Treefest is put on by the Riverview Horticultural Society in the Fall. The Riverview Hospital land is home to a huge variety of tree types, making a yearly festival of conducted tree tours, and other horticultural displays and talks, a well-attended occasion. Interestingly, our Museum building is also in the Riverview grounds.
The Treefest organizers always book the EPR event trailer (courtesy of Meridian RV and EPR Financial). Originally, it was designed and owned by CKNW and known as the “Crystal Palace”. You may recall seeing it at the PNE and other remote broadcasts. These days, the trailer appears at many other local events, such as the Blue Mountain Music Festival (described elsewhere, and attended by SPARC).
Since Treefest is on a Sunday, it coincides with SPARC’s regular opening day, so we are able to originate our Sunday program from the trailer as a true “remote” broadcast, and have it heard on the Museum floor.
When we have the use of the trailer, we use the original CKNW control board, which is still in the trailer. In fact, most of the equipment used during its broadcast days is still in place, either at the operator’s desk, or in the rack behind the operator’s back (just barely discernible in the exterior picture of the trailer, near the open sliding-window). The major item that’s missing is the Onan power generator that, if needed, could run the entire unit, including air conditioning. Besides Treefest, we have done programs from the trailer in a similar manner for the Blue Mountain Music Festival in July.
Thanks to Meridian RV, we always are allowed to spend a couple of days beforehand at their facility, giving some TLC to the equipment. We must take our own “portable AC power” to work at their storage facility, since there is no hydro near the trailer in the lot. Once all circuits are checked or repaired, and switches cleaned, we add our own reel-to-reel and cartridge tape machines to the trailer and set up the levels. Pictured are an Ampex AG-600 and Revox PR-99, plus an ITC triple cart deck. We also supply the monitor-speaker amplifier.
On Treefest morning, Coquitlam Towing donates the trailer-move to the grounds. Next, we move our audio gear into place, run a long power cable, and begin our day’s programming. We feed the program up the hill to our SPARC building. Also, the Treefest’s shuttle bus does its rounds through the grounds, and the bus radio plays our music (from our low-power FM signal) for the whole day. Treefest is always a great joint event. The pictures show the trailer – notice the CKNW control board still on its desk, the original CKNW electric clock, plus the SPARC gear that we’ve added.
The board is a McCurdy, and is the same model as donated to SPARC by CJAV (see the pictures on this page for the Mackin House Remote, and also look at “Consoles” on the Studio News page for restoration details on our own McCurdy).
Notice the genuine CKNW sweater.