CKCK Radio - Definition

CKCK Regina was one of the world's pioneering radio stations.

In 1922, the Leader-Post newspaper hired a man named Bert Hooper to run a new radio station for them. In the beginning, Hooper was the station's only employee, but he soon hired a second announcer, Pete Parker. In 1923, Parker called a Regina Capitals hockey game on the station - the world's first broadcast of a professional hockey game. Around the same time, the station conducted the British Empire's first live remote broadcast of a church service.

The station and the company, under the ownership of the Sifton family, prospered over the years. The station had a signal that belied its 10 kilowatts of power, thanks in part to its 620 kHz frequency, and the soil south of Regina on which the transmitter was built. The company obtained a television station licence, and signed CKCK-TV on the air in 1954.

CKCK started to fall on hard times in the 1970s. The television station was sold, forcing on-air staff to choose which station to continue to work for. By the late 1990s, most of the station's programming was being delivered by satellite from Toronto. Finally, as a result of a complicated transaction involving three companies, CKCK signed off the air in 2001. It re-emerged the next year as an FM station, Rock94 (http://www.rock94regina.com/).