Ted Tevan, one of Montreal’s talk radio greats, inconveniently died on Friday night, the time when statistically news has its smallest impact. Though it might have taken a few days, his colleagues and others have taken notice and offered their thoughts and stories.
I never met Tevan myself, so I have nothing to add, but I wanted to compile everything in one place.
- The paid obit, listing funeral information
- A brief obit at CTV Montreal
- A brief obit at CJAD
- An obit with lots of biographical information by Earl Zukerman in Monday’s Gazette
- An obit from the Cornwall Free News
- A brief obit from Canadian Press
- An obit from the Whig-Standard in Kingston, where Tevan was from
- Ted Bird compiles Facebook comments on his Gazette blog
- Mitch Melnick
- Mark Korman’s Montreal Radio Blog
- Paul Graif in the Local Seeker
- Shawn O’hara
- Robert Agouri
- Carmi Levy
- Ian Halperin
- Mike Cohen
- Johnny Bertolo
- Comments on Twitter
- Dave Stubbs has posted audio of a discussion with Randy Tieman on Team 990 about Tevan (MP3)
- On YouTube, video of him behind the mic, audio taken from cassette tapes (“You’re gone” comes at 7:52) and audio of his signoff
- From Marc Denis’s website on CFOX, audio of Tevan doing a Winner’s Circle horse racing report in 1973
Gabriel Morency talked quite a bit on his show Monday about Tevan. Mitch Melnick also devoted his show on Tuesday to Tevan (clips are posted here and will be aired again on Saturday), with interviews with people like Aaron Rand, Dickie Moore, Mitch Garber, Bill Brownstein and a bunch of other people I’m too young to remember.
Tevan’s funeral was Wednesday at 1pm at Paperman & Sons, 3888 Jean Talon St. W. CTV’s Cindy Sherwin was there.
Thanks for putting this together Steve.
I spent a good part of high school listening to sportsrap at night. And I’m proud to say I even got shot down once too.
Ted was informative and entertaining.
RIP Ted, you were one of a kind.
I never missed one of his shows. Never. He was the best radio announcer in Montreal sports history. I too got gunned down by Ted, and I taped it. I gotta find the cassette and have a few laughs one day. He was a big part of my weeknights. He’s the reason I eat boiled chicken sandwiches.
I’ve spoken to one of the filmmakers from Clyde Henry and apparently there’s some inaccuracies in Earl’s otherwise excellent Gazette piece. I understand that this is not going to be a full NFB co-pro, and the time-line mentioned for the film is a bit off. Clyde Henry are Oscar-nominated experts in stop motion animation (among other things) and it’s a tantalizing project, though I don’t know at all if they’ll be using animation or live action for the Tevan film.
Hey, Thanks for this, it is awesome! Is there anyway to get the Melnick stuff in mp3 format? I have hunted but no luck so far. I have problems with the team990 streaming player.
Found em. :)
A couple more tributes to Ted Tevan have been written and should be added to your fine collection:
Paul Graif’s column about Ted Tevan (Page 8) at:
http://www.westend.thelocalseeker.com
Also Mitch Melnick’s blog at:
http://melnickblog.blogspot.com/
Thanks Earl, I’ll add them.
Ted Tevan never had to reload that chocolat bullet machine gun.
Paul Graif of CTV Montreal was the first to report this, I think they were friends.
When I was in high school in the early 1980s, I listened to Tevan for one reason – to hear him shoot people with his guns. But, after I matured, I could not listen to the guy. He was boring and repetitive. He could spend entire segments of his show talking about nothing, he loved to drop names (always the same ones and mostly the namses of people no one ever cared about) and he had a huge ego.
Of course, when a media personality dies, other media types circle the wagons and pay tribute, but this does not mean that Tevan was actually good at broadcasting. He did give many Montreal broadcasters their start in radio, so they owe him something and will not talk bad about him. But, really, what did Tevan do? He was most known for hosting a late evening radio call-in show on a radio station that was always playing second fiddle to another station on the AM dial. Indeed, the station Tevan worked for had poor reception in many areas of English-speaking Montreal.
After Tevan was fired in the early 1980s, he could not get regular radio work and had to settle for gigs on little known stations. Indeed, Tevan wasn’t even paid for his work. He had to sell ad space on his own shown and use some of the cash to pay himself.
Let’s explode the Tevan myth. The guy was not a god of broadcasting.
Regardless of his radio talent, my sympathies to his family.
Just thought I’d put an updated link to Gabriel Morency’s full show where he memorializes Ted Tevan, since the link up there is dead. http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/16671723