Jim Hum, CKRK Original, Passes Away at 83

On March 30^th, 1981, the first voice ever heard on this radio station was that of Jim Hum. He was the first morning host on the air, our second program director and was a technical wizard who more than anyone kept ‘KRK’ on the air during challenging early years. K1037 is profoundly saddened to announce that he passed away at 6am this morning in hospital at Shawville, Quebec, where he had been living for the past few years. Jim was also a fixture at Echoes of a Proud Nation Pow Wow where he, since it’s outset, had a popular booth selling tattoos, posters and other paraphernalia. This past Saturday he announced that this would be his last powwow, and that he would hand everything over to his friend and business partner Joel Peterson. Those words would prove to be sadly prophetic:

“The late Janice Cross, I believe some of the family members and friends were trying to find someone to be able to work at a booth with him, because Jim, by himself, at the time he was into his 60’s, so he couldn’t move as quickly as he could so I was able to get myself a summer job, which, honestly, I didn’t think would goin to last this long. With every single year it started becoming tradition, I basically got to watch the entire community grow over the years.”

Joe Delaronde on Jim Hum’s importance to the functionality of the station in the early days:

“When the station was first built, it was created from the Cultural Center. Conway Jocks was the original manager and he did the talkshow and Jim was the ‘nuts and bolts’ guy and when the station was first built, CJAD donated equipment, put it together so we’d have a working studio, but it was all old stuff, it was all used and it broke down very frequently. If we didn’t have Jim Hum there, the station wouldn’t have survived because if it broke down ‘x’ amount of times, people would have just said: ‘ah well, it was a good idea while it lasted,’ but that wasn’t Jim.”

Along with the late Conway Jocks, Jim Hum was one of the two main pioneers in the station’s growth and importance. When the station moved to the new premises and our current location, on July 11^th, 2014, Jim came back to host the final broadcast in the original building. Jim Hum was 83-years-old