Obituary: Pamela Burge, legendary Vancouver radio DJ, remembered for humour, feistiness (2024)

Pamela Burge was one of the big stars of Vancouver radio, as both a DJ and program director, from the late 1960s to the 1980s.

Burge, then known as Timothy M. Burge, had the first underground/psychedelic radio show in Canada at CJOR in 1967.

In 1996, she transitioned, becoming Pamela Burge.

“Back then it was very tough,” said Pam’s daughter, Erin. “It wasn’t very common,” she added, saying that not many people knew what it was to transition.

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“She encountered a lot of resistance, I would say, but there was also a lot of supportive people. It was very divided.”

Burge died Aug. 3 at a care home in Kelowna. She was 79.

Pam elaborated on her transition to Vancouver Sun columnist Malcolm Parry in 1996.

“I knew I was transsexual, spending my life trapped in the wrong body and knowing I had to do something about it,” Burge said. “My whole choice of a career was hiding behind a microphone.”

Blessed with a great sense of humour, she dropped her voice while talking to Parry and cracked: “I could be a morning team. ‘Now with the traffic – here’s Pam.’ ”

Burge was born Dec. 6, 1944, in Weston-super-Mare, England, which Erin Burge described as “a little seaside community in the south of England.”

She moved to Vancouver with her family when she was six. One of her friends at Bayswater Elementary and Kitsilano High School became another legendary Vancouver DJ, J.B. Shayne.

“Tim was pretty tough,” Shayne recalls. “A guy named Reggie Riggs came after me one time. Riggs was picking on me, and Pam as Tim came up and said ‘leave him alone’ and punched him in the face.”

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Shayne thinks Burge started off in radio in Lethbridge before coming back to Vancouver and landing a nighttime show at CJOR. When Burge started playing underground rock, it was revolutionary.

“I was travelling around Shaughnessy with (fellow DJ Fred) Latremouille, and we heard (Burge) play the Velvet Underground,” Shayne said. “I could not believe it.”

Burge was supposed to be doing a blues show.

“I just cracked up, and knew that (she) was on the same page as me.”

Another longtime friend and DJ, John Tanner, said Burge had a great on-air presence.

“Very mellow and knowledgeable, always lots of information about the artist,” said Tanner.

“I remember the first time I heard a Boy George song, she was pontificating about this artist who wore makeup and so on. I guess that appealed to her at the time, because she was still a guy on the outside.”

Burge turned on to the rock underground after going to the Monterrey Pop Festival in California in 1967.

“She saw a whole bunch of shows and listened to the radio stations in San Francisco and found out about the new underground sound,” said Tanner.

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“She came back and reported to Frank Callaghan at CKLG-AM. It was the new music, the underground sound, and Frank wanted to do something with LG-FM, they were just doing classical music. Frank said ‘this is great.’ So in the spring of ’68, LG went to the underground sound, LG-FM. And that was that.”

Burge would go on to work for several stations in Vancouver and Kelowna, including LG-FM, CKVN, CKNW and CFMI. And she could be tough as a program director.

“When she went to CKNW, she told me ‘you wouldn’t want to work for me,’” said Shayne.“She was doing all kinds of medications, all kinds of drugs, I guess that was to disguise the fact that he was a she underneath it all.”

Outside of radio, Burge worked with people who had disabilities. And she kept living on her own terms, even while dealing with cancer in the latter part of her life.

“She loved to party,” said Erin Burge. “That went to the last month, really. She was always down for a party.”

“She liked her shot of whiskey at noon or whatever, she liked her bottle of wine, she liked her pot, she liked her tobacco,” said Tanner. “She said ‘I’ve liveda hard life, and if I go, well, it’s my own fault.’”

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Pamela Burge was married and divorced twice and leaves one daughter, Erin.

jmackie@postmedia.com

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