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Long Live Rock and Roll:
The Story of Ellie O’Day,
Canada’s First Major Market Female DJ:

Part One
The music came first.
Ellen Claitman was barely four years old when she began listening to music on the family
Victrola. Her mother had a 45rpm of Bolero and an LP of Peer Gynt Suites, with Carnival of the
Animals by St. Saens on the flip side. She already loved Lenny Bernstein’s Young People’s
Concerts – pretty sophisticated tastes for a small child – but then again she did become Director
of the BC Branch of Mensa Canada later in life.
With her first allowance at age six, Ellen saved enough to buy her first single – Charlie Gracie’s
You Butterfly and a year later she started a fan club for the Everly Brothers and the Kalin Twins.
She described her early tastes as rockabilly lite.
Born a city kid in 1950 in Pittsburgh, PA, Ellen and her family moved to the suburbs when she
was nine. It was in elementary school that she would cross paths with another student whose
talent would give her new ideas. The boy had been hospitalized for some time after being hit by
a car. In 6 th grade, when they finally met, “he sat at the piano and blew my mind. He played
Rachmaninoff’s Piano Prelude in C# Minor and I was ecstatic. I couldn’t wait to get home and
beg my mother for a piano.
“It took a few months of nagging. I took piano lessons for a few years, but I was older than most
of my teacher’s beginning students, and I found the selections she had us play, other than Fur
Elise and a few other standards, puerile. At home I was trying to learn that cool new song,
“Take Five” (I still have my LP) while searching for a simplified arrangement of the
Rachmaninoff. (He had huge hands. I don’t). That week at the start of my lesson, I closed the
usual folio, and attacked the opening chords of the Rachmaninoff, which I played to the end,
having memorized it. And quit piano lessons.
“Another thing that happened in suburbia was in ’63. This new girl arrived from the UK and I
asked her if she was into music and she brought over one of the first Beatles singles! (I think
Love Me Do). I found a new buddy to listen to singles with. I loved Motown and doo-wop. I had
at least two dozen singles before high school – Ruby Baby, All I Have to Do is Dream, Fingertips
– Part 2, You Keep me Hanging on, Dancing in the Street.
“I did get into Elvis, but I soon bought mostly Black music. Not only did I know all the new
releases, but I learned all the dance crazes. By the time I was 16 and driving, I was out several
nights a week at teen canteens (with a side trip for beer).”
Television was impressive then: Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, The Ed Sullivan Show (with
his commitment to introducing all manner of young rock and soul musicians to his Sunday night

audience) Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Show, Steve Allen, and finally Jack Parr on the Tonight Show.
She watched it all. “I was an insomniac”, she says.
But for any teenager coming out of the 1950s, radio was king, especially the small hand-held
transistor radio. Its power was amplified at night when all the local stations went off the air. For
Ellen, early evening meant listening to tween-oriented music with Chuck Brinkman on KQV, but
at night, with the radio under her pillow, she listened to Black station WAMO (D’Black spot on
your Dial!) and the great Porky Chedwick – the Daddio of the Raddio, the Platter Pushin’ Papa,
who is now in the rock and roll hall of fame.
“My tastes have varied over the years. I love jazz. And old school R&B and gospel have a special
glowing space in my life. I’m a sucker for reggae, particularly good dub. Still, nothing, but
nothing beats the feeling of being 17 and borrowing my dad’s powder blue Buick convertible,
top down on a summer night, screaming along to the blasting radio and Satisfaction comes on!
In high school, Ellen formed an all-girl quintet The Poor Boys. On a one-off performance on
Pittsburgh’s local television teen show she was impressed by the other group on set. In an act
that showed her early instincts to follow the music, she tracked them down to their green
room. She liked their song and wanted to know more. The band was Love. Their hit: My Little
Red Book. But her curiosity didn’t end there. “Another time on that show I was one of three go-
go dancers, and we got a pair of vinyl go-go boots which I wore throughout my freshman year
at the University in Madison, Wisconsin.”
It was during her two years at Madison (1967-68) that she was introduced to Chicago’s first-
class blues players at weekend dances. This included Walter Shakey Horton, who, she notes,
was a major influence on music producer and long-time CBC radio host Holger Peterson who
founded Alberta’s Stony Plain Records.
But there was a lot more to discover beyond the blues. “I camped overnight once to get a ticket
for a BB King concert on campus, and my girlfriend and I – who loved the Doors – went to see
them at the Coliseum. The band played well, but Jim Morrison was a mess. We had a cool club
in Madison called The Factory where I saw Paul Butterfield several times, Jimi Hendrix, and Rick
Nielsen’s early band Grim Reapers before they became Cheap Trick.”
After leaving U of M, Ellen finished her BA at the University of Pittsburgh. Her degree:
Anthropology, specifically Folklore and Ethnomusicology. It was 1971. That same year she came
to Canada as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Anthropology at Edmonton’s University of
Alberta. Why?
“Money. They offered me $300 a month as a teaching assistant and that was decent dough for
a student in 1971; and other than one US school (which put me on the following years’ waiting
list) I only applied to Canadian universities. I was exiting the US; and subliminally, I’d been
singing Four Strong Winds in a for-fun folk group in the previous year”.

But then she quit. She wanted something else.
“I never aspired towards radio, until I knew I was so close I could taste it”.
While at U of A, she applied for a job moving A/V equipment. She was turned down because
she was too small. And female. “I was handy, having worked on antique cars with my dad. I
could sell cars, or stereo equipment.” In 1973 she moved to Victoria, B.C where she found a job
at a high-end camera shop. But even after becoming manager, she knew it was dead end. “I
didn’t want to get into wedding photography.”
In 1975, Ellen enrolled in the Applied Communications Program at Camosun College on
Vancouver Island to study film, photography, audio production, radio and TV. “Going in I hoped
to become a TV floor manager.” It was here that an assignment got her instructor’s attention
and changed her mind.
“Our first audio assignment was to write a 15-second public service announcement, record it,
and replay it for Kerm, the instructor. Mine was on Greenpeace (it was 1975), and I knew how
to operate a reel-to-reel recorder so I was confident.”
Kerm had her play it over and over, watching the UV meter each time. Her production held. Her
voice was consistent and level. He noticed something else. She could talk. Her speaking voice
was intimate, personable. One-to-one. He told her you can’t teach that. You either had it or you
didn’t. He took her down the hall to the campus radio station where two guys from second-year
were on air. Kerm introduced her and said teach her the board.
It was easy for her. She could slip-cue an album seamlessly. (“I recall using Bowie’s Station to
Station and the Live in Philadelphia albums’). She also had a great record collection. “Kerm
especially liked my Supertramp album. And between songs, I would either talk about the artist,
or do some killer segues between tracks.” One of her student co-operators had a part-time gig
at local radio station CKDA. He had a party in the control room and got fired. He recommended
they hire her.
“My first paid radio gig was as Assistant Engineer for Fred Cole, the Chief Engineer at CKDA,
who noticed I got an A in soldering. The job included small fixes on headphones, dubbing
commercials to cart, and live operating the board for weekday jocks.”
After graduating from Camosun’s Applied Communications Program in 1977, she began work at
smaller market CKOK in Penticton, B.C. But having spent most of her life in cities she wanted to
get back. She began sending out demo tapes. This was how it was done. Cassettes.
She was also considering her style and her relationship to her audience. Back in Pittsburgh she
had listened in the early morning hours to Ellie Dylan on WABC, and in Chicago the great
Yvonne Daniels at WLS. “Dylan was okay. Daniels was wonderful but not ‘me’. I listened to my
old instructor Kerm, and I talked the way I chat up music with my friends. No schtick. Just me.

No jokes, but a sense of humour. And share the excitement, which was hard to muster when
the Bee Gees produced half the Top 20.”
Just after New Year’s 1978, Ellen got a call offering her a job in Vancouver. “Want to come to
the big city?” As it was her birthday, she thought it was a prank. The caller, Greg Heraldson, told
her to call a certain number when she got off the air. At home, she dialed the number. The
reply was “CKLG”.
On January 28, 1978, CKLG in Vancouver hired Ellie O’Day. The Vancouver Sun’s Denny Boyd
wrote about her arrival in his column. It was an event. Ellie O’Day was the first woman to be
hired in major market radio in Canada and among a handful of women on air in North America
and the UK.
Charles Campbell, the editor and light behind the eyes of Vancouver’s entertainment weekly
the Georgia Straight for over a decade, put it this way: “Ellie has impeccable musical taste, a
gently dry sense of humour, a solid measure of wisdom, and a very sexy voice. Of course, in
many universes, that’s not the formula for a perfect radio DJ. But in Vancouver in the 1970s, it
certainly was.”
Like most new hires, Ellie was given the graveyard shift. CKLG was fully automated, meaning
she had no creative input. The board worked much like a jukebox with a predetermined order
for playing predetermined music, until the moment when the carousel would freeze. At that
point she would play 45s until the engineer arrived and went behind a locked door to reboot
the system. But when she convinced the station she could reboot it herself, she got the key.
“About 3 am, I’d sneak into the room with the music cartridges (like smaller 8-track tapes) and
replace some of the current hits, which were mostly Bee Gees at the time, with great R&B: Ray
Charles, Otis Redding, Fontella Bass. I’d get calls from people saying you should play this all the
time, and I’d explain we had to keep this secret. Around 5am I’d restore everything and lock the
door.
“In the morning, the computer print-out would show that I played the required A2 and B4 and
C3, etc. But I didn’t play that music.”
Ellie was rocking radio right away.
She was reading the UK papers by then, and on her first trip to London in 1979, under the
banner of her newly formed O’Day Productions, she brought back records by Joy Division,
Buzzcocks, Stiff Little Fingers, and Dire Straits. “The Stiff Records promo guys took me to the
Hope & Anchor, and to a Lene Lovich rehearsal. I was smitten. I came home with a dozen or
more interviews.”
Continuing to make London her own, she often stayed at the storied Columbia Hotel. “The cool
thing about the Columbia was that it was the hotel new bands stayed at when they were in

London to tape Top of the Pops. Breakfast was included at this hotel, and in the morning, I’d
circulate in the breakfast room and introduce myself to bands, and ask would they be releasing
in Canada? If so, could they fit in an audio interview. At night, I’d go to concerts and clubs”.
Starting O’Day Productions marked another savvy step in forging her way in the radio and music
business. She caught the ear of CKLG veteran radio personality Doc Harris who suggested she
set up her own company.
He told her: “The station pays your company, and you get to write off expenses. Get yourself an
accountant.” Ellie figured out he knew about her record collecting addiction. Soon she was
getting contract work from CBC TV, and column-inch small change from the Georgia Straight.
The company persisted from 1978-2017.
As for the response to her on-air arrival, “Most of the guys were quite cordial, especially on AM.
The program directors were hard on me. The pay was close to minimum wage. It was when I
moved to CFOX where I seemed to butt a few heads – how much Led Zeppelin do you have to
play? I was quite stoked about the new UK Music Invasion. To be fair, I was given two outlets at
CFOX for the new music.”
One of those outlets was the 6pm to midnight shift. “11pm to midnight was called Side Show.
One night was The Import Hour, sponsored by Quintessence Records (later to become Zulu),
whose ads featured DOA and Pointed Sticks. My guest co-hosts were staff at Quintessence. Half
of what we played were local tracks, rather than imported records. I also pre-produced a
weekend morning show featuring interviews from the UK, especially those artists who were
touring in Canada, plus phone interviews with other bands coming to town.”
Eventually the interviewing was pushing out the DJing. And word was getting out to the indie
community to find her on CFOX. She loved radio – it was still about the music – but it was also
about the musicians. She quit CFOX one weekend in 1980 when the boss was away and got a
job at the new Phantasmagoria Records. At higher pay. This was the next step in a 45-year
career dedicated to music, the performing arts and the cultural life of this country.
To be continued…