REMINISCING???

In “Looking Ahead” I don’t reminisce. It is an awful trap. It is seductive and wasteful, sometimes self-gratifying, sometimes self-pitying. You decide.

The 40th anniversary of my ignominious departure from CHUM radio passed a few days ago. I didn’t hear from anyone! Not a soul called to remember the day when the president of CHUM Limited, Allan Waters went on the air to tell the audience that Larry Solway would not be returning. He even said: “If I had been here I would have gone downstairs and taken him off the air.” There had been a small, obviously organized barrage of calls protesting my explicit description of orgasm, a description cribbed directly from the then famous “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex” by Doctor David Rubin.

I stayed around just long enough to watch how things came out. I turned down Chuck Templeton who asked me if I’d like to fill in for Pierre Berton in his crosstalk show on CKEY. I said “The body isn’t even cold in the grave Chuck.” They wanted me because all the publicity had made me a “hot” property. Meanwhile, back at the radio station the switchboard was jammed with angry listeners. There were so many calls that morning, and for several hours after the announcement, that the entire 92- exchange (the old WAlnut) exchange crashed. Anyone with a phone number beginning with 9 was cut off. Businesses, doctor’s offices, restaurants, all were getting calls ranting about my vacating my 10 a.m. spot. I was no more. I went out in a blaze of something – it sure wasn’t glory. But management (of which I was part) remained unmoved. I was gone and would not be returning.

The furor died down of course. For six months Waters lived up to his on-air promise that the spot would not be occupied again by a phone-in show. Then perhaps he thought he’d left a vacuum and that Solway might show up at another station. When I heard Dick Smythe (who hated doing a talk show) come on the air to take phone calls, I wanted to call and tell him not to worry, I wasn’t going back into the Talk Radio business.

A few interesting things happened. I got tired of answering phone calls so the two of us headed south. When I returned in winter I drove up to Ottawa to visit the CRTC. Management had been worried that their license would be lifted because I had, in their view, overstepped the bounds of decency. Harry Boyle, then vice chair of the CRTC greeted me at his office door: “What the hell happened Larry,” he boomed. “The calls here were fifty to one in your favour. we weren’t even thinking of lifting the license.”

(Sidelight: many years later, with my boat moored in the Thousand Islands, I did a regular gig on the CHUM-owned station in Kingston. The company then bought the station in Brockville. I was invited to attend the “festivities” at the transmitter tower site. Marge Waters, the beautiful wife of the president said to me: “You’re not going to talk dirty here are you Larry.” I was how she remembered it.)

For those who remember the series, all about sexual dysfunction (years before Viagra) I at no time used any language that could be remotely labeled as “talking dirty.” Perhaps she thought the word masturbation was a little too heavy for her fragile sensibilities.

I was never bitter. Things happen. What is – is. The only sadness I felt was watching that wonderful, inventive, ground-breaking radio station turn into a clone of a dozen other stations by a succession of button-pushing consultants and incompetent staff. (After Allan died there was predictably, an unseemly rush to sell the station, take the millions, relax and buy expensive cars. They did. Sadly, there is virtually no station there anymore. Just my own pioneering (begun when I was vice-president programming) station - CHUM FM. It survives and prospers.

I guess I’ve written this piece of self-indulgence because the past has gone and the future seems to have passed me by. Not just with text messaging, FaceBook and Twitter, but with the new technology that allows businessmen to run brain-dead, hands-free radio stations with about as much imagination as a turnip-peeling competition.

I got on with my life. TV News beckoned. I went. Documentaries followed – I wrote and hosted them. There was “This is the Law,” "Juliette and Friends," my own TV interview show. In the late 70s I returned to the stage, which had been my childhood love.

By the way, I you were not around for the furor of November 1970 it's all in my book “The Day I Invented Sex,” Long out of print there are copies available on Amazon.

Speaking of “Long out of print….”