Fred Latremouille (left) and Red Robinson on the set of CBC's "Let's Go" c. 1964.
By Tom
Hawthorn
The Globe and Mail
The Globe and Mail
March 21, 2015
Fred Latremouille's voice, as smooth as
cream liqueur, provided a background soundtrack for British
Columbia's baby boomers, who aged along with the popular broadcaster.
He first hit the airwaves in Vancouver
at age 17 in 1962, building a following on Top-40 radio stations as a
disk jockey spinning the latest rock and pop singles. By his 30s, he
had transformed from swinging teenaged heartthrob to wisecracking
television weatherman. His final public act was as an amiable and
affable morning radio host alongside Cathy Baldazzi, a traffic
reporter who would become his wife, on a laid-back show called
“Latremornings.”
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The death of Mr. Latremouille from
liver disease at 69 shocked many of his fans, as his boyish visage
and youthful vigour gave him an ageless presence.
A familiar voice on the airwaves for
decades, Latremouille's ability to connect with his audience made him
a much in-demand pitchman for radio and television commercials, where
he displayed a deft comic touch.
Like many of his peers, Latremouille
came to radio broadcasting as something of a loner, a boy who moved
often and heard on the airwaves the exciting sounds of Elvis Presley
and early rock ’n’ roll, finding in it an unseen community that
shared his interests.
Frederick Bruce Latremouille was born
on Oct. 22, 1945, in Nanaimo, B.C., to Margaret and Bruce
Latremouille. His father, a wartime pilot officer, trained other
Royal Canadian Air Force flyers on Tiger Moths. The couple divorced
when Fred was two. His mother later married Robert Harlow, the
regional director of CBC Radio, and the boy grew up in a duplex in
West Vancouver. Bill Good, a popular sportscaster, lived on the same
block. His namesake son and young Fred bicycled around the
neighbourhood and maintained a friendship that would see both become
legends in Vancouver broadcasting.
“We didn't so much go to school
together,” Bill Good Jr. said recently, “as skip school
together.”
Young Latremouille earned spending
money as a teenaged caddy at Gleneagles Golf Course, gaining a love
for the sport. At age 16, he spotted a newspaper advertisement
seeking an announcer for radio station CKYL in Peace River, Alta.
With a song about tumbleweeds playing in the background, the teenager
recorded an audition tape in the family basement that he mailed to
the station. He lied about his age, telling them he was 20. His ruse
was discovered when he arrived at the radio station, but, having
already invested the price of an airplane ticket, the station
retained the precocious youth, who dropped out of Grade 11 to read
the news and host a morning show.
The gig lasted about a year before he
returned to Vancouver, enrolled again in high school, and began
hanging out in the waiting room of radio station CJOR trying to
cajole the staff to listen to his tape. He pestered station manager
Vic Waters for months before being hired to handle an afternoon show
featuring country-and-western music. The young jock slipped onto the
playlist pop tunes of interest to his peers. He claimed to have been
the first in the city to play a record by the Beatles and was a keen
promoter of the Motown sound.
In 1964, he was lured away to a popular
hit-parade station whose boss jocks were known as the CFUN Good Guys,
billed as “tops on the teen scene,” and whose weekly charts were
called the CFUNtastic Fifty. He even took a pay cut to be able to
work at a station more dedicated to pop music. (In later years, as
his popularity and effect on the ratings became more obvious, he
proved to be a shrewd negotiator.) Mr. Latremouille won the coveted
assignment to act as master of ceremonies for the Beatles concert to
be held at Empire Stadium in Vancouver in August, 1964.
Unfortunately, he developed mononucleosis and the task fell to Red
Robinson, who had introduced Elvis Presley at the same venue seven
years earlier.
The following year Mr. Latremouille
played drums with the station's house band, the CFUN Classics, on a
rollicking instrumental song titled, “Latromotion,” released on
the London label. It first appeared on the CFUNtastic Fifty at No. 45
on Feb. 13, 1965. The tune spent seven weeks on the station's charts,
rising as high as No. 13. (The Classics formed the nucleus of the
band Chilliwack, chart-friendly rockers who enjoyed several hits in
the 1970s and ’80s.)
For a time, the station promoted him as
Fred Latrimo, though he soon reverted to his given name. Mr.
Latremouille (pronounced LAH-trah-moe) had been called, briefly, Fred
Lane, and, later, Fearless Freddie. He also created an alter ego
known as the Legendary Chief Raunchy Wolf, who wore a coonskin cap, a
fringed buckskin jacket and spoke in risqué double entendres.
In the mid-1960s, he was invited to
become a business partner in night clubs. He declined in the end, but
the night spots — one in Vancouver and the other in suburban New
Westminster — thrived under Latremouille's suggested name, The
Grooveyard.
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In an age of frenetic delivery and
motormouth patter, his cool insouciance stood out, and he was tabbed
to be host of television shows airing on the CBC in the 1960s,
including “Let's Go,” “Where It's At” and “New Sounds.”
He described Mr. Robinson, the first deejay to play rock ’n’ roll
in the city and a later coworker at CFUN and co-host of “Let's Go,”
as a mentor. For his part, Mr. Robinson says of his pupil, “greatest
natural talent I ever saw.”
A restless figure confident in his
abilities, Mr. Latremouille flitted from job to job, knowing he was
in demand. He worked briefly at CFAX in Victoria before returning to
Vancouver for two years at CKLG, a Top-40 rival to CFUN. At ’LG,
he joined with fellow jockey Roy Hennessey under the name Froyed to
record a parody of the Rolling Stones' “Ruby Tuesday” renamed
“Grubby Thursday.” The parody lyrics joked about unclean hippies
and rhymed DDT with LSD.
While he missed out on the Beatles,
Latremouille got to emcee a 1966 performance by the Rolling Stones.
“The Stones rolled out of a big black Caddy limo in a cloud of
marijuana fumes,” Latremouille once told Vancouver Sun columnist
Denny Boyd. “Some girls had a birthday cake for Mick Jagger, but he
just scooped up some icing on his finger and kept walking. Keith
Richards didn't say a word, but I talked a lot to Charlie Watts. When
they started, my mouth dropped open at how good they were, what a
great lead singer Jagger was. Then, right in the middle of 'Paint It
Black,' the kids charged the stage and all hell broke loose.” The
show included several arrests, broken windows, and a bomb scare.
The 1960s had reached Vancouver. The
radio host grew his blond hair into a mod, mop-top bowl with long
sideburns, while also wearing a velvet-trimmed Edwardian morning
coat, or a red serge military tunic in the Sgt. Pepper style. He
performed alongside Paul Revere and the Raiders and chugged Southern
Comfort with Janis Joplin. At public events, the deejay would be
mobbed like a rock star.
Mr. Latremouille became a co-editor of
the Georgia Straight newspaper in 1967 seven issues after its debut,
a time when the underground paper faced harassment from the police
and threats from Vancouver's mayor. “Sometimes we had to step over
the dopers on the floor to get work done,” he once said, “and the
Marxists were always coming in to tell us we were too soft.” He
personally sold the paper on street corners at 10¢ per copy and
conducted a telephone interview with John Lennon during his honeymoon
bed-in for peace with Yoko Ono in Amsterdam in March, 1969.
A diagnosis of testicular cancer in
1972 seemed to barely slow his pace, though the radiation treatment
would damage his bones so that he would be unable to golf in his
later middle ages. He was host of “Hourglass,” a dinnertime news
program airing on CBC-TV in Vancouver, and later showed up on the
dial on a lunchtime program titled “Fred and Friends,” which was
taped at locations around the city. By the early 1980s, he was the
weatherman on BCTV's “News Hour,” a ratings juggernaut in the
market.
He also appeared in bit parts in
Hollywood movies filming in Vancouver, including playing a cop in the
Donald Sutherland crime caper, “A Man, a Woman, and a Bank”
(1979), an airport guard in the George C. Scott horror movie, “The
Changeling” (1980), and a reporter in the made-for-TV thriller
about a serial killer, “Jane Doe” (1983).
Mr. Latremouille was a popular
spokesman for Chevron gas and Kokanee beer, but a series of spots on
behalf of the provincial government, called “The Province Reports,”
were criticized by some commentators for being propaganda
masquerading as news. The Opposition NDP complained of factual errors
putting the governing Social Credit party in a favourable light.
In 1984, he returned to C-FUN, where he
handled morning-show duties alongside a bright, young broadcaster
named Cathy Baldazzi, who reported on traffic and weather. They
married — his third, her first — in 1987. A move from C-FUN to
rival KISS-FM in 1992 shook up local radio lineups, as rivals
scrambled to counter the city's top-rated morning man. (At the same
time, Red Robinson wound up hosting the morning show at rival CISL.
“When he was on the air,” Robinson said of Latremouille, “the
ratings came.') The couple got Prime Minister Kim Campbell to join
them one morning, as she selected music and introduced the traffic
report. The pair retired in November, 1999, with Mr. Latremouille
saying it was time, as he told one newspaper, to “bury the alarm
clock, sleep in and hit some golf balls.” The couple returned to
the airwaves six years later on Clear-FM, broadcasting from their
suburban seaside home in which a studio had been built. After a year,
they retired for good, building a summer home on 25 acres on Prince
Edward Island.
While holidaying in Hawaii in 2003, the
couple invited B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell to dinner. The premier
helped himself to “two or three martinis” before having wine with
dinner, Mr. Latremouille said afterwards. The premier was pulled over
for speeding and arrested for drunk driving after leaving their home.
A breath sample an hour after his arrest registered a blood-alcohol
concentration of 0.149, well over the legal limit of 0.08. Mr.
Campbell later pled no contest and paid a fine. Mr. Latremouille
wondered aloud whether he should have “tackled” his friend before
letting him leave.
Like many broadcasters, Mr.
Latremouille dedicated much time to charity fundraising and was known
for promoting with his wife the annual Christmas Wish Breakfast, a
yuletide tradition in which people bring toys for distribution to
needy children.
The broadcaster was inducted into the
B.C. Entertainment Hall of Fame in 2006 and was named to the Canadian
Association of Broadcasters' Hall of Fame the following year.
Mr. Latremouille died on March 5 at
Scottsdale, Ariz., where he maintained a winter home. He leaves his
wife of 27 years as well as sisters, brothers, his stepfather and his
mother.
The broadcaster was a noted prankster,
responsible for mayhem during live shows. (He once set Bill Good
Jr.'s script afire as he read from it.) He incorporated fake wakeup
phone calls in his shows, including once calling a woman at a snore
clinic to tell her she'd be representing Canada at an international
snore-off.
The radio host was in the audience for
a taping of the “Tonight Show” while on holiday in Hollywood in
1988 when approached by a man who said he was looking for a Canadian
disc jockey. The man told Mr. Latremouille that host Johnny Carson
had taken ill, as had guest host Jay Leno. “I started to get
nervous,” Mr. Latremouille later confessed. “And then I really
got nervous when the guy asked me if I was funny.” He then was
handed a piece of paper letting him know he'd been pranked by friends
back home.
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