Career broadcaster Ron McFadyen, renowned for years of authoritative, smoothly-delivered radio newscasts and astonishingly exuberant local sports coverage, died in Ontario last Friday.

McFadyen, who had left the Yukon in 2017 after almost 50 years here, was 80.

It was McFadyen’s voice that launched CKRW early on a November morning in 1969.

His half-century broadcasting career began at the age of 15. That’s when he started hanging around a Cranbrook, B.C. radio station until its management was persuaded to hire him.

It was a career that would see him move to Alberta and Saskatchewan before arriving in the territory on July 9, 1969 – 11 days before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

McFadyen had actually begun his working life in the sixth grade doing deliveries for a pharmacy so he could have money for extra-curricular activities.

Radio was among those interests he had as a young man, not just in getting on the airwaves, but also in how the equipment worked, building his first “shortwave radio” as a high school student.

That was back in the days of soldering wires together, adding speakers, seeing what tubes and spare parts from broken TVs you could get from local stereo stores, and reading up on electronics from magazines, he said during a 2009 interview with the Star.

He later started hanging around the local radio station – CKEK – until they eventually hired him for shifts from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. through the week, and weekend sign-ons.

That led him to his career – and degree in “practical” – in radio, taking him initially to another station in Cranbrook, then on to a number of stations before he learned of the job with a new broadcaster (CKRW) taking to the air in Whitehorse.

“I didn’t even know where Whitehorse was,” McFadyen recalled with a laugh in the 2009 interview.

“I looked up stuff in the paper and there were two channels of black and white TV, Kentucky Fried Chicken, but you know (it’s) the land of the Midnight Sun and something new.”

He packed up his 1961 Volvo, filling it to the roof with his belongings, and headed north, marking his July 9, 1969 arrival date in the dust on his dashboard.

Nine days later, U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy’s Oldsmobile would veer off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Mass., killing his young aide, Mary Jo Kopechne.

That first morning on air, the CKRW building was full with people, like Rolf Hougen, who had risen early and come down to witness the birth of a new radio station going to air at 6 a.m.

The next day, McFadyen remembered, he was alone for the early-morning broadcast.

Gradually, more than a few of those 6 a.m.-to-6 p.m. workdays at CKRW took their toll.

Around 1971, McFadyen left the private broadcaster to take a job at Murdoch’s gem shop, suggested by his friend, the late Mike Scott, crafting jewelry.

Scott had noticed McFadyen’s handiwork when they had been out snowmobiling one time and offered him the job.

“I was burned out,” McFadyen said of his broadcast career at that point.

The gem store job provided something new, with the chance to tromp around the territory’s gold fields on occasion to look for gold that could be used in the jewelry.

“I’ve seen large peanut butter jars full of gold nuggets,” McFadyen said.

He couldn’t remain immune from the radio business though – especially when a job opened up in the Whitehorse offices of the CBC in 1973.

McFadyen had always wanted to work for the national broadcaster. Though he hadn’t won a job there when he’d auditioned in the early 1960s, this time around, he did.

“I just loved working in radio,” he said.

It wasn’t always easy, though, especially during strike action in the early 1980s, when McFadyen and others were on the picket line for a few months.

The late broadcaster also hosted CBC programs during his time there, including an open-line portion of the noon show that has long since been discontinued.

He also emceed the popular CBC Old Tyme Fiddlers Show, which the network formerly hosted before several hundred people during the then-Yukon Sourdough Rendezvous festival.

He would remain at the CBC until 1996, flawlessly reading the morning local news and later informing Yukoners about how their athletes were doing at local and Outside events.

He became one of the first Whitehorse reporters among others at the CBC to travel to each of the Arctic Winter Games, starting in the mid-1970s.

His work saw him interview the likes of former prime minister Stephen Harper, CBC broadcaster Barbara Frum, who died in 1992, singer Gordon Lightfoot, who passed away this year, and even a Playboy bunny over the years.

Asked about the stories that perennially lingered in his mind, he mentioned the first-ever strike by Yukon teachers in the early 2000s.

In 1996, he was one of eight people at CBC Yukon to leave the corporation amid downsizing after he was offered a severance package – two months after he had been diagnosed with leukemia.

“I was just devastated,” he told the Star of his illness.

He went to work at the former Radio Shack store until a job opened at CKRW in 2000. Once again, he couldn’t stay away from the radio business, rejoining the station he had helped bring to the air more than 30 years earlier.

Nancy Thomson, a now-retired longtime CBC Yukon journalist, was a colleague of McFadyen’s there beginning in the early 1990s.

“He was great to work with – could be a wee bit exasperating when he got really excited about covering an event – but really, that was just Ron,” Thomson told the Star.

“He had an incredible appetite for reporting and brought zest to everything he did. He was never lacklustre or disinterested; he poured himself into the job 110 per cent. Always,” said Thomson.

“We had some good laughs along the way. Ron had a very dedicated approach to our listeners and made time to cover the smallest of community events that other reporters may have been inclined to overlook,” Thomson said.

“He cared deeply about broadcasting, cared about the Yukon and the people who live here, and cared about his colleagues. His work ethic was simply astounding,” Thomson recalled.

Former CBC broadcaster Pam Buckway worked with McFadyen from 1974 to the late 1990s.

“He had a better sense of what ‘community radio’ meant of anyone I’ve worked with or listened to on the radio,” Buckway told the Star this week.

“He carried his tape recorder with him everywhere. He would talk to kids, and is singlehandedly responsible for two generations of kids not being afraid of microphones.” Buckway said.

“He would crouch down with them and ask them what it was like to hit the ball, and then call the parents to tell them their children would be on the radio the next day. He worked hard.”

Buckway called McFadyen’s sportscasts “amazing.

“He had children’s voices, parents’ voices, adult players’ voices, coaches’ voices, the sound of goals being scored and the cheers from the crowd. Not just once in a while but every day,” she said.

“At Rendezvous (back when CBC actually covered the festival), he would describe whatever was going on so well that people who couldn’t attend felt like they were there on Main Street watching the event with him,” Buckway recalled.

“He was also one of the main people who got the Yukon Amateur Radio Association going almost 50 years ago. He was president for years as well.”

Retired radio inspector Jeff Stanhope added, “I first moved here in 1992, and that’s when I fell into Ron’s orbit and influence.

“I knew immediately that here was someone who was sincere, hard-working and in for the long haul, having already lived in the Yukon for some years,” said Stanhope, now a Vancouver Island resident.

“He projected a great optimism and saw the value of ham radio in community service, such as in assistance with large sporting events like the Klondike Road Relay or The Chilkat bike race,” Stanhope said.

One of his other passions was in the area of emergency preparedness and the contribution from amateur radio, Stanhope recalled.

“In fact, much of what the club did was (and is), in this area thanks to the direction and promotion by Ron. He maintained good relations with EMO, Wildland Fire, and other YG departments or agencies in this regard.

“He was also a great promoter of amateur radio as an enjoyable hobby for anyone, with its many different aspects and was essentially the “face” of amateur radio in the Yukon.”

McFadyen’s distinctive Volvo was readily recognizable around Whitehorse – largely because of the towering ham radio antenna fastened to it.

Stanhope called McFadyen a driven “doer”, an essential driver behind the many great projects undertaken by the club over many years, like the Yukon WAN or to advance new technology (such as digital radio).

“Many of these projects required resources the club simply didn’t have, but he was also able to scrounge a lot of equipment for the club!

“This helped a great deal when there was not much money around,” Stanhope added.

“Finally, I’d have to say he was also a good friend and knew almost everyone, it seemed, which also helped when promoting the hobby.

“We are very sorry to have lost such a dedicated individual.”

Star editor Jim Butler saluted McFadyen as “a worthy and formidable media competitor” dating back 42 years.

“His inexhaustible energy and incredible devotion to extracting maximum excellence from what-ever news or sports item he was assembling simply have no parallel,” Butler said.

“The private conversations we had about territorial politicians over the years were far zestier than what he could ever air or I could publish ... they were rollicking days from a vivacious, bygone era.

“And to watch him maintain that jaw-dropping level of energy into his 70s, particularly with his health issues, was an astounding thing to witness.”

Butler remembers standing outside the Star building in 2000 while McFadyen – then back with CKRW – interviewed himself and then-publisher Jackie Pierce on the occasion of the paper turning 100 years old.

Pierce died in March of this year. That lighthearted street-corner conversation has now transformed into a life-lasting memory, Butler said.

“That day, I stood with two corner-stones of the Yukon media scene who got their starts here in the middle of the 20th century,” he recalled.

“It’s incredibly melancholy that they’re both gone, but they’ve left a record of accomplishment and longevity you won’t see duplicated, given the volatility and uncertainty of the contemporary media landscape.”

From Ontario, McFadyen occasionally emailed the Star with news tips or comments on stories he had read on the paper’s website.

Family and friends are invited to gather for a celebration of McFadyen’s life at the Blair & Son Funeral Home in Perth, in the Ottawa valley, on Aug. 4.

Other figures familiar to longtime Yukon radio and television audiences who have died in the last 11 months include former CKRW program host Bill Swainson, who passed in August 2022, and CBC Yukon camera operator Wayne Vallevand, who died June 7.