Hooray hooray, an interview with Jim Raddysh, mainstay of 90s children entertainment in Prince George

He's come from such a long way

In some ways, Jim Raddysh is my white whale.

I haven’t devoted my life to hunting for him, but he has remained elusive. Not deliberately, it turns out, but because his last name is a homophone for a well-known vegetable.

For those not familiar, back in the 1990s there were a lot of kids in Prince George. I’m not sure what was behind it, but I do know that I was in split classes almost entirely from grades one through seven. We had arcades/activity centres the Family Fun Centre and Bubba Balloos and more than one movie theatre and the annual International Children’s Festival, which for multiple days brought in entertainers from around the world to juggle and sing and perform in big tents set up in what is now Lheidli T’enneh Memorial Park. And one of the mainstays of those performances was Raddysh.

But the thing he is probably best known for, at least among those in my particular age group, was a segment called Toon Raiders that aired betwen cartoons on Saturday mornings. It was one of those short bumper bits, where he’d be out in the community somewhere talking to kids at the museum or the fire station and we’d learn a bit about the place and he’d sing a song. And the song I best remember, which he played every week with kids singing along, was Hooray Hooray. I couldn’t remember the full thing but I could remember the opening lyrics “Hooray, hooray, what a wonderful day,” and the closer — “I’ve come from such a long way let me hear you say hooray.”

Now, these days when you get hit by a wave of nostalgia for an old TV show or want to hear a half-rememberd song, the obvious move is to head over to Google or maybe YouTube and start typing the words in and have it pop up. So it was probably ten years ago now that I suddenly remembered, “Hey, there used to be this guy Jim Radish who was on TV here” and decided to go searching — and my search turned up nothing. If you’re paying attention, you can see that part of the problem was that I remembered his name as “Radish,” not “Raddysh,” though to be fair you can also see in the pictures above that his branding was very much around radishes, so that’s why my eight-year-old self would have made the association. It’s also true that he has a very small digital footprint so even now there’s not a whole lot associated with his name, but searching for “Jim Radish” in places like the Prince George newspaper archives was utterly fruitless. I even had a friend who worked at CKPG and asked him if they had any old tapes of him in the library and he told me no, though I’m not positive if that’s because they actually don’t or he just couldn’t find them.

Anyways, every once in a while I would type “Jim Radish” into Google or DuckDuckGo to see if someone had maybe digitized an old VHS and put it online but no one ever did. I also started to wonder if his show wasn’t as much of a mainstay as I had imagined — I’ve learned as an adult that things I used to think were on forever when I was kid actually had very short runs, so perhaps there just wasn’t much to even work with.

But then earlier this week, the user Tired-of-the_______/ made a post in the Prince George subreddit titled “90’s Children’s Festivals” and wrote:

This might be a stretch.. but does anyone remember Jim Raddish (spelling may be different) from the Children’s Festivals in the early ‘90s down at Fort George Park? And does anyone remember the song that he always sang??? It’s driving me crazy

And the fact that they spelled his name with two D’s opened up a whole new avenue of exploration. It had simply never occurred to me that his name might not actually have been “Radish” — so I went to the newspaper archives and search “Jim Raddish” and there it was — a bunch more hits, and even a photo: He wasn’t a figment of my imagination.

Still, the number of hits was less than I would have expected so I still thought he might not have been quite as prolific as I remember. So I posted about it in this newsletter asking if any of y’all remembered him and — you came through. Several people let me know that his name was Jim Raddysh, with a Y and a few also pointed me to what seemed to be his Facebook profile, performing on Salt Spring Island, so I reached out and….

If you tune in to CBC Daybreak North later this morning, you’ll hear me talking about my search for Jim and my eventual finding of him. I’ve also put up the full interview in video form, which you can see below, and it will be on the CBC Daybreak North podcast which you can find on CBC Listen, Apple, Spotify or wherever.

Jim also shared a couple of his signature tunes with me, including the elusive Hooray Hooray which I’ve posted below, as well.

I think it comes through, but speaking with him was such a treat — it was so nice to hear his origins, get some timeline details straightened out, and to find out that he is still performing and still thinks fondly of those days in Prince George. I know this a niche that is very specific to ‘90s kids from Prince George but what else is this newsletter for if not that? If you fit into the demographic — or even if you don’t — please enjoy this early Christmas gift and thank you to all of you who helped make it happen.

Video:

Podcast:

Songs:

Hooray Hooray:

Let’s Dance:

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