VOCM's transmission towers have collapsed under ice at least twice in the station's history, and both times the station was back on air within a day. That resilience isn't incidental to VOCM's story, it is more or less the entire story.
Built by a Father and Son in a Circular Road Bedroom
VOCM began as an experimental operation run by Walter Banks Williams III and his father out of the family home at 80 Circular Road in St. John's, after Williams, trained at RCA and American radio schools, secured a license from the Newfoundland Post and Telegraph Department on 22 December 1933, according to a documented history of the station. The station ran only a few hours a day at first, built and operated with equipment Williams assembled himself, years before it had an official commercial launch.
A Call Sign Almost Nobody Else Has
VOCM officially went to air on 19 October 1936, and at its commercial opening St. John's mayor Andrew Carnell jokingly suggested the call letters stood for "Voice of Carnell Mayor," before the station settled permanently on "Voice of the Common Man." That VO prefix is rarer than it sounds. It was issued specifically to stations in the Dominion of Newfoundland before it joined Canada in 1949, and according to Wikipedia's account of the station, VOCM is one of only four Canadian radio stations that still carries it, a direct on-air marker of Newfoundland's pre-confederation history that outlasted the political union itself.
Towers Down, Back on Air Within a Day
The station's physical resilience became a recurring theme of its own history. A 1958 freezing rain storm downed its towers and the station won federal approval to boost daytime power to 10,000 watts in the aftermath, and in 1984 ice buildup collapsed both of VOCM's 278-foot towers entirely. The station was back on air within roughly 24 hours, running off a nearby 250-foot FM tower and a standby 1,000-watt transmitter while permanent repairs caught up. A 1985 fire that destroyed a tuning hut led to another power increase, up to 20,000 watts, the following year, each disaster somehow followed by the station coming back stronger than before.
A Christmas Tradition That Takes Over the Whole Signal
VOCM switches its entire schedule to all-Christmas music every year, kicked off by Dial-a-Carol, a long-running on-air fundraising event held in late November. Pairing a full format switch with a charity drive is a heavier commitment than most stations make for the holidays, and it has become one of the fixtures listeners across the Avalon Peninsula associate directly with VOCM rather than with the holiday season generally.
Still Local, Under New Ownership
Ownership has changed hands repeatedly, from Joseph Butler's Colonial Broadcasting System in 1937 through Harry Steele's Newfoundland Capital Corporation in 2000 to Stingray Group's current control since 2018, yet the station has kept its "Local News Now" identity and talk programming like Open Line largely intact through every transition. That continuity, under four different ownership structures across nine decades, is not something most AM stations of this age can claim.
Nearly a century after two men built a transmitter in a St. John's bedroom, VOCM is still broadcasting on the same frequency it moved to in 1949, carrying a call sign that Newfoundland stopped issuing the same year. The towers keep falling. The station keeps not staying down.