Some radio stations launch with a gala. CKUA launched from a basement. On November 21, 1927, a station switched on in a room in the Power Plant Building on the University of Alberta campus, and it became CKUA.
H.P. Brown and A.E. Ottewell launched it. The University of Alberta alumni history page tells the story plainly, and the modest details make it better than most origin tales.
The people who carried CKUA to Calgary
Brown and Ottewell had a basement and a plan. They still needed a frequency.
Enter W.W. Grant, who owned the Calgary station CFCN. He took his own station off the air so CKUA could be heard on that frequency for its first broadcast. Switching off your own transmitter as a favour to someone else is rare in any business, and Calgary should remember it.
That first winter, the schedule ran eight hours a week, on Monday and Thursday evenings. Plenty of us spend longer than that deciding what to stream.
How quickly CKUA grew
The schedule grew fast. By the late 1930s the station was on the air forty hours a week, and by 1944 it reached sixty-three hours a week, nearly eight times the first winter. In 1945 Alberta Government Telephones took on the operating costs.
That reads like a station that found its audience first and its funding second. It’s the hard way round, and it tends to make a loyal crowd. The alumni history lays out those numbers in one place.
CKUA’s claim to be Canada’s first public broadcaster
The station makes its own claim on its About page, saying it was founded in 1927 as Canada’s first public and educational broadcaster.
The Canadian Encyclopedia is more careful, saying the University of Alberta was “probably the first educational institution to get a radio broadcasting licence in Canada.” The word probably matters, and an archive should respect it.
Credit CKUA with the claim, credit the encyclopedia with the caution, and enjoy that a university basement is even in the argument.
CKUA today
In 1995 CKUA was reorganized as a nonprofit radio station, and it has kept going in that form. According to the station’s Our Story page, it now has studios in the Alberta Hotel on Jasper Avenue in Edmonton and one in Calgary’s East Village, near the National Music Centre.
That is a long way from a borrowed frequency and two evenings a week. One of those studios is in East Village, so go find it and tune in.
A Pipe Organ Started Calgary’s Music Centre pairs nicely with this one, and Calgary Jazz Started as a One-Day Party on Prince’s Island is close behind. Or try Calgary Got Its First Civilian Brass Band in 1885 for a change of pace.
More from the archive: Passchendaele Brought a Calgary Love Story to the Big Screen.
Quick answers
CKUA began on November 21, 1927, from a room in the Power Plant Building on the University of Alberta campus. H.P. Brown and A.E. Ottewell launched it. The first winter schedule ran eight hours a week, on Monday and Thursday evenings.
W.W. Grant, who owned the Calgary station CFCN, took his own station off the air so CKUA could be heard on that frequency for its first broadcast. CKUA has a studio in Calgary’s East Village today, near the National Music Centre.
CKUA says it was founded in 1927 as Canada’s first public and educational broadcaster. The Canadian Encyclopedia is more careful, saying the University of Alberta was probably the first educational institution to get a radio broadcasting licence in Canada. Credit the claim and the caution both.
