KAMLOOPS, B.C. – Hugh McLennan has been torn by two loves all his adult life.
Life on the ranch has always competed with his love of working on radio.
With his strong, resonant voice and a broad smile shaded by a cowboy hat, McLennan has become a fixture at western Canadian cowboy poetry gatherings, cattle producer meetings and roundups.
He would prefer to be thought of as a good hand at branding time, but his tape recorder is always close by to record stories about people on farms and ranches living the same kind of life he and his wife Billie have enjoyed together for 35 years.
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Originally from Edmonton, he got his start in radio after high school while working on his uncle’s Manitoba farm as a teenager in 1961.
His first station was CFRY in Portage La Prairie, Man., where he was paid $130 a month for 12-hour days, 61Ú2 days a week.
“All the while I was out on the tractor, I was dreaming of being in radio. All the while I was on radio, I was dreaming about being back on the farm,” said McLennan.
He spun records, read the news and did everything else a small town radio station demands.
His second job was at CJOC in Lethbridge, Alta., for $160 a month. After that he moved up and down the radio dial from Victoria to Prince George, B.C., to Calgary until he finally came home to Pinantan Lake, about 65 kilometres out of Kamloops.
He left radio in 1975 to build the ranch at Pinantan Lake. Working odd jobs or being a ranch hand on other people’s places helped him and Billie earn enough to buy their own cow/calf operation 15 years ago.
It was a good place to raise a family and their two sons have since grown up and moved on.
Spencer McLennan plays football with the Canadian Football League’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Rod is a representative for Phoenix Hydraulics, an Edmonton construction company.
Besides their 50 or so cows, they took on training two-year-old colts for ranch work 12 years ago.
“There’s pretty good demand for reliable ranch horses in this part of the country,” said McLennan, who has been around horses all his life.
But even as he worked cattle and coached horses, the voice of radio kept calling him.
He started the Spirit of the West show in Kamloops six years ago. Dawson Creek, B.C., was the next to pick it up and he is now on the air in 13 markets in Saskatchewan, Alberta, B.C. and most recently, Texas.
“I had the idea the show would work as a syndication feature so I sent demos out all over the country,” he said.
The show takes him to cowboy festivals, meetings and any other event that offers a strong, positive image of life in rural North America.
Each show takes about 20 to 30 hours of work to produce.
He used to rent production space at a Kamloops station but now it’s all done in a custom built studio from his home. He started with reel to reel tape machines but now uses computers and a digitized sound system for editing and producing a better product.
He and Billie handle the technical part, as well as the administrative demands.
“It’s strictly a home-grown operation,” he said.
There is no strong news focus. McLennan wants to reach the human side of ranch and farm life. He wants story tellers, people with good memories and anecdotes about the funny side of life on the farm.
Each show features a single story of four five-minute clips of interviews with his featured personality, interspersed with western music and ending with cowboy poetry read by the poet. An additional feature is the Rangeland News where ongoing issues are mentioned but he tries to avoid political wranglings and hard news features.
As the show has grown in popularity he has received more story ideas from listeners and friends than he can produce.
The show is usually heard in the mornings and some replay it in the evening.
McLennan said agriculture-related material is a hard sell to get on the radio. Many outlets are in a cost-cutting mode and the first to go is the farm show followed by the farm reporter. The smattering of agricultural news is turned over to general reporters.
When they first talked stations into taking the show, some said the McLennans should pay to put it on the air. As a compromise, each station is provided with six minutes of local time to sell to advertisers.
“A lot of people are under the impression when they hear all those commercials that ‘he’s making a lot of money on the show,’ but no. It probably costs us about $30,000 a year just to keep it going,” he said.
So, why does he do it?
He does it because the show has become an addiction. He intends to talk until he drops with no thought of retirement because from the McLennans’ point of view, they’re having too much fun to stop now.
