Niagara GHRS Radio Broadcasts on CKTB in 2005

If you tune an AM dial around St. Catharines, one frequency keeps company with the morning coffee and the evening drive: 610. CKTB has been there, off and on the same number, since 1930, and the station's long run through changing owners, frequencies and formats is a chapter of Niagara broadcast history that a haunted folklore magazine can read as local storytelling. This article follows the record behind CKTB News: who built it, what it sounded like, and what callers heard when they rang the studio.

The story of a haunted region is often the story of its voices, and for more than nine decades the voices of the Niagara Region have passed through this station. That makes its history worth setting down exactly, the way a heritage body would, and the facts below come from the broadcaster's encyclopedia entry and the pages that entry itself cites.

What was the station originally called?

The call sign stands for Taylor and Bate, the names of the original owner recorded alongside it. The station signed on in 1930, founded by Edward T. Sandell. It launched as a phantom station of CKOC in Hamilton, meaning it shared that station's programming rather than producing its own from the start, and it began life at 1120 kilocycles.

Its early decades show how quickly the dial moved in that era. CKTB shifted to 1200 in 1933, to 1230 in 1941, to 1550 in 1946, to 620 in 1950, and finally to 610 in 1959, where it has stayed. Each move belongs to a wider reordering of North American AM allocations, which the station's own history records as routine housekeeping for the period.

Studios in a canal promoter's mansion

The station's studios sit on Yates Street in downtown St. Catharines, in the former mansion of William Hamilton Merritt, the main promoter of the first Welland Canal. The transmitter is sited on Grassy Brook Road east of Port Robinson. That combination, a landmark downtown address and a rural transmitter plot, is typical of how Ontario radio grew: a heritage building for the microphones, open land for the towers.

For anyone tracing stories about old Niagara buildings, the mansion is the detail that matters. A house connected to the Welland Canal's promoter became a working newsroom, and the same walls that once belonged to canal politics later held the microphones for morning talk shows.

How did the station's owner change over the years?

Ownership changed hands many times, and the sequence is worth knowing because it explains the shifts in programming. In 1936, CKTB became a founding network affiliate of CBC Radio as a privately owned station. In 1944, it affiliated with CBC's Dominion Network, an affiliation that held until the Dominion Network was dissolved in 1962. Sandell died in 1943, and the station was acquired the following year by Niagara District Broadcasting.

Niagara District Broadcasting launched an FM sister station in 1949, and at first CKTB-FM largely simulcast its AM counterpart. That station today is CHTZ-FM at 97.7 MHz. The stations were acquired by Standard Broadcasting in 1980. Standard sold CKTB to Affinity Radio Group in 1997, Affinity was acquired by Telemedia in 2000, and Standard reacquired the station when it purchased Telemedia in 2002.

Then came a decade of consolidation. In October 2007, Astral Media acquired Standard Broadcasting's terrestrial radio and television assets, including CKTB. In July 2013, most of Astral Media's broadcasting properties including CKTB were sold to Bell Media, a subsidiary of Bell Canada Enterprises. On February 8, 2024, Bell Media announced the sale of several of its stations to Whiteoaks Communications Group, the CRTC approved the purchase on December 19, 2024, and on June 16, 2025, Whiteoaks took ownership. The company stated there would be no major changes to CKTB's programming, and at the same time the station added a new local morning program hosted by Gene Valaitis, described as a veteran Toronto radio personality.

What does CKTB sound like now?

The format is talk radio, a mix of locally produced and nationally syndicated Canadian talk shows. Weekdays begin with "Niagara in the Morning with Steph Vivier." Gene Valaitis hosts midday from 9 to noon. In afternoon drive time, "The Drive" is heard, with Jon "Gonzo" Mark. Late nights are repeats of weekday shows. The branding is CKTB News, the station carries affiliations with The Canadian Press and NPR, and it lists CHRE-FM and CHTZ-FM as sister stations.

Newsroom operations are handled by Bonnie Heslop and Matt Holmes, with additional support from Christine Janzen and Tom McKay. News in off-peak hours comes from the Canadian Press. Following the Golden Horseshoe takeover, CFRB 1010 AM Toronto continued to provide select programming through syndication, including "The Vassy Kapelos Show" and "Shane Hewitt and The Night Shift."

The American host Canada only heard here

For years CKTB was the only affiliate in Canada to carry the controversial The Phil Hendrie Show, until 2006, when Hendrie retired for the first time. The station continued to air the best of Phil Hendrie on Saturdays from 6 to 10 p.m. until April 2007, when the show was replaced with other programming. With Hendrie's return to radio, CKTB returned him to the lineup on a daily basis, but the show was subsequently dropped and replaced by Dr. Joy Browne, another American program. Browne's program was also subsequently dropped in favour of two-hour-long best-of programming blocks, edited from the day's local programming.

Any listener who built a routine around a syndicated host and then lost it on short notice knows that particular radio grief. Program schedules in this market move quietly, and the station's own account of that run is a reminder that a show you remember hearing can vanish from the log without a farewell.

Who counts the listeners?

St. Catharines is sometimes considered part of the Buffalo radio market when dealing with syndicated programming, but CKTB does not usually show up in Buffalo's Nielsen Audio ratings. The stated reasons are a lack of knowledge of the station, its distance from Buffalo combined with its presence on the AM dial, and its primarily Canadian content during the day. BBM, by contrast, registers CKTB as a popular station in the St. Catharines market, with audience share comparable to that of CHML's audience share in nearby Hamilton.

MeasureSt. Catharines marketBuffalo market


Ratings bodyBBMNielsen Audio
CKTB presencePopular, share comparable to CHML in HamiltonUsually does not appear

It is a neat illustration of a border market's arithmetic: the same signal can be a fixture on one side of the water and a stranger on the other. For a folklore reader, that split matters, because the stories a station tells its own region rarely travel as far as the region travels.

What did the on-air line up look like to the neighbours?

Past hosts of locally produced programming include Tim Denis, Joe Cahill, Kevin Jack, Stephanie Sabourin, Rob McConnell, Larry Fedoruk, Chris Biggs, John Michael, Shelby Knox and Tom McConnell. The station's technical record lists 10,000 watts of power by day and 5,000 watts at night, a class and licensing authority recorded without further figures. It also lists a repeater on 102.9 CKLH-FM HD2 in Hamilton, and the official website is cktbnews.com.

If you have lived in the Niagara Region long enough, some of those names are the sound of a commute or a kitchen radio. Others belong to an earlier order of the day, before syndication filled the hours that local hosts once held alone. Radio history is oral history that was never written down until someone kept a log, and the list of past hosts is one of the few places those shifts remain visible.

Where the record goes quiet

A folklore magazine reads a station's history differently from an encyclopedia, and it should be honest about the difference. The account leaves the daily texture of early broadcasts thin: what an average 1930s hour contained, how the switch to the Dominion Network was announced to listeners, or whether any program from the Yates Street studios was ever recorded and kept are not set out. The encyclopedia entry, and the pages it cites for verification, do not publish those details, and the station's own web address is listed without a program archive.

That gap is where a local record can still be built. If a relative worked at the mansion on Yates Street, or if you have a cassette of a call-in show from the years before syndication, a regional archive is the place that material belongs.

Ask yourself what you remember hearing at 610, and whether anyone else still has the tape. The Limestone Lantern editorial team can be reached at contact@ontarioghosts.org.