The show's sponsors got in on the fun as well, as Gentile and Binge's trademark was their ability to turn a standard 60-second commercial announcement into a comedy sketch that could run for three minutes or longer.

For example, according to popular legend, after promoting a miracle weight-loss aid called "Dr. Quack's Slim Jim Reducing Pills" with the story of an obese woman who got stuck in a telephone booth, Gentile and Binge received over $3,000 from listeners requesting a $1 trial of the pills as advertised, and the station had to hire a clerk to return the money.

[9] Gentile and Binge were a fixture on CKLW until moving to WJBK radio (now WLQV) in 1948, attracting audience ratings as high as 80% at their peak.

As television's popularity boomed, CKLW, like many other stations, coped with the changes by replacing the dying network radio fare with locally based disc-jockey shows.

Throughout most of the 1950s and into the mid-1960s, CKLW was basically a "variety" radio station which filled in the cracks between full-service features with pop music played by announcers like Bud Davies, Ron Knowles (who had a rock-and-roll show on AM 800 as early as 1957), and Joe Van.

However, on April 4, 1967, CKLW got a drastic makeover with Bill Drake's "Boss Radio" format, programmed locally by Paul Drew.

In July 1967, CKLW claimed the number one spot in the Detroit ratings for the first time, and WKNR was left in the dust, switching to an easy listening format as WNIC less than five years later.

In addition to Dave Shafer and Tom Shannon, the lone holdouts from the "Radio Eight Oh" era, "Big 8" personalities during the late 1960s and through the mid-1970s included Gary "Morning Mouth" Burbank, "Big" Jim Edwards, "Brother" Bill Gable, Pat Holiday, Steve Hunter, "Super" Max Kinkel, Walt "Baby" Love, Charlie O'Brien, Scott Regen, Ted "The Bear" Richards, Mike Rivers, Duke Roberts, Charlie Van Dyke, Johnny Williams, and newsmen Randall Carlisle, Grant Hudson, Byron MacGregor (who had a three-and-a-half million-selling #1 hit single with his recording of Gordon Sinclair's commentary "The Americans" in 1973), and Dick Smyth.

As a result, CKLW was sometimes referred to as "the blackest white station in America", and many believe the integrated music mix helped bring Detroiters closer together in racial harmony, especially after the riots of July 1967.

The Windsor-based station maintained a sales office in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan, where it picked up numerous sponsors for U.S. consumer products, some of which had to use the disclaimer and live announcer end-tag "Not available in Ontario".

The CKLW newscasters — including Byron MacGregor, Jon Belmont (later ABC), Bob Losure (CNN), Dick Smyth (who would later become the first newscast when Toronto's CFTR went all-news in 1993), Grant Hudson, Joe Donovan (sports), Mark Dailey (CityNews), Randall Carlisle, Keith Radford, and Lee Marshall — delivered imagery-laden news stories in a rapid-fire, excited manner, not sparing any of the gory details when it came to describing murders or rapes.

CKLW's newscasts were acknowledged for more than just their "flash," however; the station won an Edward R. Murrow Award for its coverage of the 1967 riots, helmed by Smyth.

[10] These included Anne Murray, The Poppy Family, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, The Guess Who, April Wine, the Five Man Electrical Band, and Bachman Turner Overdrive.

Just as, if not more, responsible for the decline in CKLW's ratings as the 1970s wore on was the rise of FM radio as an outlet for contemporary music, as the station gained a direct FM Top 40 competitor, WDRQ, in 1972, and its listening audience was also fragmented between album-oriented rock outlets such as WWWW, WRIF and WABX and adult contemporary stations like WNIC and WMJC.

In an attempt to go after longtime "full service" powerhouse WJR, CKLW converted to AM stereo in 1982 and even got the rights to broadcast University of Michigan football and NASL soccer, but in this, it was also unsuccessful.

The final death knell for the "Big 8" came in October 1984, when the station fired 79 staffers (including most of the remaining announcers and Rosalie Trombley), closed its American sales office in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan, and announced that it would soon change format to Al Ham's "Music of Your Life" format of Jazz standards and big-band music and go completely automated.

The "Big 8" was finally laid to rest on Tuesday, January 1, 1985, and the station soon dropped stereo since most of the big-band and jazz standards music in its new format was in mono anyway.

For a brief time under CUC Broadcasting ownership, it was a member of the NBC Radio network beginning in 1991 (which was by then a shell of its former self), and ending with the station's sale to CHUM Limited in 1993.

The station boasts a fully staffed local newsroom and also airs hourly newscasts from The Canadian Press radio network (formerly known as Broadcast News), primarily at night.

CKLW is picked up clearly as far off as Toledo and Cleveland (where it was consistently a highly rated station during its Top 40 days), Lansing, Michigan, and even the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio, with reports of night-time reception as far off as Toronto/Oshawa, Ontario; Hartford, Connecticut; Pennsylvania; New York City; Little Rock; Des Moines, Iowa; and San Antonio, Texas.

A station in Bonaire in the Netherlands Antilles (PJB3, Trans World Radio), provided severe interference to CKLW during its Big 8 years and beyond, operating with 525,000 watts of power.

CKLW was and is under no obligation to protect Bonaire, as PJB signed on long after North American allocations were settled and the Netherlands Antilles did not honour international agreements.

In fact, as early as 1956, Bud Davies hosted a "bandstand"-style show on CKLW-TV called Top Ten Dance Party.

For the most part, though, CKLW-TV was overshadowed by its powerhouse sister radio station and mainly aired low-budget local shows along with Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) (and also CTV) network fare.

CKLW-AM-FM then moved from the TV station's 825 Riverside Drive West location to its own studios and offices at 1640 Ouellette Avenue.