Radio Town & Rural Roots: Nathan Howe on Doc Cruickshank, CKNX, and Building Community

A visionary broadcaster. A small-town station with big dreams. A new Canadian play with live music straight from the dawn of Canadian country music.

About This Episode
In this episode, actor and playwright Nathan Howe takes us behind the scenes of his brand-new play, Radio Town: The Doc Cruickshank Story.

The play chronicles the remarkable journey of Doc Cruickshank, the small-town visionary who founded CKNX Radio and Television in Wingham, Ontario and built it into a powerhouse of Canadian broadcasting.

We talk about:

• 📻 The history of CKNX and its role in Canadian broadcasting
  
  
• 🎶 Early Canadian country music and why it still resonates
  
  
• 🌾 How radio built — and connected — rural communities
  
  
• 🖋 The creative process behind writing Radio Town
  
  
• 🎼 The show’s live music, performed by the actors themselves — all skilled musicians playing songs from the era

Why You’ll Love This Episode
If you’re passionate about Canadian theatre, small-town stories, music history, or the roots of Canadian broadcasting, this conversation will transport you back in time and leave you eager to see what’s sure to become a new Canadian classic.

Tickets on sale now! 1.877.862.5984 | www.blythfestival.com 

Got something to say? Send me your thoughts any time. I read everything you write: jwallace@blythfestival.com 

The Blyth Festival Podcast is presented by our Exclusive Communications Partner, Tuckersmith Communications Co-operative (TCC). Thank you!

Today’s episode was recorded at  the Wild Goose Studio https://wildgoosestudiocanada.square.site/  in downtown Blyth.

Credits: Producer/Host: Joanne Wallace | Sound Designer/Engineer: Jim Park

Music: Gotta Give Me Something, (theme); River Run Dry via Epidemic Sound; Wabash Cannonball, Al Widmeyer; Down Yonder, The Barn Dance Band, Red Wing/Crooked Stove Pipe, Bill Monkis; all from Saturday Night Barn Dance (Vols 1&2), Barn Dance Historical Society; I’ll Tell You Like It Is, Rikard From; The Waitress, Mac Taboel both via Epidemic Sound.

Transcript

Joanne Wallace: 0:04

On one snowy day in 1926 Wilford Cruickshank was puttering around the back room of a small electronics shop. A buddy of his arrived, he had the latest issue of Popular Mechanics magazine in his back pocket, and he said, Hey, Doc, I thought this might interest you, and he opened the pages to an article called How to build a simple transmitter. That was the moment, the moment Wilford, aka doc Cruickshank, took his first step onto the road that would lead to a little radio station in Wingham, Ontario, a radio station that changed everything,

Unknown: 0:43

coast to coast. People like old time music most, and here from the wegham arena time for the 26th anniversary, CKNX Bar dance.

Joanne Wallace: 0:52

CKNX brought rural stories and country music to Canadian airwaves for the very first time. It was ambitious, it was local. It was a little bit crazy. Playwright Nathan Howe has turned this story into a new play, and we're going to talk about what it means to give a community a voice and why that still matters today. You Joanne, Hi, I'm Joanne Wallace, and this is the Blyth festival podcast presented by Tucker Smith communications Co Op. Today, I'm speaking with playwright and performer Nathan Howe, and I'll tell you more about this in just a minute, but first, a couple of notes. One This episode marks the last in our regular season for 2025 so after today, we'll be saying goodbye for a while. Now, that said, Blyth will be bringing you what's quickly becoming a new Christmas tradition in November and December, and that is a remounting of our homegrown holiday classic, a Huron County Christmas Carol. Two years ago, I spoke with actor Randy Hughson about his tour de force performance as Ebenezer Scrooge in this piece, and I can confirm Randy will be back and at his very scroogiest again this year. So we'll reissue that episode for you later on this fall, to get you in the mood. And by the way, tickets for that show are on sale right now. And secondly, I cannot confirm this, and it might not come to pass. So let me just say this, if you are a fan of a certain group of plays known as the Wingfield follies, keep an eye on your Blyth email and social media feeds. That's all I'm going to say for now. But it could be very exciting news. Okay, back to Nathan. Howe Nathan is a Saskatoon based actor and playwright. He's been on Blyth stages many times as a performer, and folks on the fringe circuit in Western Canada will certainly have seen a number of his plays, but this is the first time he's written an entire show for us, the theatre company and the community he's come to love. And that play is called Radio town, the doc Cruickshank story, and it takes us to Wingham, Ontario, home of CKNX radio, and also home to the man who turned a relentless sense of curiosity into a cultural powerhouse that changed Canadian Broadcasting forever. It's a story about broadcasting, yes, but it's also a story about ambition, about tenacity, about legacy, and mostly about what it means to truly serve a community. So whether you're planning to see the show, and you totally should, or you've already seen it, I think you'll find a lot to chew on in this conversation, so let's get to it. Hi Nathan, hello. Welcome to the podcast, and thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. All right, let's get going for listeners who don't know who exactly was doc Cruickshank and why is his story important,

Nathan Howe: 3:59

Doc Cruickshank was a person from Wingham who kind of stayed at the top of technology through his life. He was ahead of everybody and a person like that, you would usually expect to move to, especially at the beginning of radio, which, what, which was where he was starting to move to a big city and work for one of the few radio stations in Canada, but he decided to stay in Wingham and build build a community, basically build up community radio, agricultural radio, and create a music scene and create an industry in his town so that people can live and work there.

Joanne Wallace: 4:45

It's such a cool story, and there's a lot of there's a lot of story here and a lot of history. So I'll get to that in a minute. But first I wanted to say, you grew up in Saskatoon. Is that right? That's true. So how? Did a guy from Saskatoon get interested in the story of a man who built a radio station in Wingham, Ontario? That's

Nathan Howe: 5:07

a great question, and that's a question that people are asking me in Wingham all the time, which is fantastic. Unfortunately, it's a long story with a lot of happenstance, but yeah, we're on a podcast, not in line at the grocery store. So I when I was moving to Ontario, I had heard of the Blyth Festival, and they do new work, new Canadian work, and I had a lot of friends who had worked here and had recommended it to me, and somehow I was on tour with a writer in residence, Phelan Johnson, and somehow word got to the to Gil and the festival that I played the saxophone, and so I ended up here

Joanne Wallace: 5:55

in extra years because you played the saxophone, yeah.

Nathan Howe: 5:59

So I moved to, I was going to move to Toronto anyways, but I didn't have to look for a place, because I was going to spend all summer out here. So I landed in Toronto with a backpack and my saxophone, and I felt like a real cool artist. And then, and then I came out here, which kind of reminded me of home. The landscape is very similar, you can, you know, see for days, and the sky is huge. And I was here for the next three seasons. I really loved the work. I really loved the town.

Joanne Wallace: 6:33

And I should just say that you were here for as an actor, not actually as a

Nathan Howe: 6:37

saxophone player, yes, yeah, yeah. I had, I had a, you know, a small acting part of that, but then yeah, the next two years, it was, yeah, I was acting, and I was working on a collective creation my next season, called wing night at the boot. And I was, I kind of put myself in charge of making the music for that show. And to make the music for that show, I wanted to research into what the music history was in the area, who the big artists were and and so we got a tour of the barn dance Museum in Wingham that was, at that time, already closed, but not emptied. And it was amazing, like it was a whole scene was was in that town in this area, yeah.

Joanne Wallace: 7:21

And I'll we'll get to a question about the barn dance too, for listeners who might not know what that was, yes. But okay, so there you are in the barn dance Museum,

Nathan Howe: 7:30

yeah. And so I started learning about all these artists, like musicians, who were all from here and from the area, who made a living as just musicians and radio show hosts. And then we went upstairs in that museum, and I had my phone flashlight out because there were no lights on, and I walked into a room that was a TV studio, and it it was kind of amazing to me. I don't like I know there were TV stations in Saskatoon, but nothing. No one was creating their own TV or shows. It was news and, like some some local programming, advertisements, that kind of thing. And it really kind of piqued my interest and and then I forgot about it because I had to do a show. But then I was pitching shows to Gil and he's like, Weren't you looking into doc Cruickshank a bit and, and, and so I went home and or I went to the place I was staying in Blyth, and I kind of took some time to brainstorm what that would look like as a play. I'd done a lot of history plays in my writing and and once, I kind of found the the hook of what, you know, what connected me to Doc Cruickshank story, to the theatre I, you know, I couldn't stop writing. What was that hook? I fell in love with this theatre that tells local stories, and the audience is there, here, like going to watch a show about themselves or their relatives, and Doc Cruickshank spent his life doing that, and the Blyth festival has spent its history doing that, and it felt really kind of Meta. And really, I it was, I kind of got to write my like, you know, my love letter to the theatre and to the community, after living here

Joanne Wallace: 9:29

in a lot of ways, this story, this doc, doc Cruickshank story, is pure Blyth. It's profoundly local, and it's based on a piece of real history, and it shines a spotlight on a rural community that made a massive contribution to something that turned out to be of national importance. So I wonder, can you talk a little bit about the role that Doc and CKNX played in the development of the Canadian Broadcasting industry?

Nathan Howe: 9:58

Yeah, I could talk a bit about it. Um, I mean, it was, it was at the beginning of everything. So there, Doc Cruickshank is known as the grandfather of agricultural radio. He was kind of at the beginning of community radio, bringing community members on to speak to the community. They were kind of like early, like early to the Daily News, which was a concept that is so like, you know, through my life, daily news has, you know, now become instant news. But back then, like, it was a discussion between, you know, the doc Cruickshank and his tiny team, and they had to like work with the newspaper and also against the newspaper in ways too, because that was, you know, Thursday was, was when the weekly newspaper came out, and there was a bit of trouble, I guess, between the newspaper and the radio station, because who who could report the news, and who was getting paid to bring the news? And, I mean,

Joanne Wallace: 11:00

they started just by reading the newspaper on the air. So that's great. Thank you. And I know you talked about the TV station that you saw when you went upstairs, yeah, in the museum. And for people who maybe don't know the history of CKNX, it did start as a radio station. They later started a television station, and you're going to see all of this dramatised in Nathan's play. So it's, it's very cool, a fantastic story. And you talked about the barn dance earlier, so can you tell us real quickly about what the barn dance was? And then my next question is going to be about the role that CKNX And Doc played in the development of Canada's country music scene. So maybe you could put those things together for us.

Nathan Howe: 11:45

Yeah, yeah, I can, yeah. The barn dance was a live show on Saturday nights, where on the radio, on the radio, yeah, it began. It began by the like they were playing records, and then they started inviting live bands into the studio, and then that, kind of like that started basically the the roster of, like, Country and Western musicians from this area, and, you know, was kind of the catalyst For many people to to work as musicians, but the barn dance, yeah, it was this Saturday night show. They started to get people to come, like people were coming to the station and watching through the window. And you know that there was a restaurant beside the station, and so they could watch the barn dance there too. So they started taking it live, and then they started touring to community halls and town halls. And basically the barn dance grew and kept going until there was a stop in the 80s and 90s. But 2023 was the last barn dance that's about that very long ago. No, not at all. And it started in 1936 it stopped playing on the radio in, I think, 1970 don't quote me on that. It was near the near the end of Doc's time at the station, but it

Joanne Wallace: 13:17

was on, it was on the television. Oh no, it was at a different show on the TV

Nathan Howe: 13:21

station. It was a different show. They had a lot of music shows on TV, but it was circle eight. Ranch was kind of the popular TV show version,

Joanne Wallace: 13:30

but, and it became the sort of Canadian response to the Grand Ole Opry, right? Yes, totally, yeah. And I mean, all that started in Wingham, so yeah, it's a really great story. Okay, I want to talk about the actual play now and what audiences can expect when they come into the theatre. Doc is our main character, but who else are we going to meet

Nathan Howe: 14:00

his family, Mabel Cruickshank, as is his wife, Bud Cruickshank is his son, and John is his brother. So we'll meet the Cruickshank family, and then so many characters over the 46 years that the play covers. There will be, you know, some recognisable barn dance musicians, some many who couldn't fit into the show. It's, there's seven people covering this much time. The cast is a bunch of, like, multi instrumental, like talented

Joanne Wallace: 14:36

folk. Yeah. Actually, I was going to ask you, is there going to be a band? Or how is, how is the music going to be presented?

Nathan Howe: 14:41

Oh, yeah, the music is. It's a constant in the show. And we've got people learning instruments. So there, there is a band, but there's no sturdy like person on bass, Gil. Gil has been learning the bass for the show. You. Um, so he's now one of the four bass players in the show.

Joanne Wallace: 15:05

Actually, we there was a panel discussion about this show at our recent Bonanza weekend, and our director, your your Director of Music, George meanwell, told quite an interesting story about the bass players and how he was, how it was a challenge to him to programme the music and arrange it and whatnot, because it depended on who was available for the scene. Yeah,

Nathan Howe: 15:31

yeah. It's been a real like through through the rehearsals, I've been doing so much rewriting, and George has been doing so much readjusting, as we find out, you know what, what is needed to keep the show going, kind of thing. So it has been a real, like, collaborative, like, push and pull of like, well, this scene needs to happen here. Well, that song has to happen here, and we need this person on this.

Joanne Wallace: 16:00

There's a lot of really big moments in this story, like we have the first barn dance, and we have the decision to open a TV station, and spoiler alert, there was a fire that actually happened that burned everything down and so on. I found when I was reading the script, your scripted stage directions around some of this stuff are so intriguing, they almost read like a cinematically to me. And I know you have a reputation for this kind of imaginative, minimalist style in your writing. Can you talk a bit about how this is evolving in the rehearsal hall and what some of these moments are going to look like.

Nathan Howe: 16:42

A lot of it comes to necessity. What we can what we can physically do with, you know, seven people, three of them have to be in a band. Two of them have to move set pieces. Maybe three of them have to move set pieces. So a lot of you know, this is, this is the thing with writing theatres. A lot of stage directions are, they help tell the story, but are rarely shown on stage.

Joanne Wallace: 17:07

All right, we are going to take a short break now, but don't go away, because I'm really interested in this part of the conversation. And we come back. I'm going to ask Nathan a little bit more about the craft of playwriting. We're also going to chat about the role technology plays in doc story and about the profound act of community building that this whole story captures, and whether we might be able to harness that energy today, so we'll be right back. There's more to come, but first a quick reminder that tickets to radio town the doc Cruickshank story are on sale right now. You can order them@www.blythfestival.com or you can call Nathania or Audrey, or any of our other friendly box office staff for help. I'll leave the box office number for you in the show notes below. I also want to give a quick shout out, as usual, to our exclusive communications partner, Tucker Smith communications Co Op. I know I keep talking about them, but they are a full service telecom provider serving Huron County. They are also our internet provider, and we cannot run this theatre without them. And our actors love them too, because they really enjoy having internet in their temporary summer apartments. On top of that, they sponsor this podcast, and we are very grateful. Oh, they also sponsor our exclusive members newsletter, which you will get anytime you make a gift to the Blyth festival, because when you do, you become a member of our family, and we will send you this newsletter, which I write, and personally think is fabulous. So thank you to all our members. Thank you. TCC, we couldn't make this podcast without you. All right, let's get back to my chat with Nathan. Howe. Nathan, I want to talk more about the craft of playwriting, because this act of supporting writers as they go about creating new Canadian plays that capture our history and our understanding of who we are, etc. This is our our core mandate at the Blyth festival. So I know that a lot of our listeners are are really deeply interested in how it all works, and we could do an entire episode play writing. But let me just start here. CKNX was all about sound, right? Voices, music, radio. So as a playwright, how did you think about translating all of that into something visual and live that we could see in front of us?

Nathan Howe: 19:37

That's a great question. Yeah. I mean simple answer, it's, it's the medium that I that I'm working in. But longer answer, I suppose it, it is the The play is about the people who who made the noise. And so while we still dramatise that. That, like the the performances and the radio shows, it is like, what, you know, what were these people going through? Why did they choose to do what they did and and, you know, always putting people on stage is something that I find, I connect to and find more, you know, real and authentic than really, any other medium.

Joanne Wallace: 20:28

Yeah, yeah. There's a beautiful section of the play that takes us through the war years, for example. So it's a very, it's deeply human piece of the story, right?

Nathan Howe: 20:41

Yes, yeah. And that feeling of, like, you know someone leaving and you may never see them again, or that feeling of of of distance and like fear that you know the world is about to change, I think, is something that that yeah, that we can all connect to and that that was a very important part of like the the growth of those people, as well as the radio station it, you know Well, while everyone is is shutting down and change, and businesses are changing the way that they operate to help the war effort. The radio station became very important for getting the news out to this whole part of the world.

Joanne Wallace: 21:36

What about the music we were talking about this before the break. Early country music is woven throughout the show and is part of the story. Again, with your writing hat on, what role does that music play like, not just historically, but maybe emotionally or thematically?

Nathan Howe: 21:56

Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a wealth of music from the era that was played on the station, and I have the luxury of being able to bring these musicians onto the stage as characters. So I as I was like finding everything that I could and digitising whatever I could find, I started whittling songs down as I as I listened to it, as I wrote. So there are a few songs that that work for the characters to tell their own story. There are a few songs that kind of put us in like a time period. And you know, we can hear the advancements in the songwriting for the people too. We've got Earl Haywood at the beginning and near the end of his career, and you can hear the the quality in his writing and how much he's, he's he's grown through that time. Yeah, it plays a huge role in, like, so many different ways in this show, like, emotionally, yeah and physically, I guess we get to see how it happens.

Joanne Wallace: 23:19

Okay, we've talked about technology. You've mentioned it a couple of times before the break. This is a story about a man in a radio station, but it's also a story about technology, and it's about what happens when a new medium comes along and it reshapes how people connect and create and understand the world. So we are now facing another wave of potentially disruptive technology. AI, so what did telling this story lead you to reflect on in terms of how technology changes us, and how we can maybe harness it for good instead of evil?

Nathan Howe: 24:01

That's a fair question. I wish I had a concise answer, or, like, had a great answer. I mean, the this wave of radio and then television, like they were waves, right? Like, now we think of radio as something that like, Oh, you, you turn on every once in a while, but it was, it was important and integral to the community then. And the same with television. It was local, it was important, it was integral. And then came along cable, and that shut so many stations down, and then came along streaming and that such so shut down so much cable. So it's, it's really, I mean, where I found some faith in there was that, like AI, is going to have its its end. It might take my job for a while, but then people are going to want something human, because people are human. And. Hmm, so that's like, kind of the hope that I found in that, but it is like, it's also a story of like, of people will always like, persist and keep on, keep on changing and finding, finding new ways of communicating with each other. So while we might be in an era of disinformation at the moment that you know that may have its that wave may crash into the shore soon,

Joanne Wallace: 25:32

actually, since you mentioned the community piece, this is, I mean, this is the heart of the story. I think when I was reading the script, I felt how deeply this story is about that, about building community. It's about giving people a voice, bringing them together, helping a small rural place see itself as part of something bigger. It It feels almost impossible to imagine creating something like seek annex today in because our communication and our entertainment has all become so homogenised. Do you think we've lost something like, is this a pure nostalgia play, or is there something in it that we can still learn from?

Nathan Howe: 26:18

That's a great question. I mean, I always believe there's something we can learn from, from looking back at history and and, you know, Doc says it in, in the play is the world is smaller now we all have access to like we can reach further than we used to be able to. So while I feel like, yes, it is an nostalgia play in some ways, there's also like actionable ways to like, to to reach, reach out to your community, to kind of create your own community at this time, which you know, again, has led to some evil in the world. And this is the question, yeah, it's a great question.

Joanne Wallace: 27:04

I want to be able to go back in time and have radio stations all over again. Yeah,

Nathan Howe: 27:08

right. I mean, you never know. You could always go back. That might be, you know, we might all find that we should go back. We should like, go back to, you know, opening coffee shops in towns and gathering places so that we can talk to each other face to face, because the way that we're not talking to each other face to face isn't really working. You know, I talked before about like, the waves of like technology and changes in humanity. You know, this might just be another one where once we, you know, get to a certain point where we can stop and look inwards. You know, we might take something and learn from it and and go back to looking after our neighbours.

Joanne Wallace: 28:00

If doc himself could tune in from the afterlife, what do you think he would say about this play?

Nathan Howe: 28:10

That's an excellent question. I mean, if I hope that he would, he would look at the play and and like I hoped there would be proud, because I feel like just the act of doing the play the local story is kind of what he lived for, at least my reading of that, you know, it's hard not to read that into someone who decided to stay and decided to build where he was, yeah, so I hope that there is some pride. I imagine he would probably put his hands on his hips and go, No, that's not how that happened sometimes, because, you know, as I said, a lot of stuff burned down. So research was was fraught. And I mean, like, I hope a little bit that, because the Blyth festival started a few years after his death. Like, you know, if, if he's looking down at the place, I hope that he's already aware that this, this stage, is kind of carrying on what what he was building in the area.

Joanne Wallace: 29:23

Thank you. Nathan, this has been so much fun, one of us could stop talking. However, I'm going to squeeze one more question in. Tell us what's next for you.

Nathan Howe: 29:34

What's next for me? I am going to Victoria now to act in a play. It's a Michael Healy play. So Michael Healy, some of his work has been done here. The drawer boy was the most recent one. It's a Michael Healey play about the Conservative government in 1979 the night before a non confidence vote happened. So I'm playing Joe Clark. Who short run as prime minister?

Joanne Wallace: 30:04

All right, you heard it here first, folks, if any of you are out west, you can catch Nathan at the belfry theatre. What's the name of the show? 1979 All right. And if you're not in Victoria and you're here in Ontario, then you need to get yourself to Blyth so you can catch this amazing show about doc Cruickshank and CKNX. Thanks for everything.

Nathan Howe: 30:24

Nathan, thank you. Thanks for having me. We'll talk to you again.

Joanne Wallace: 30:35

That was playwright, actor and all around, nice guy. Nathan. Howe, tickets for Nathan's play radio town the doc Cruickshank story are on sale now, and we would love to have you join us for this fabulous premiere. Again. You'll find the box office number in the show notes below. Now here is where I usually say, please Like and Subscribe Us For more great conversations, which you should still totally do, but we will be on hiatus now until next season, that is unless a certain exciting event possibly related or not to Wingfield farms, takes place, in which case we will bring you an episode all about that. So yes, you really should subscribe. Today's episode was recorded in the beautiful wild goose studio in Blyth, and you should absolutely visit when you're here. The gallery is filled with stunning pieces and hosted by the charming Hans Van Vliet and his partner, Cindy McKenna. And Hans and Cindy also run a gorgeous B and B on the upper level. So call them if you need a place to stay. We're right across the street from the theatre. Thank you so much for being with us again this season. Thank you for listening so closely, for sending me all your lovely cards and emails. Everything we do at the Blyth festival is really about building a community of people who love Canadian theatre, and this podcast is no exception, which means you are a massive part of its success, the same way you are a massive part of the success of anything we do. So thank you from the bottom of my heart. A final shout out to Tucker Smith communications Co Op, who will be sponsoring us again for another two whole years. And finally, a special thanks to my tireless, unflappable sound engineer, Jim Park. Jim puts up with more nonsense than you could ever possibly imagine. He's a consummate Pro, and we're lucky to have him. I'm Joanne Wallace, until next time, thanks for listening. You.