Bearing a gift beyond price, almost free

I grew up to one of the better FM radio stations in Canada. At least, it was pretty good while I was growing up and still living at home, before it succumbed like most other radio stations, to the format chain gang. I station I speak of is CHOM-FM, 97.7. Only after I left Montreal to join the military did I realize how good of a station CHOM was and how crappy and uninspiring were the other stations I would be exposed to. Especially Kingston. Oh man, their radio selection was le suck. Luckily, where I was in eastern Canada, we were able to benefit from being close to many radio markets, and on a good day, we had some decent music wafting across the border from New York state. But on a bad day, it was brutal.

Thankfully, I made a friend in David Devlin, who brought me into his world in Toronto, where although most of radio had also joined the format chain gang, there was one shining beacon of hope and originality in an upstart little station at the frequency 102.1, with the call letters CFNY. This station's motto? The Spirit of Radio.

Now that phrase may sound familiar to you if you're a fan of the band Rush, and it should. Rush wrote a song named The Spirit of Radio, and it was an homage to CFNY:

"Fans started referring to it as the Spirit of Radio, which was used as their catch phrase for some time and also inspired the Rush song "The Spirit of Radio". Unable to mention CFNY directly on the Permanent Waves album containing the track for fear of alienating airplay on other stations, the band instead ensured the catalogue number of the album was 1021 - a nod to the station's 102.1 FM frequency." (from the Wikipedia article)

I wish we still had stations like that....