Air force Radio host Tom McGouran has been cracking up Winnipeg listeners over most of the past four decades on a lengthy list of top-rated morning teams By: David Sanderson Posted: 3:00 AM CST Saturday, Mar. 13, 2021 Last Modified: 4:31 PM CST Friday, Mar. 12, 2021 Updates

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This article was published 13/03/2021 (1649 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Tom McGouran, a self-described good Irish-Catholic boy, will have a couple of reasons to raise a pint or three when St. Patrick’s Day rolls around later this week.

First of all, 2021 marks the veteran radio personality’s fifth anniversary at 94.3 The Drive, where he and Vicki Shae co-host Tom & Vicki Mornings weekdays from 6 to 10 a.m. Secondly, it’s been 40 years, give or take, that local listeners have been treated to his trademark cackle, as recognizable a roar as there is in the biz.

About the “or take” part of that equation…

In September 2012, McGouran was let go by 92 CITI-FM along with Joe Aiello, his on-air ally of 18 years. The news wasn’t all bad. He received an 18-month severance package, the catch being he couldn’t work for another Winnipeg station while he remained on CITI’s payroll. No biggie, he thought; he’d simply treat it like an extended vacation and when the day rolled around, he’d get back to doing what he does best, cracking wise and introducing tunes.

That’s not quite how things turned out. In the spring of 2015, with bills piling up and zero employment prospects on the horizon, the divorced father of five grown children, all boys, accepted a telemarketer’s position; ideal for somebody who’d made a living — a pretty good one, at that — with his voice, right?

Uh, not so fast.

“I got on with Kraft, addressing complaints from people whose jar of salsa wasn’t full to the top, that sorta thing, and it was up to me to make them go away happy,” McGouran says, seated on a couch in the River Heights abode he shares with his partner Tammy and their pooch, Stewie.

“My first hour on the job, I get this call from a woman in California whose cheese was mouldy. ‘No problem,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll take care of that for you.’”

Following a bit of back and forth, during which McGouran secured the caller’s address to send her some complimentary coupons, she asked where exactly she had reached him. He wasn’t able to divulge that for security reasons, but allowed that he was in Canada. “Canada?” she replied excitedly. “Hang on a sec, my husband would love to talk to you.”

McGouran spent the next 20 minutes discussing fishing with an elderly gent whose dream was to cast a line in a crystal-blue northern Canadian lake. At the end of their conversation, McGouran said he hoped the fellow made it up here one day. He bade him and his wife a great day, the same way he’d ended calls to the radio station for 30-plus years. Seconds later he received a tap on the shoulder.

“McGouran, that took way, way too long,” his supervisor spat out.

“Whaddya mean?” he responded. “Those two people just got off the phone thinking Kraft is the greatest company in the world.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she shot back. “I need you to pick it up.”

Which is precisely what he did at the end of the shift, “it” being his jacket, as he walked out the front door, his telemarketing career over before it ever really began.

●●●

McGouran, the second eldest of six brothers, grew up in Toronto. He vividly recalls tuning into CFRB, an all-news AM station, at the age of five with his mother Betty, letting her know, “That’s what I want to do when I grow up.”

After graduating high school — that would have been 1977, says McGouran, now in his early 60s, counting back on his fingers — he enrolled in a broadcasting program at Seneca College, 30 minutes away from where his family lived. The school had its own campus radio station. It wasn’t long before he was spending the bulk of his days spinning songs by the likes of Boston, Kansas and the Electric Light Orchestra — “the exact same stuff we play today” — on a volunteer basis.

“I ended up not going to some of my classes because I was getting so much practical experience at the student-run station,” he says, taking a sip of coffee.

“I mean, it’s not like I was interested in learning how to use TV-studio equipment. I don’t have a technical bone in my body. Radio was the only thing that mattered.”

In 1979, his course complete, he mailed out 250 audition tapes to smaller-market stations from coast to coast. His first job, at CFMX in Cobourg-Port Hope, about an hour’s drive from Toronto, required him to play classics six hours a day. Except by classics, we’re not referring to the Beatles and the Byrds, but Bach and Beethoven.

“During my interview they asked if I knew anything about classical music and I lied, straight-faced, telling them, ‘Oh, you betcha,’” he says, bursting out laughing.

“Thankfully, there were a few older guys there who knew what they were doing and could help me with some of the tougher pronunciations, like Tchaikovsky.”

McGouran spent close to a year in Cobourg-Port Hope. From there it was on to Saskatoon — the first time he’d been to Western Canada, in fact — where, based on a tape he’d sent a year prior, he’d been offered a midday slot at an FM station focused on progressive roc: Rush, Yes, Jethro Tull, that sort of thing. The station was owned by WIC, a media company that also oversaw Q94-FM, a light rock station in Winnipeg.

In late 1981 he was contacted by Q94’s management team, asking if he’d be interested in transferring there. Back then, Winnipeg was roughly five times the size of Saskatoon, so he jumped at the chance to work in a larger market.

Within days of his arrival he openly wondered, “My God, what have I done?”

“First day on the job they told me I was going to have to change my name, ‘cause McGouran wasn’t gonna fly,” he says, recalling “Tom Rogers” was the nom de plume they’d chosen for him. Worse, he hadn’t done his homework.

“In Saskatoon I had full leeway to do my show the way I wanted: chatting with callers, joking around, whatever. At Q, all they wanted me to do was play 10 songs in a row, without saying sweet F-all in-between any of ‘em. To my way of thinking, I’d suddenly taken this giant step backward.”

A few months into his tenure at Q94, McGouran learned that CHMM-FM was changing its format from country to soft rock and would be rebranding itself as CKIS-FM. He successfully applied for a gig that kicked off at 10 a.m. weekdays, perfectly suited to a single person in his mid-20s who, at the time, was thoroughly enjoying everything the local night life had to offer.

In his autobiography My Word! The Larry Updike Story, McGouran’s decade-long on-air partner and foil recalls his new co-worker’s initial day on the job at CKIS as being somewhat memorable.

“Down the hall he came, a slightly smaller image of Robert Plant himself. A young man with long flowing sandy hair, a black T-shirt covered by an open plaid shirt, ratty jeans, scruffy work boots, and a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth,” Updike wrote. “He greeted me warily… ‘Sorry, I’m late man, slept in…’ he said, without a hint of regret or apology. And that was it.”

McGouran and Updike spent the next 10 years, on and off, testing radio’s boundaries. Within days of being fired from CKIS for failing to comply with the mandated musical format there — silly love songs indeed; they were once reprimanded for playing the Beatles’ Love Me Do, “the featheriest, poppiest song you could play, almost,” because management considered it rock, versus soft rock — they caught on at 92 CITI-FM. That was where they enjoyed their greatest successes. That is, if you consider McGouran getting suspended in the early ‘90s for almost giving his co-host a heart attack after, unbeknownst to Updike, orchestrating his mock kidnapping/assassination live on-air, a success or not.

“It was crazy (poop) in another time,” McGouran says of the stunt, which, that morning, sounded realistic enough coming through the speakers that concerned listeners alerted Winnipeg’s finest, who showed up at the station, guns drawn, wondering what the fuss was all about.

By the spring of 1994, McGouran and Updike had been courted by a Vancouver station to take their shtick west. They were handed the keys to the second-most popular morning show in the city, the hope being they could take it to the top. Unfortunately, by fall the program’s ratings had plummeted from No. 2 to No. 6, a considerable drop in an industry dependent on listeners’ ears for advertising revenue.

“Nothing had changed in terms of format. Our mindset was, if it worked here, why wouldn’t it work there?” McGouran says matter-of-factly. “For whatever reason, though, it was a style that definitely didn’t catch on. We got one (ratings) book and were basically told to pack our bags.”

McGouran had a big decision to make upon the pair’s return to Winnipeg. There was an attractive offer on the table to go back to CKIS-FM, which Updike accepted. With five children under the age of 10, McGouran’s mind wasn’t made up. He wanted to secure the best deal possible to support his growing family, which was how he ended up back at CITI in November 1994, sans Updike.

Joe Aiello, currently heard on Power 97’s Power Mornings with Philly, Joe and Kirby, worked with McGouran and Updike in the early days of the Tom and Larry shenanigans, producing their show for CITI. So when McGouran reached out, asking if he’d be interested in serving as his new early-morning sidekick, he didn’t have to think twice.

“I was hosting my own afternoon show on 97 at the time and if I remember correctly, Tom called me while I was on the air,” Aiello says, when reached at home. “Larry’s were big shoes to fill, no doubt about it, but because it was their decision to split up, I didn’t have the added guilt of feeling like I was taking somebody’s job away. About six months in, Tom and I had developed a pretty good rhythm where we were starting to hit our stride. From there, we ended up enjoying a run that was longer than Tom and Larry’s even, close to 19 years.”

Aiello doesn’t hesitate when asked why he believes his pal has managed to carve out such a successful career, close to 45 years, if you include his time in Ontario and Saskatchewan. What you hear is what you get, he says; McGouran is the same person when the microphone is off as when it’s on.

“He’s a great storyteller, he’ll tell listeners everything they need to know — sometimes too much information — but most of all, he doesn’t take himself too seriously and is never, ever afraid to laugh at himself,” Aiello says.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s embarrassing. He’s OK being the butt-end of a joke. Our job was to basically break each other’s balls for four hours a day, five days a week. Lo and behold, we were able to turn that into a pretty successful career.”

●●●

Following his ill-fated attempt at telemarketing, in June 2015 McGouran was hired by a buddy who owned a home-construction company. Every once in a while he’d be helping pour a concrete driveway when he’d guffaw at a co-worker’s joke. Because the others knew him simply as Tom, they’d whip around, practically in unison, going, “Wait a sec. Where do I know that laugh from?”

In May 2016, 94.3 The Drive extended an offer, asking him to join that station’s morning team. McGouran, who typically hits the hay just after 7 p.m. and sleeps “like a baby” until his alarm goes off at 3 a.m., admits to having had a few butterflies on his first shift back.

Comparing his job to that of a hockey player’s, he says it’s not like he could strap on a pair of skates and get himself into game shape before sliding into an announcer’s chair again. That said, it only took an hour or so until he felt like he’d never been away.

“What makes our show interesting is the dynamic between us; not necessarily as man and woman but more from a generational point of view,” says Vicki Shae, McGouran’s on-air partner since 2019 who, in her early 30s, is younger than most of his kids. “We come from different places, we see the world in a different way and I think that’s what brings out a lot of the fun you hear.”

Shae never tires of listening to McGouran wax on about radio’s “good old days,” which, if he can be believed, were “so much more dynamic and wild” than what they currently get away with. (Perhaps she’s referring to the morning McGouran gave listeners a play-by-play of his vasectomy. Or maybe it was the occasion when he went skydiving on-air, and after his chute failed to open, his producers immediately went to commercial, concerned the next sound the audience heard would be a loud splat. Spoiler alert: he survived.)

“I didn’t grow up in a classic-rock household, we were more of a Beau-and-Tom family versus Tom and Larry, but I did become aware of Tom later in life,” Shae says, referring to former Q94 morning hosts Beau and Tom Milroy.

“I have to say it’s been very interesting to share a show with somebody who has the kind of clout in the city he does. Before, when we could do charity events, people were forever approaching him to let him know they’d been listening to him since they were a kid, and that he’s been a big part of their life. Who wouldn’t want to hear something like that?”

For his part, McGouran maintains he’s presently having too much fun to even consider the “R-word.”

No, he’s afraid they’re going to have to drag him out, proverbially kicking and screaming, the next time he’s told to park his headset.

“I was incredibly lucky to have had the experience with Larry and Joe, to this day two of my best friends in the world, more like brothers really, thanks to radio. And now with Vicki, who’s also very sharp, very funny… seriously, I’m having the time of my life,” he says.

“People have asked if I’m more appreciative of what I have now after being out of the game for four years and I can’t say no. But I temper that by telling them I’ve always been appreciative. Since that first day in Cobourg, playing fricking 30-minute symphonies, I’ve felt like I was the luckiest guy in the world, getting to do what I’d wanted to do since I was a little kid.

“At the end of the day, how many people get to say that?”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca