Some say bad news comes in 3’s, and this week unfortunately, they’re right.

Last weekend, we lost Jack Finnigan, who had recently been hosting weekend afternoons on CJAD 800AM. Too bad CJAD doesn’t even acknowledge him on the website.. Jack was also known as JP Finnigan in the 70’s on CKGM 98 AM when that top-40 station dominated the Montreal airwaves.

Then we lost Patrick Letang to cancer. Patrick was one of the reasons I enjoyed listening to 940 AM. He had a very human way of presenting business news, and for a while was a regular contributor to the Radio in Montreal Yahoo group, which made him so much more real than just a voice on the radio. When he was diagnosed, he started a blog to share his experiences with his battle. I always looked forward to new posts, where he took a very direct approach explaining what was going on. Though I never met him, his posts helped me understand a bit more what my father went through when he was losing his battle to the same cursed disease.

I learned of the third yesterday, and this time it was someone I knew. I met Andy K when he took a peek into the conference room where we were hosting Podcasters Across Borders 2006 and saw all these people with microphones. Thinking he’d stumbled into a radio production conference, he started talking with Mark Blevis, who had never heard of him. When Mark introduced me, I immediately knew this was the former CKGM morning man and one of the regulars on long-defunct CFOX 1470. Andy and I chatted for quite a while about radio and podcasting, and he ended up attending the rest of the conference. A life long radio guy, he was so enthusiastic about what podcasting was and what it could do. He chatted up the conference on his morning show, and was nice enough to send me the audio aircheck of his show. We exchanged a few emails in the weeks following the conference, he asked for equipment advice, production techniques etc… It was a strange feeling for me to be telling a guy who’d been in radio 30 years how to do audio. When CPB took the summer off, he wished me well, and we lost touch. I would love to hear the audio he created..

Rest well radio guys, you’ll never know how many people you touched..

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Posted by Bob on Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 10:45 am.