The Buffalo News Team Canada Couldn’t Resist
Irv, Rick, Tom—and the Channel 7 signal that crossed the border
There was a time when watching television in Southern Ontario was an adventure.
Before 500 channels, before CNN, before 24-hour news and certainly before YouTube, Canadian television viewers had a few channels to choose from. If you lived in Toronto, Mississauga, Etobicoke, Hamilton, St. Catharines or anywhere close to Lake Ontario, you discovered that the television antenna didn’t stop at the border.
The Americans were coming.
And one of the strongest signals was WKBW-TV Channel 7 from Buffalo.
For generations of Canadians, Channel 7 wasn’t just another American station. It was practically a local station from a city that happened to be on the other side of the Niagara River.
And at the centre of it all were three men:
Irv Weinstein.
Rick Azar.
Tom Jolls.
And every so often, you’d see the unmistakable presence of Clip Smith.
Together, they created something that television would have a hard time duplicating today.
They became personalities.
Not just newsreaders.
Not just a weatherman.
Not just a sports guy.
They became family members you never actually met.
“Topping Tonight’s Eyewitness News…”
That voice.
You knew it immediately.
Deep. Powerful. Deliberate.
Irv Weinstein.
You could be sitting in your living room in Toronto and hear that voice coming through the television, and suddenly something important had happened in Buffalo.
Or Tonawanda.
Or Niagara Falls.
Or Cheektowaga.
And somehow, you cared.
Irv had a unique way of writing and delivering the news. He loved alliteration and dramatic descriptions. Fires weren’t simply fires. They were spectacular blazes. Criminals became knife-wielding delinquents or pistol-packing punks.
He had a style that was part newspaper headline, part radio announcer and part Broadway performance.
And he knew exactly how to grab your attention.
WKBW had started out as an underdog. Weinstein famously joked that when he arrived, Channel 7 was essentially the fourth station in a three-station market, and that its ratings were worse than the sign-off test patterns on Channels 2 and 4.
Then Irv changed the game.
Instead of the stiff, formal newscasts that dominated local television, WKBW went for energy.
News wasn’t supposed to be boring.
It was supposed to move.
As Weinstein himself described the approach, they were aggressive and “razzle-dazzle.”
And Canadians loved it.
Then came Rick Azar
If Irv was the voice of authority, Rick Azar was Mr. Smooth.
Sports time meant Rick.
Bills.
Sabres.
Baseball.
Hockey.
Football.
And if you were a kid growing up in Southern Ontario, you could learn more about Buffalo sports from Rick Azar than you could from most Canadian television broadcasts.
Azar was actually the first voice ever heard when WKBW-TV signed on in November 1958.
He eventually became WKBW’s sports director and remained there for 24 years. He was there for the Sabres’ first game at the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium and covered some of the great moments in Buffalo sports history.
But there was something else about Rick.
He looked like a television sports announcer was supposed to look.
Smooth.
Polished.
Confident.
Irv himself described Rick as a “solid professional” and “Mr. Smooth.”
And then there was…
Commander Tom
Every Canadian kid knew Tom Jolls.
Maybe you didn’t know his name.
Maybe you didn’t even know that he was the weatherman.
But you knew Commander Tom.
And when the evening news came on, Tom Jolls could go from children’s television personality to serious meteorologist without missing a beat.
His weather reports became part of the culture.
There was the Weather Outside.
There was the Weather Word.
There was his famous weather stick.
And there was that phrase that practically became a Buffalo trademark:
“…and cooler by the lake!”
A beautiful day?
Salubrious.
That word became so associated with Jolls that people in Western New York knew exactly what it meant.
But Tom had another line that sent parents scrambling to look at the clock.
“It’s 11 o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”
That phrase became one of the most recognizable parts of the Channel 7 experience.
For Canadian parents, it was almost like having an American neighbour looking through the television screen and asking:
“Okay, kids. That’s enough television. Time for bed.”
And then there was Clip Smith
Every once in a while, the familiar Channel 7 lineup would have another recognizable face.
Clip Smith.
He became part of that larger WKBW personality machine—the kind of television where the people on the screen weren’t interchangeable.
You knew who you were watching.
That was the secret.
Today, you can turn on a news channel and sometimes have no idea who the anchor is.
Back then?
You knew.
You knew Irv.
You knew Rick.
You knew Tom.
And you knew their voices before you even looked at the screen.
The Border Didn’t Matter
The strange thing was that WKBW wasn’t really our station.
It was Buffalo’s station.
But the signal didn’t care about international boundaries.
Southern Ontario viewers could pull in Channel 7, and WKBW itself recognized that it served a substantial audience north of the border. The station’s own history notes that its news programming served many viewers in Southern Ontario.
So a television station in Buffalo became part of Canadian childhood.
You could sit in Toronto and watch a Buffalo snowstorm.
You could hear about a fire in Tonawanda.
You could watch Rick Azar talk about the Bills.
You could watch Tom Jolls standing outside getting blasted by lake-effect snow.
And then Irv would come on and make the whole thing sound like the biggest story in North America.
The Famous Channel 7 Sound
And then came the music.
That unmistakable Eyewitness News sound.
The opening.
The graphics.
The dramatic theme.
The announcer.
Then:
“Topping tonight’s Eyewitness News…”
You were hooked.
WKBW’s format drew from the fast-moving “Action News” approach associated with Philadelphia’s WPVI, combined with Weinstein’s own “Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio News” philosophy.
And that’s why it felt different.
It wasn’t simply:
Here are today’s stories.
It was:
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED TODAY!
And the personalities made it entertaining.
The Canadian Eyewitness News Ritual
For a kid growing up in Toronto in the 1960s, 70s or 80s, the evening could go something like this:
Dinner.
Homework.
Maybe Hockey Night in Canada.
Maybe Channel 7.
And if the antenna was positioned just right, the picture was actually pretty good.
If it wasn’t?
You got snow.
Ghosting.
Horizontal lines.
A little static.
Maybe somebody had to stand beside the television.
Or worse…
“Go turn the antenna!”
And somebody would yell from the living room:
“HOW IS IT NOW?”
“NO!”
“WHAT?”
“TURN IT BACK!”
“HOW ABOUT NOW?”
“GOOD!”
“DON’T MOVE!”
And there you were, watching Irv Weinstein through a television picture that looked like it had travelled through three thunderstorms to get to Toronto.
But nobody cared.
Because it was Channel 7.
More Than News
The remarkable thing about Irv, Rick and Tom was that they didn’t just report Buffalo.
They became part of Buffalo.
Their 30-year run together became the longest-running anchor team in Buffalo television history and one of the defining institutions of WKBW.
And their influence crossed the border.
Canadians didn’t need to live in Buffalo to know the personalities.
Irv became the guy who made every story sound important.
Rick became the guy who told you what happened in sports.
Tom became the guy who told you whether you needed a coat—and whether the weather was salubrious.
And when the clock approached 11, Tom had one final question.
“It’s 11 o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”
Funny thing was…
The kids probably weren’t watching Channel 7 anymore.
They were probably downstairs watching the second television.
Because somebody had discovered something else on late-night television.
But that’s another Toronto story.
The Legacy
Irv Weinstein retired in 1998. Rick Azar had left the anchor team in 1989, and Tom Jolls continued with WKBW until 1999.
But by then, the damage had already been done.
They had permanently etched themselves into the memories of two countries.
Ask someone who grew up around Buffalo or Southern Ontario during that era about WKBW and you’ll often get the same reaction:
A smile.
Then they’ll imitate Irv’s voice.
Someone will say:
“It’s 11 o’clock…”
Someone else will add:
“…and cooler by the lake!”
And inevitably, somebody will remember salubrious.
That’s how you know they weren’t just television personalities.
They were part of our lives.
Before smartphones.
Before cable news.
Before the internet.
Before hundreds of channels.
There was Channel 7.
There was WKBW.
And there was that unforgettable trio:
Irv.
Rick.
Tom.
And for countless Canadian viewers, Buffalo was never really that far away.
It was right there in the living room.
On Channel 7.