Excerpted from "Lyman Potts was a founding father of Canada's music industry," Fred Langan, The Globe & Mail , December 10, 2018.
Joseph Lyman Potts was born in Regina on Nov. 11, 1916, just 11 years after Saskatchewan became a province. He was named after Lyman Abbott, a hockey player on the Regina Victorias – coached to victory in the Allan Cup by his
father, Joe Potts. Captain Abbott, awarded the Military Cross twice, was killed in the last months of the First World War.
Along with coaching hockey, Lyman Potts’s father ran a barbershop, and not just any barbershop – it was an elaborate operation with seven chairs on the ground floor of a building that housed lawyers and doctors. It was a meeting place for the local establishment. Many of them kept their own razors at Mr. Potts’s barbershop.
Young Lyman went to Regina Central Collegiate. He was not an athlete, but he was outgoing and active in things such as high-school plays. He was also fascinated by radio from the age of 5 when he watched transmission towers being installed on the Regina Leader Post Building.
As a teenager he also wired his own neighbourhood, using thin copper wire hooked up to his own radio at home to send programs to some of his neighbours. He also had a microphone to practise broadcasting. He started working at the local radio station, CHWC, when he was 16, and took a full-time job there when he finished high school. The pay was $5 a week.
In the 1930s, live music of big bands was the staple of private radio stations in Canada. On a Saturday night the Regina station would handle the broadcast of an orchestra from a local ballroom. The station would come on after a similar broadcast in Winnipeg and, after an hour and a half, would switch to a broadcast from Calgary.
Mr. Potts worked as the announcer, technician and traffic manager, organizing the logistics of it all. One night he remembered packing up the equipment and rushing out to meet some friends. He had a date with a girl he never thought would go out with him. All of a sudden there was a problem with the next station and he had to go back inside, set up his gear and get the band playing again to broadcast for another half hour. Things with the young woman worked out. He married Michelle Bole three years later.
In 1940, he went to Hamilton as production manager of radio station CKOC. He was delighted to be making $125 a month. Once again he did everything, working as an announcer, traffic manager and program director. One night when there was a fire at the Woolworth’s store in Hamilton, he hooked up a primitive relay and broadcast live, at first from a payphone then from an apartment across the street from the fire.
In 1955, he was hired by a Toronto lawyer and a London, Ont., insurance executive to start a radio station from scratch in London. Mr. Potts successfully opened and ran CKSL.
His next stop was Montreal, where he worked for CJAD. The station was soon bought by Standard Broadcasting, which owned CFRB in Toronto and was part of the Argus empire run by E.P. Taylor and Bud McDougald.
In 1963, he moved to Toronto to work for the chief executive of Standard Broadcasting, a rather formidable Englishman by the name W. Thornton Cran. Mr. Cran’s wife liked to give new hires the once-over so she invited Mr. Potts for dinner, and served him kidneys. He couldn’t stand them but ate them anyway and passed muster.
His jobs included overseeing the operation of FM radio stations. In 1966, he organized the first private radio news network, Standard Broadcast News, using reporters and announcers from stations across the country to put together a national news service.
One of his key jobs at Standard was helping write presentations for Mr. Cran to present to the broadcast regulator, the BBG. Keeping the regulators happy was one of the reasons for starting the vast library of Canadian recorded music.
Prime Minister John Diefenbaker created the BBG in 1958. Up until then, the CBC had been the regulator. One of the first appointments was Mabel McConnell, Mr. Diefenbaker’s dentist from Prince Albert, Sask.
“None of these people knew anything at all about broadcasting,” Mr. Potts said. “Along with Diefenbaker’s dentist was the head of the Potato Board in Prince Edward Island. It was all political.”
However, Mr. Potts had a lot of time for Andrew Stewart, the head of the BBG.
It was while he was at Standard Broadcasting that he started the Canadian Talent Library. His skills as a diplomat with the BBG convinced Standard to post him to London, where
Standard was working with companies that were trying to set up the first private radio stations in Britain.
When he left the radio business in 1981, he was president of Standard Broadcast Productions and a vice-president of Standard Broadcasting. He then started his own consulting business and kept active in broadcasting for another two decades.
In retirement, Mr. Potts archived the history of the early days of radio broadcasting in Canada. He helped establish a website, The History of Canadian Broadcasting, and wrote many of its entries. He was a walking encyclopedia of the history of radio and television in Canada.
Mr. Potts’s mind was razor sharp. His brain seemed like a computer hard drive, and well into his 90s he could recall the most extraordinary pieces of information without any hesitation.
A diminutive man, he kept the booming voice of an old-fashioned radio announcer all his life. He loved to talk. As Mac McCurdy, his boss at CJAD and Standard Broadcasting used to say, “Ask Lyman a short question and you get a long answer.”
