Jim Chapman was born and raised in the Forest City and sixty years later is still proud to call it home.

He was a high-school dropout in 1966, something he still regrets.

“I do wish I had stayed in school, for a lot of reasons”, but the lure of rock and roll stardom was too strong, buoyed by a contract with Columbia Records in New York when he was just eighteen.

“That didn’t work out but I stayed in show business for the next couple of decades, with stops along the way to run a couple of other ventures, too.”

Eventually, he wound up as “the only staff songwriter on any radio station in Canada”, providing regular humorous and satirical songs for Peter Garland’s Original Morning Show on CFPL-AM.

That led, in a roundabout way, to an invitation to create a brand new talk radio program on CJBK, and that began a decade and a half of top-rated programs that established him as the dean of London’s talk radio hosts.

During that period he also became a regular columnist for the London Free Press and Business London Magazine, a news commentator on The NewPL and a talk show host on Rogers Television. His voice in all these ventures spoke from what he describes as “the centre of Canadian political life, slightly to the right on economic issues, slightly to the left on social issues”.

The work load and a Type A personality pushed him into a series of heart attacks just after his fiftieth birthday, during one of which he had a Near-Death Experience that became the subject of two subsequent local best-selling books, ‘Heart and Soul’ and ‘Come Back to Life’.

The books made him a sought-after keynote speaker and he travelled as far afield as Seattle, Dallas and New York, and spoke extensively across southwestern Ontario. He was also interviewed on the CTV and ABC Television networks, the CBC and BBC radio networks and on dozens of radio stations across the United States and Canada.

Over fifteen years, the vagaries of the radio business took him from CJBK to CKSL, back to CJBK again and finally to CHRW.

In 2007 he decided to throw his hat into the ring in the provincial election, and retired from all his media careers in order to give campaigning his full attention.

Unsuccessful come election day, he decided to stay retired and managed almost three months before “it just about drove me crazy”.

Reactivating a dormant communications consultancy, he soon was “busier than ever” helping a number of clients. Within a year he was back on the radio, too, hosting The Jim Chapman NewsHour on the station where he began his radio career almost two decades earlier, now known as am980. And his byline again appears monthly in Business London Magazine and in SNAP Magazine, too.

In the fall of 2009, increasingly disturbed by what he saw as a dysfunctional city council that was not meeting the economic challenges facing the city he loves, he resolved to do something about it.

The result, thanks to the help of a number of civic-minded investors, was the Voice of London, a weekly e-mail newsletter with a full-time reporting staff providing in-depth information about London’s political scene.

“It wasn’t easy putting it together but I think the effort will prove to be worth it. I have confidence there is a market for timely, accurate and in-depth political reporting, and an audience that will respond by becoming more informed about the politics and politicians at city hall.

“A better-informed electorate is the only way to ensure better-performing municipal government, and without that things simply will not get any better.”

Still pushing every day, still very much a Type A personality, Jim tries hard to balance work and play in order to keep himself as healthy as possible.

“I’ve got a loving family, a beautiful home, several dogs and cats, a few nice collector cars and several piles of unread books, and I’m a pretty happy guy. And I look forward every day to the challenge of trying to make my city a better place for everyone to live.”

Not bad for a high-school dropout.