The Morning Man returns to Winnipeg’s airwaves

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This article was published 29/06/2023 (857 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Tom McGouran has found a new a.m. home on the FM dial.

The veteran Winnipeg radio personality will be the voice of the morning show on Peggy 99.1 FM starting Tuesday, July 4.

“A friend of mine said, ‘You’re going back; you got another gig,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m like the cockroach of radio — they can’t get rid of me,’” McGouran says with a hearty laugh. “It’s gonna be fun.”

McGouran’s voice, a mainstay of morning radio for more than 40 years, has been absent from the airwaves. In October 2021, he was let go by the station formerly known as 94.3 The Drive, along with his morning show co-host Vicki Shae and fellow on-air personalities Alix Michaels, Kelly Parker and Dez Daniels, owing to the format change to NOW! Radio.

But McGouran, 66, took it in stride. This wasn’t the first time he’d been fired from a radio station.

“This is the death of nothing at all — it’s not the end of anything,” he told the Free Press at the time.

“What people accuse me of all the time is too much positivity,” he says now with a laugh. “I was always, always positive that something else would come up.”

The new gig on Peggy — a pop-rock station with the tagline “Playing Winnipeg’s favourites” — also comes with some new challenges: this is the first time since 1982 McGouran will be hosting a morning show solo. Before it was Tom and Vicki, it was Tom and Joe (Aiello), and before that it was Tom and Larry (Updike).

“I’ve always had a partner,” McGouran says. “At first I went, OK, let me try and wrap my head around this scenario. Now I’m just super-excited to embrace it. I’ve already trained on the board. The last time I worked a board, it had knobs and we were playing records.”

He’s excited to get back on the mic, even if it means waking up seven hours earlier than he has been for the past 21 months. But McGouran is a morning person who relishes helping others be morning people.

“When you hear back from people and they say, ‘You know what, you made me happy’ or ‘You made me laugh before I started my day’ — that’s like gold,” he says.

“That’s an unbelievable feeling to have, that you had that effect on someone.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com