It’s an image that has become synonymous with Christmas in North Bay; Scott Clark wearing his green elf suit.
It means the holiday season has arrived and the time of giving is here, and Clark has spent a lot of his adult life giving back to North Bay. From the Santa Fund to the Longest Morning, Clark has been a part of many events that have changed the lives for the better for people in the Gateway City and are still big events to this day.
But it might not have happened if not for Patty Star. She was the chair of Ontario Place in the late 1980s and was implicated in a political fraud scandal. She received a full pardon in 1996 and then wrote a book about the whole experience.
Clark says she was a guest on his radio show one afternoon. “She said to me ‘never forget the power you have as a broadcaster. The things that you say affect your community and can change your community for good. You have the ability to hold people accountable. You have an incredibly powerful platform,’ and I never forgot that. It was a real turning point for me.”
The Scarborough native came to North Bay in 1990 to be the morning show host on what is now KiSS 100.5, back when companies who owned radio stations still showed an appreciation for having local content. Right off the bat, Clark was coming up with ideas to raise awareness about an issue in the community with a fun and engaging promotion.
“Ray Thorne was the Executive Director of Community Living and asked me if I would get involved with a fundraiser, they wanted to initiate called, Pennies that make Change,” says Clark.
“At that time there was such a thing as pennies in Canada,” he jokes.
“But nobody ever used them, they all got stuck in a drawer or in a bucket. So, we asked people to donate their pennies and at the time, the North Bay Centennials were in town and they had a player named Chad Penny, so he was the perfect first celebrity chair of the event. He was our poster guy. It was my first learning experience of being connected with a charity and fundraising for people and working toward something for the common good,” says Clark.
“I had never done that before in my radio career and it took me on a certain path that really taught me about the generosity of North Bay.”
The next thing Clark gave to the community was his hair.
“In the early '90s I was on the radio with Erin Brooks and at the same time, my dad was battling cancer,” says Clark.
“I asked her about shaving her head for something, and she said she would do it to raise money for my dad. So, I said, what if we both shaved our heads and we raise some money and she thought it was a good idea. This was before Cops for Cancer and so this wasn’t a well-done fundraising thing yet.”
Eventually, they had carte blanche to go on air and talk about it every day and Clark says they received more attention for that than they thought possible.
“People would phone us, or talk to us at remotes and tell us about their family members who had battled cancer, those who had won, and some of those who were unsuccessful, and they dug in and just thanked us for raising awareness.”
Clark says, “We thought we were just doing a good thing; it would all be in good fun and a little dramatic at the end when we shaved our heads. But in the process, we learned about how our actions and our words and putting it all out there and how that was affecting families and the community as a whole. That really moved me, and we hit our target, shaved our heads and it really taught me something about the power of what we were doing.”
Another fundraiser that is still happening today that was rooted in what Clark calls his box of “dumb ideas” is the Longest Morning.
He says, “A gentleman from the Rotary Club mentioned they were no longer having a telethon to raise money for the local group and so I said, well before TV there were radio-a-thons. The idea was, what if we broke a world record where I go on the radio and be live the whole time. Crazy idea, right?”
Clark did some research and found that this is one of the top five records people consistently try to break from the Guinness Book of World Records and, at the time, the record was 74 hours.
“You had to be on air every 15 minutes. So, there is no sleep or long breaks or anything like that. A doctor told me the body is not designed to stay awake past a certain amount of time. People have been sent to the hospital trying to break this record. So, we decided we wouldn’t try and break the record, but we would go for two days.”
Clark says their goal was $25,000 but the end result was in the $40,000 range in their first year. He believes it was a hit because of a tie-in they had with Jeff Turl who was running the radio program at Canadore College. Clark says, “He got his students to interview the families that were going to benefit from the money raised, and they put together these vignettes that said the money stays here and there is a family that will be supported from those dollars that are raised. Well, the money just started pouring in after people heard those, it was insane.”
For over two decades now, the Carmine Ricciuti Christmas Special has become a staple in people’s holiday traditions.
“That started when my program director Andy Wilson said to me, ‘What are you doing for your show on Christmas Eve?’ And I didn’t have a clue,” says Clark.
“I was a regular customer of Carmine’s and he loved playing his accordion and I just thought why not do the Carmine Ricciuti Christmas Special and we would make him the local hero. He came into the studio and we had lots of laughs, we sang songs. Someone called in and said they had a Tickle Me Elmo toy, which at the time, was one of those toys that you just couldn’t get. People lined up for weeks trying to get this thing. Well, this caller said, ‘I have one, do you want to auction it off during the Carmine show and raise some money for the Santa Fund?’ We said ‘Sure!’ and that’s how, every year you see it starting to evolve. We moved it outside the studio, got into the community, and it's something that brings in more than $60,000 every single year.”
And those dollars going toward the Santa Fund is an organization which Clark is Chair of this year after Co-Chairing with Lachlan McLachlan for several years.
“Many years ago Lachlan approached me and said that he could really use a hand with the Santa Fund,” says Clark.
“I was honoured to come in and co-chair with him, he’s a prolific community focused giant, and asking me to join him was an honour.
“It was for sure the biggest thing that I had ever undertaken at the time. I wanted Lachlan to co-chair and stay on because he had so much knowledge of the history of the Santa Fund and he actually knew Art Haley and he knew the founders of the organization and so that depth of knowledge of this group of people who came together for the community, I didn’t want that to go away, his depth of knowledge has been fantastic.”
Clark says there are certain events in the community that are such big deals that being asked to help organize them is a “right of passage.”
“You’re asked to take a role on, and you have no idea that people think of you in that way because your first reaction is, really you want me? And then you get in and you learn the ropes and you successfully build these great relationships with people at these events and then you execute it and it becomes one of those things where you take it as an amazing learning experience. You’re able to do something that really, dynamically affected the community in a positive way, and then transitioning that leadership to a younger group that will take it on and I think that’s how legacy is created.”
