My love-hate relationship with the privacy graveyard that is Facebook reached a ten on the hate level this morning when I found out that a colleague had used the status update to say goodbye.

 

CFNY's Martin Streek took his life at the age of 45 shortly after he wished his loved ones well and made a good natured pledge to reunite soon...but not too soon.  Martin was let go after two decades with one frequency in Toronto radio and it had to hurt.  I only had seven years at 102.1 and when it was suggested that I should be on my way it was a punch to the gut.  I didn't want to leave.

 

I never thought it would kill me.  But I was only 26.  And there were other opportunities once I did the four to six weeks of beating myself up over circumstances that were beyond my control.

 

When a radio personality is let go they always think they will never be behind another microphone for the rest of their life. That's a fact.  There is a small circle of survivors in the Toronto business who always seem to bounce back and land a gig in another station's lineup because too many of this city's program directors are afraid to look beyond the 416.

 

Unfortunately, there is a point to that.  My experience in other Canadian cities tells me that there is a very limited amount of talent out there.  I have to blame the radio "schools" churning out grads who have no business being in the business and for too many managers, "they'll do". 

 

I didn't know Martin Streek very well.  He was a shadow lurking the Sprit of Radio hallways by the time I moved on and I know his brother, a friend of our morning show, had introduced him to the people responsible for the amazingly popular CFNY video roadshow.  Marty was the longhair who lugged albums from gig to gig.  I was years away from the Spirit when I took notice of Marty's growing popularity as an on-air personality, seemingly the heir to Chris Sheppard's live-to-air club gigs.

 

When I came back to the station cluster that includes The Edge there were probably three people I knew before 1987 and Martin was one of them.  But we had no common background or anything with which we could catch up.  I did see him, from my perch on the "grumpy old man" AM station, as someone the younger set at the Edge adored and admired.

 

I always wondered if these Edge youngsters realized Martin was four years younger than this grumpy old man.  Probably not, and they wouldn't care.  It's how you present your age not how you mark it.

 

Nobody fired in radio, for whatever reason, is given an opportunity to say goodbye.  That hurts.  You're at home, your work email account suspended and you're praying that the boss is being innundated with demands that you return immediately.

 

Sometimes he is.  Sometimes, as in Martin's case from what I've been reading online, people aren't even paying attention.  What is guaranteed is that the decision is final and you've got to manage your severance properly and find something else before you become so irrelevant, you're doing Google searches to see if your name and "radio" are in the same result.

 

I don't know about Martin's demons but I have my hunches.  This business is brutal if you're working outside your demographic.  Even if you still "sound" young, you're out in public and I remember one CFNY jock in the '80s getting razzed off a stage because his hairline had gone all George Costanza. 

 

Within a year he was on another station spinning Lionel Ritchie tunes.

 

And those same idiots at the club were probably complaining to his boss about his sudden departure.

 

One of my closest friends at the old CFNY lost his job and died a few years later under mysterious circumstances.  I've always suspected he'd had enough and made a very difficult decision.  Nobody really knows what happened because there was no note.  No cell phones.  No status updates and no memorial pages to attribute blame and make it about you and not the person who lost hope.

 

Martin may, just may, have lost faith in the business of radio; but even the self-professed radio haters today made it very clear that terrestrial radio with real personalities who have something to say and can connect still mean something, even though they blast the very medium that made the connection.

 

The connection Martin had with his listeners leaves me with something everybody in the so-called obsolete radio business can take comfort ....even if our friend lost sight of it yesterday.

 

Hope.