Northern Stars

A password will be e-mailed to you. This website was founded by writer-director Ralph Lucas as an offshoot of an idea for a documentary series titled Northern Stars The Canadian History of Hollywood. Launched before the .ca suffix was created, the research for the documentary series went online as Northernstars.net, a url which is still active. Whe... n it was launched it was just the latest in a long line of projects designed to document and celebrate all things Canadian, as Lucas likes to say. His first venture was the publication in the mid-1960s of a tabloid newspaper devoted to Canadian music. This was in the pre-CanCon years. In the first edition, Lucas wrote an editorial calling for more Canadian music on Canadian radio stations. CRTC regulations would come almost five years later. During a broadcast career that lasted 22 years, every station Lucas would program or manage would always exceed the minimum quotas. Every station also enjoyed increased ratings, but that had more to do with the entire programming mix, not just the music. In 1977, ten years after the national celebration of Canada`s 100th birthday and Montreal`s magnificent Expo 67, there was little of that Expo feeling left in Canada and even less in Montreal as the Province of Québec had elected its first separatist government just one year earlier. Lucas, a fan of Canadian history since grade school, had been collecting odd bits and pieces of information for years and decided it was time that some of that history reached a much larger audience. By then, he had become an award-winning radio writer-producer, turning out commercials, satirical programs, and the occasional work of science fiction. And so he turned his talents to creating a series that would run on Canadas first radio station, CFCF. The series had as its foundation in the fact that the country was about to celebrate its 110th birthday, but far more than mere numbers, there was So Much More to Celebrate. Fifty-two 90-second programs were written. They were produced by CFCFs Keith ...Read More