Alan
Francis Erdman
Born
Al
Erdman was the chief engineer at CJOR for 24 years, starting when the station
operated out of the Empire Ballroom on Georgia Street in 1956, until just
before they left the basement of the Grosvenor Hotel
on Howe Street in the early 1980's. Previously, he had worked
at the wired music provider, Muzak in Vancouver and
the Saskatchewan Telephone Company in
Professionally,
Al was known as a brilliant radio engineer, responsible for a number of
innovative products including the AFE 3 and AFE 10 solid-state line amplifiers,
AFE 5 compressor/limiters, talk show tape delay systems, and remote broadcast
equipment. Al designed the first system to allow talk shows to be run from
remote locations, a technology that was used extensively by on-air
personalities Jack Webster, Pat Burns, Ed Murphy, Terry Moore, John Wilson, and
Chuck Cook during CJOR's heyday as
Personally,
Al was known as the shy, soft-spoken, cigar- smoking, Pepsi-drinking, Bing
Crosby-listening, slightly rumpled-looking fellow as much responsible for the
"personality" of the station during the 60's and 70's as any one of
the on-air staff.
Al
could easily have been the inspiration for Peter Falk's
Al
was a longtime Bing Crosby fan and was rumoured to
have the 3rd largest collection in the world. When he lived in his house on
Al was also a longtime radio amateur holding both the call signs
VE7AFW, then VE7AFE, and finally VE7AL. He
had thousands of DX and QSL cards and earned ARRL certificates in almost all
categories. We was renowned for building some of the best sounding AM
transmitters on the air, and carried an RF burn on his forehead and chin from
one of his favourite, hyper-tuned, water-cooled
creations. He taught Morse code classes for the local chapter of the Amateur
Radio Relay League during the 50's and 60's.
In
later years, Al caught the computer bug. He would go down to the Eaton's Centre
at lunch time to experiment with the 4K Commodore PET.
He bought a succession of computers - Commodore 16K PET, VIC 20, 64, 128, 128B,
Amiga, and finally an HP Pavilion. He loved to program and his resistor colour-code program and 10 piece graphic dice programs were
two that he was particularly proud of.
The
story of how Al Erdman left CJOR is a sad one. During the technical
out-sourcing that happened in the radio industry in
I
worked as Al's assistant at CJOR from June 1974 to August 1980, but continued
to stay in touch with him until he passed away. On-air personality John Wilson,
Al and I used to get together for dinner once a month to talk about the things
we all loved - music, radio, and computers.
Al
Erdman was a remarkable man - a part of
By
Fred Licota
Alan F. Erdman
(1918-2002)
Officer
in the Fraternal Order of Eagles in
Erdman invented line
amplifiers in use at the time of his death. A friend Stan Davis, a well known
broadcast engineer used Al’s designs in his installations. Al is revered by
those who worked around him. He was a true character in a day before radio was totally
modernized.
Al was single and left no immediate family. His estate left much to the SPARC
museum of radio history in
Memories of Al: I do remember that Al Erdman's was a ham operator VE7 AFE. He
told me that he waited an extra few weeks before writing his exam, because the
call letters were issued in alphabetical order, and he could see his initials
were coming up. Someone at DOC must have tipped him off when the right time
came up. Al started with CJOR in 1955. Something that a lot of people don't
know is that much of the technical side of talk radio was born out of Al's
brain at CJOR, as he grappled with problems that had never been adequately
addressed.
Originally, the six second delay was built up by recording on the front Ampex in Master Control and playing back on the back unit.
It so happened that the machines were six seconds apart (at 7.5 inches/second).
Later Al built up the system of pulleys and wheels that allowed the use of just
the front machine. The telephone hybrids that allowed speakerphone ease, but
with broadcast quality, were all designed and built by Al.
When Stan Davis started manufacturing broadcast consoles, many of which are
still gracing control rooms in BC's interior stations, each of those boards
contained AFE 3 and AFE 10 line amplifiers... the AFE stands for Al Frank
Erdman. When Burns moved his Hotline back to
Nowadays, the entire infrastructure of open line radio is available,
purpose-built for the task, from broadcast suppliers... in CJOR's
heyday, this was not possible. And a surprising amount of CJOR's
electronic devives were conceived, designed,
perfected and built by Al!
by Dan Roach