replacement job into a full-time gig doing mornings on CKNX-FM starting in 1990.

Over the decades, he changed dial positions a few times, moving to the AM side in 2005 and then to new sister station CIBU (94.5 the Bull) in 2011, where he’s been ever since.

In an interview with the Goderich Signal Star, Main observed that he’s seen two kinds of jocks over his long career – the ones who blow in and out of town with a “suitcase full of tricks, and then there’s the guy who settles into a community, becomes the friend you call to emcee; the guy you trust, and that’s more in keeping with who I am.”

Wingham and the region have been lucky to have Main as that second kind of hometown radio hero – and we wonder if there will be a next generation like that in small towns like Wingham that deserve that sort of local radio?