In a recent column, I wrote about Toronto radio station 1050 CHUM's (now CP24 Radio 1050) heady days of the late 1950s and 1960s (This Week, March 12, 2009.)

Warren Cosford, a radio veteran from way back (starting in 1963 at CJOB in Winnipeg), pointed out to me that, historically, CHUM's star as a leading Rock broadcasting entity didn't begin a gradual fade-out in 1968, as I had stated. Contrarily, it got better beyond the Sixties, and mightily thrived and won out over continuously hard competition from other stations throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Warren, who was born with a burning love of radio in his blood, came in as production manager of CHUM-AM in 1970.

He was hired by program supervisor J. Robert Wood, who more than anyone, turned around a station that was in urgent need of repair, while being battered by a nemesis called the Drake Format.

The revolutionary Drake Format, introduced by U.S. Radio Programmer/Consultant Bill Drake (1937-2008), was widely catching on in the U.S. According to Warren, this novel innovation involved, "a tight, high-energy presentation using a short list of songs, that made competitors sound old, tired and sloppy."

CHUM was able to survive by adapting and conforming to the times that brought in a new generation of Top 40 radio.

Warren helped to quickly prop up staid old CHUM by implementing various procedures that saw significant results and improvements, such as better communication between departments inside the CHUM operation.

One of the great highlights of Warren's tenure with CHUM was the production of three renowned early 1970s documentaries: The Story Of The Beatles (actually acclaimed by Elvis Presley), The Elvis Presley Story and the 64-hour Evolution Of Rock. Their syndication played an important part in placing CHUM on an international stage.

Vintage radio fans and collectors are made up of two primary, intertwining camps: the love of the music on one hand and the broadcasting mechanics of programming on the other. The latter group is mostly enveloped in trading and collecting "air-checks" (off- the-air tape recordings of old radio shows), many of which are "scoped" (the music parts are extracted).

For me, music is paramount. Though CHUM stayed on top during the 1970s and 1980s, the Drake influence coincided with significant changes in the landscape of recorded music.

I continued to listen to CHUM and bought the Top 40 records back then, but personally, the passage of time has held very little nostalgia for this period.

That is not to say that the best of radio history went out with the Sixties. Just ask Warren Cosford.