Neal’s Story

Amanda: This is Ryerson Rewind — a podcast featuring alumni, sharing their fondest memories from Toronto Metropolitan University.

Neal: My name is Neal Sandy, Radio and Television Arts, 1968, which means I’m really old. One of my fondest memories was my voice teacher, his name was Maurice Dessertie, and Maurice Dessertie was a great fan of Johnny Carson, and Maurice Dessertie used to come into class he would say “I’m going to teach you about five or six voices today”. So he’d start out with voice number one, voice number two, and they were all different, right up to five or six voices, and he was sort of trying to get us to try and imitate the way that Johnny Carson would speak on his TV show, The Tonight Show, at the time because he was a great fan of Johnny Carson. So fond memories of Maurice Dessertie who died last year who died at the age of 92. And then we took a course called Political Geography, and the professor's name there was Tom Sosa, and Tom was from the Caribean Islands, and he was like razor thin, about six foot two, and used to speak in this wonderful Caribean accent, to us about, you know, the Political Geography course. And he was of the opinion that if you were raised and born in a Northern climate, you move fast. You didn’t hang around and have long lunches, you had work to do. But Tom Sosa was from the Islands, so he said, ‘you have to learn how to move more slowly, your heart will thank you’. And Tom had a particular way of describing the mentality and the movements of Northern climates versus the Caribean. He said ‘It’s the heatin’ and the coolin’’. So the coolin’ of course, good ol’ Toronto, and the heatin’ was where he came from. And so that’s one of the things we joked about, a lot. About our professors. And we loved them all. And they loved us. One of the other fond memories I have of my RTA days was going on the radio, for the first time ever in my life. And I had wanted to be on the radio when I started the course, and I got a chance to be on the radio, at the Toronto Metropolitan University station of those days, which was CJRT. Which still uses those call letters and it’s the Jazz station, Jazz FM 91. OK, so CKLN came after that, but I was on CJRT, doing an afternoon drive show called “College Circuit', really corny. But we’d play music, and I’d do news, and weather, and things, and I was absolutely thrilled to be on my own show. And so that’s one of my other fond memories of the RTA program. And there was a guy by the name of Ted O'Reilly, who was a graduate of the RTA program, before me by a couple of years, but he was doing a program every night at CJRT Jazz Program, which incidentally he did for some 30 or 35 years before he retired, and I got to know Ted. Years later, years and years later, after working at CFRB and other radio stations in Toronto, I ended up at Jazz FM91 and Ted was still there! And so I did the news and he did the show. You know this was like mid-morning, and you know in those days, like today, people graduating from Toronto Metropolitan University in that program, were highly respected in the industry. Everybody knows everybody, and so those memories are wonderful to have.

Amanda: This podcast is a production of the Ryerson University Alumni Association. I’m Amanda Cupido, a proud member of the board of directors, and the producer and editor of this podcast. For more stories like the one you just heard visit torontomu.ca/alumni.