Ecuador '64

Ecuador lies on the Equator in Northwestern South America. In 1965, the population was just under 6 million.

Guayaquil is on the Southwestern coast of Ecuador, slightly inland on the Guayas River. It is hot and humid year-round. It has long been the economic force of the nation, with the main banks and industries.
Quito is in the central mountains, and, at 10,000 feet above sea level, cool and Spring-like all through the year. It is the capital, intellectual and diplomatic center of Ecuador.

Click on this sentence to hear the
Ecuadorian National Anthem in MIDI format

In 1964, in a further attempt to finish my next-to-last year of High School, I found an opportunity to study in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Unfortunately, when I arrived, there had just been a revolution (which deposed the sitting president, Carlos Julio Arosemena Monroy) and schools in Guayaquil were unable to overcome a muddled bureaucracy and admit a new student, especially one without the necessary "normal" prerequisites in Ecuadorian history and such.

My passport stamped for my first entry to Ecuador

Not wanting to go back to the US, and abandoning the formal "exchange" program that got me Ecuador, I traveled to Quito, the capital, where I was told greater leeway was granted to foreign students in deference to the diplomatic community. That was true, and I was accepted at the Colegio Americano ("Americano" refers to "The Americas" and not the United States of America) where I was introduced to classes unknown in Ohio such as Logic and Ethics, as well as practical ones like "Redacción Comercial" (Business Spanish). All instruction, of course, was in Spanish.

The Colegio American campus around 1964.
Click on the picture to read about the Colegio Americano

My Ecuador "parents" Florence and Dr. Galo Ballesteros at their
home in El Batán overlooking the northern part of Quito.

Amidst a busy course schedule, I found time to visit most of the stations in Quito. At one, Radio Ecuatoriana, the owner invited me to do a radio program with Top 40 hits from the US every Saturday. I also answered some of the station's English correspondence, like this request for a reception verification. I couldn't spell or proofread then, either. The show, called "Gringolandia," lasted until I made the decision to have my own radio station.

This is a letter received by a radio listener in Pennsylvania in 1964, confirming reception of Radio Ecuatoriana. It is signed by the station owner and one David Gleason.

While browsing the stores and sights in Quito's colonial downtown, I spotted a store with a radio transmitter in the window. I went in to see it, and the proprietor, Ing. Al Horvath, saw me peering into the innards of a 1,000 watt radio transmitter with uncommon interest and curiosity.

Somewhat amazed about my interest in a transmitter (I looked every bit of 17... or less), I explained my several years of "work" in radio. Horvath confessed that he had built the transmitter hoping to sell it to someone, bundled with a license his son in law, Carlos Guarderas Barba had obtained for a new AM in Quito (where there were already about 40 other AM's).

Carlos Guarderas Barba today

Unfortunately, no one wanted that frequency: 570 AM. In Ecuador, stations did not use towers, preferring instead to use long-wires hung between tall wooden poles. Of course, a low frequency would not tune easily in to such a short antenna, and so this channel was available... for a price of U$S250 dollars (I had to buy the transmitter I had been admiring, too. And the tower. And the ATU... there was a catch of kinds.).

Independence Square in Quito, circa 1967.
The Cathedral is behind the park. The picture was taken from the portals of the Presidential Palace.

The Central Bank is flanked by the entrance to the Cathedral.

My late father had been an investment banker and managed money all his life so most of my birthday and Christmas presents were shares of stock, not Roy Rogers 6-Gun sets. From that beginning, I had saved and invested since I was in the QSL card business, and had a little stashed away. I decided that a city of 700,000 with nearly 40 operating stations badly needed one more.

I bought the transmitter equipment from Horvath, and headed to Mexico to get record contacts and to buy jingles from Organización Radio Centro and Francisco Aguirre Jr.

Francisco Aguirre Gómez of ORC

Larry Cervon

Quito is only a few kilometers to the South of the Equator. Here is the monument as it looks today at latitude 0.

In September, 1964, we were ready to put the tower up. The transmitter site was on a flat hilltop to the NE of Quito which we happily found had nice conductivity because it was very loamy and less rocky than other areas of town. Quito is at nearly 10,000 feet above sea level, in a long valley in the high Andes.

Here are a series of photos of the construction of the transmitter site for Quito's new HCRM1, Radio Musical, on 570 AM.

The transmitter site before any construction in late August of 1964. The city of Quito lies below the site, which was over 10,000 feet AMSL. The view is form the Northeast, looking over the central and northern part of the city.

Plowing the furrows for the 120 ground wires that will be buried under the earth.

The "caseta" or transmitter building was prefabricated, and sported a very handsome pure asbestos roof.

Construction begins with the transmitter building, prefabricated by a local carpenter. Note the land freshly plowed and turned to make burying of radials easier. 5 miles of copper was buried for the ground system. At the time, other stations simply buried an old car radiator as a ground!

A nice hole is ready for the tower base to be poured.

Cement cures in its wooden form; bolts to hold the tower base are protected by a cloth cover.

Ing. Horvath surveys the base and the frame for the doghouse (antenna tuning unit). The interesting scaffolding had a purpose: the tower was erected top section first, and winched upwards, with new sections being added to the bottom. A crew of farmers manually held guy wires and ropes as the tower rose.

The first and topmost section is assembled; other sections lie to the right. Note the beacons and lightening rods on the tower.

This old truck carried the winch that pulled the tower upwards using the wooden scaffold as a gin pole.

Seen from the scaffold, here the tower is part way up, and still not tensioned properly. There is, in fact, a pronounced lean at the top.

"Towering" over Quito from the suburban area of Bellavista, HCRM1 looked to have a huge tower. In fact, it was only 200 feet high, with enormous top-loading to work on 570.

With the tower barely visible at the center, here is another view of the new HCRM1 transmitter site in 1964. Oh, there is a reason why the call letters had a numeral at the end: "1" indicated Quito and the Province of Pichincha, "2" was Guayaquil, and every other province or zone had a number designator..

My first business card as owner of a radio station. "Director" was a more common term than "General Manager" and indicated, of course, ownership as well.

This was the cover of the original sales presentation for Radio Musical... Quito stations did not have such things in 1964 and all rate cards were verbal! (and rates, were, shall we say, fluid.)

HCRM1 had the highest rates in the market... and a commercial limit of 10 minutes an hour at a time when 30 minutes was common.

When Radio Musical went on the air, there were nearly 40 other AM stations in this market of 700,000.

Click on the radio to see a pop-up list of all the competitors who were on the air before me!

The first cart machines in Ecuador were at Radio Musical. It also had the first solid state audio chain (Audimax and Volumax).

A "57 of the Week" from the late 60's. Click on the chart to see a more readable PDF version.

Radio Musical played lots of hits from the US; of course, they were not available in Quito anywhere. So my mother, each and every week of the year, went to a record distributor in Cleveland and sent the new songs that had just debuted on the WIXY chart! A few days later, the same songs were heard on Channel 57 in Quito, to the obvious delight of our listeners.

As befitting a Top-40 station, Radio Musical had its "57 of the Week" and the list of the city's most popular songs was published every Sunday by the Diario El Tiempo in Quito, and the entire hit parade was counted down at 5 PM! (The #1 song was by Argentine duo Fedra & Maximiliano, and the #8 ranker was "Suspicious Minds" by Elvis Presley.

Radio Musical played the hits no matter the language... there were many French and Italian songs on the list as well, and we made an annual trip to the San Remo Festival in Italy to bring back the competing songs which always found great acceptance (and was sponsored by Ing. Luigi Perotti, the importer of Borletti sewing machines).

Patricio Toro, one of the best announcers on Radio Musical and Canal Tropical. Click on the photo for an interview (in Spanish) with Patricio where he describes how he was hired by me. In part, he says,

"Later... I received several phone calls from a gringo who spoke horrible Spanish that I could not understand, who invited me to visit a station he had just built and which had the the absolute best technology that existed at the time, and which had recruited the best announcers of the time and I thought he was playing a joke on me and I never paid any attention until I got a call from Guillermo Jácome, one of the the best voices ever and he said that Mr. David Gleason, a US citizen, had called me and he requested that I come for an interview to the facilities of the station that would become Radio Musical AM.

I went and they offered me a salary that was ten times greater than what I was making plus all the required benefits, and later it became the leading radio group in the country, Núcleo Radión, made up of Radio Musical, Canal Tropical, Radio Fiesta on AM and Teleonda Musical on FM, the first commercial FM (in Ecuador) At Canal Tropical, I spent a wonderful era in my career and was also the official voice of the Núcleo Radión and of Teleonda FM. "

The station was located in this building on Avenida Colón in the more modern northern part of Quito for its first 3 years. The signs on the second and third floor say, "Núcleo Radión" which was the name for the growing station cluster after Canal Tropical-805 was added in 1966.
In 1967, we were evicted from the building for being too noisy for the other tenants. In less than a week we built new studios and moved the three operating stations with no loss of airtime. The ugly SAAB car was mine, being my first experience in trade deals (three-for-one, anyone)

(Picture from the future transmitter site of HCTM-FM located at the 14,000 foot level on Mt. Pichincha overlooking Quito from the West.)

To serve this market, Radio Musical went on the air the 5th of December of 1964. It had the best announcers, collected from all the major stations in Quito. Jingles arrived from Mexico, music was imported from all over Latin America and the newest Billboard chart busters came from the US. (diligently shipped every week by my mother in Cleveland, who picked up a WIXY-1260 chart and went to a one-stop to buy the newest tunes

"Official letter of Verification" sent to a listener in Texas who received
Canal Tropical in its first year of broadcasting.
Note that by late 1966 there were 6 sets of call letters for the group.
Click on the letter for a more readable PDF version of the letter.

From the International Radio Club of America's DX Monitor from December of 1964 comes my DX report as well as the report of noted Denver area DXer Larry Godwin who visited my station while touring South America by Jeep!
Click the scan above for a better quality PDF of the page.

1966. The commercial success of Radio Musical included the overnight show, where tropical dance music was played. An ailing competitor at 805 kHz was purchased in early 1966, rebuilt, and launched in May as "Canal Tropical." The station’s working class appeal was a perfect complement to the upper income youth appeal of its sister station... and an instant ratings winner. In fact, the station went on the air half way through a Datos, S.A. survey and was in the top five nonetheless.

A "6 AM-Midnight" summary form a 1969 Datos, S.A. survey of Quito. In upper income levels, my stations were #1, #2, #7 and #10 and accounted for nearly 50% of listening. In middle income, 4 of the top 11 were mine, and three stations had 20% of the lower income audience. Click on the partial table for the whole page of these 1970 ratings.

Interestingly, the #2 station in 1969 in upper income was an independent FM, Teleonda. This station was the first independent FM in northern South America and was profitable in its first year on the air.

1965. Radio Musical was a daring venture in retrospect. Against over 30 competitors, all with block programming, appeared the first Top 40 station in South America. Advertisers thought it was a ridiculous proposition, as they were used to sponsorable block programs, not a 24-hour music format. No one advertised. Our first client didn't pay his bill... (I learned that it is not a sale unless it pays.) A competitor referred to us as the "pocket station" as only kids with pocket transistor radios listened. Anyone with more experience in Ecuadorian radio would not have done this crazy project.

By the sixth month, HCRM was only billing about $50 a month. We were a month away from bankruptcy. In June, a box arrived from Guayaquil, the major ad center for Ecuador. It was from McCann-Erickson, and had orders and acetate commercial disks for every radio account they had, and for 15 to 20 spots a day each! McCann had done a survey. The little new station was #1. Within weeks, we were sold out.

The station was under such demand that by the end of 1965, clients could only by Run-of-Schedule spots and a quarter of the schedule ran between midnight and 6 AM. In the Datos surveys, it was frequent to see the evening hours with shares in excess of 75% of listening; the hours after 10PM came close to 100%.

1966. The overnight show on Radio Musical was not true to the format... for we played tropical dance music from midnight to 6 AM. The success of this program was widely commented and I was worried that someone might "take" the format fulltime.

A small station on 805 kHz, Radio Pacífico, tried to compete with the Radio Musical format. the lost all their money doing it. Fausto Vallejo Silva, the owner, offered me HCFV1 for $2,500 or S/. 50,000. I snapped it up, closed the station and had the transmitter chucked down a ravine (this was pre-environmental awareness). A new station appeared in its place... using the name of the overnight show, "Canal Tropical." It was pure cumbia, porro, gaita, mapayé, with a bolero or two thrown in for flavor. High energy jocks played the hits 24 hours a day on this tropical station with Top 40 formatics.

Canal Tropical debuted on the 21st of May of 1966. A 15-day ratings sweep was half way through that Saturday, but HCFV managed to show nonetheless... at #1 in middle-income listeners!

The first song on the air was Sonia López' "La Pollera Colorá" which was a hit cumbia at the time. To hear this same cumbia in midi format, click here. If you liked this, here is a version of the classic "Cumbia Colombiana."

When 1967 saw the inauguration of my second station in Quito, we decided to tune it into the tower of the first. Here we see the ad published by the consulting engineer and showing the diplexer and ATU for the first such operation in all Ecuador.

Growth
What do you do when you are sold out for two years, besides raise rates every few months? You buy or build new stations.
This ad was from an advertisers guide published in 1967. There were now four stations, including one very special one: Ecuador's... and Northern South America's very first independent FM station.

1967. At this time, Quito had only one TV station and no independent FM facilities. A license was requested for the country’s first commercial independent FM. Going on the air at midyear, easy listening HCTM1 maintained a stance of "no commercials" for 6 months.

In fact, I had not intended to sell advertising on the station ever; it was a tribute to my first job in radio at an FM. But at lunch with a client, the distributor of Ecuador's only instant coffee, I was asked to have my salesperson drop by for a contract on the FM. When I mentioned I did not sell ads on the FM, I was asked to name a rate... I simply multiplied my highest AM rate by four to discourage the deal. Surprisingly, he said yes... so I said, "the spots are only 20 seconds" and was told this was fine.

The appeal of the format among advertisers became so high that "Teleonda" achieved sellout within its first year. The format was a hybrid of beautiful music and the traditional folk and national music of Latin America. Three song sets would include two instrumentals, and a vocal which might have been a tango, a vals, a pasillo or a bambuco as well as trios and folksongs. Total commercial time in each hour was two minutes, in six twenty-second spots.

A year later, Teleonda became the first stereo station in the country and moved its transmitter to a small mountaintop overlooking the city. We went stereo by modifying a test bench stereo generator intended for radio repair shops and injecting it into our home made exciter. It lit the pilot light on radios and had true stereo separation!

As can be seen from the ratings from a few years later (graphic above on this page), Teleonda was #2 in upper income listenership, and in the top 10 in middle income audience. The station was always sold out... and this was before 1970! FM had arrived and was successful in Ecuador before the average FM in the US or Mexico was!

Letterhead and cards for the group a few years later. Note that there were FM simulcasts on each of the 3 AM stations, and two independent FMs for a total of 8 stations in Quito alone.

The "owner's" office at 1027 Avenida Amazonas in Quito. Records were the decorating motif as can be seen from the following pictures, too.

In the Radio Musical Canal 57 studio (second from left) with production manager edwin Almeida (left) and "El Pollo" Fuentes, Chile's top pop singer of the era. Fuentes was taking listener calls as part of a concert the station presented in Quito.

At the "board" (a Gates Yard) at Radio Musical. The Fairchild reverb, the Yard power supply and a CBS Audimax were in the rack.

1967. Our only failure. Next to Radio Musical's 570 frequency there was a rural station, some 60 kilometers outside of Quito, at San Pedro de Amaguaña in the same province of Pichincha. It was HCSP1, at 595 kHz. Recognizing that the station could fit into the Quito dial, I bought it and moved it to Quito and had it reassigned to 590. A transmitter site was built right off the Panamericana Sur, about 4 km south of the Villaflora, in nice wet land. The stations signal covered parts of 6 provinces.

I wanted to create the Ecuadorian equivalent of Mexico City's Radio Centro, a nostalgia format with boleros and trios and romantic crooners. The playlist was extensive, as opposed to the Top 40 style of my other stations. It was called La Voz Amiga.

Nobody listened. I learned a lesson about playlist length, at some cost. I also learned the art of the move-in, taking a rural station and moving it to the big city.

But in 1968, I changed programming. The one music format was still missing: Ecuadorian folk music, the music of the indigenous population. 590 AM became Radio Fiesta, and immediately made a profit. Although the listener target was not much sought by advertisers, there was considerable profit to be made in messages for rural areas and greetings in general. Sold at a premium, each stopset consisted of many "meet me at the bus from Quito" and "your mother had her operation in the city and is fine" announcements.

In 1968, the Interamerican Asociation of Broadcasters held its convention in Quito. I was asked by Arch Madsen, the US delegate, to assist in the organizing of the event. Here is a surviving snapshot of the opening night reception. To my left is Rafael Guerrero Valenzuela, owner of CRE and Tropicana in Guayaquil. The location is the Hotel Quito Intercontinental in the capital.

The same year found me at the Asociation Ecuatoriana de Radiodifusión's convention in Guayaquil where I was photographed with Mr. Guerrero, Nacho Ponce of Radio Quito (El Comercio Newspaper) and Mary Lou Parra.

In an article in the Quito daily paper, "Hoy," Francisco Febres Cordero writes about La Mariscal, the traditional upscale neighborhood of Quito where Radio Musical and its sister stations were located. In the article, he shows how much Radio Musical was a part of the culture and history of Quito in the late 60's.

"Muchos años después -desplazados que fueron los caballos a sectores ignotos- los autos continuaron simbolizando en La Mariscal el paso de la niñez a la adolescencia: los "hijitos de papá" paseaban por la avenida Amazonas en un incesante tránsito circular de todas las tardes a la salida del colegio y todo el fin de semana, sin otra misión que la de ser vistos por la parroquia y la de admirar a las quinceañeras que, a su vez, cruzaban en sentido contrario una vez tras otra vez tras otra vez, al ritmo de las melodías de Enrique Guzmán o Alberto Vásquez, que Gabriel Espinosa de los Monteros o Pepe Rosenfeld hacían sonar en la consola de Radio Musical. A través de una de las ventanas de esa casa, identificada con el número 1027, se dejaban ver los primeros disck jockey de la radiodifusión, para recibir, con sonrisa conquistadora, el saludo de sus fans.

"Many years later, the horses having been removed to more remote areas, cars continued to symbolize in La Mariscal the passage from childhood to adolescence. The rich kids drove back and forth along Amazonas Avenue every afternoon after school and every weekend with no other goal than that of being seen and admiring the young ladies, who followed the same circular route in the opposite direction to the beat of the songs of Enrique Guzmán or Alberto Vázquez that Gabriel Espinosa de los Monteros and Pepe Rosenfeld played at the console of Radio Musical. From the one of the windows of that building, identified with the number 1027, you could see the first disk jockeys of (Quito) radio, who were ready to acknowledge with a winning smile the waves of their fans."

A local magazine features the Radio Musical chart and night rocker Gabriel Espinosa de los Monteros. The text reads,

"History - for Ecuador -begins at Radio Musical in Quito, which, in addition to being the first link in the Núcleo Radión (group) opens the era of "disk jockey stations." Non-stop programming, always agile, obviously informal, but always dynamic and happy. Success is total in the Capital of the Republic, making it necessary for Canal Tropical to soon appear, satisfying dance music fans with the same style of radio. Both stations reach, and still hold, the highest positions in the ratings."

No greater compliment have I ever been paid. I was just 20 at the time.

Here is another square in central colonial Quito. The hill above was the location for the pole-and-wire antennas of many of Quito's AM stations at the time,

1969. Another FM license was requested, and HCTT1 signed on in 1968 with a mix of paid embassy programming and classical music. Within a year, a weekend rock program had proven itself so successful that the station became the first contemporary FM in South America, playing the latest Stones, Beatles and Zeppelin cuts

In this year, the original three Quito AM stations installed simulcast transmitters on FM. The 5 stations in Quito accounted for nearly half of all radio audience in the market. During the period between 1964 and 1969, I was sole owner, manager, group programmer and sales manager, as well as chief engineer.

Such multi-functioned owner-operator descriptions were common. One owner in Quito, Numa Pompilio Castro of Radio Cosmopolita, also did his station's morning show where he would identify himself as "Numa Pompilio Castro, dueño, propietario, locutor y portero" or "Owner, operator, announcer and janitor."

With the announcement of the discovery of petroleum in the Orient to the East of the Andes and the construction of a pipeline, I applied for and was granted AM stations in Lago Agrio (in the jungle) and Bahía de Caraquez (at the pipeline's end on the Pacific. I also built a mini-Musical in Ambato on 1480 and licensed but never built Radio Musical 840 AM in Tulcán.

1970. The economic situation in Ecuador looked to be rapidly deteriorating, with runaway inflation, currency controls and shortages of everything. For 6 months, I lived in Washington, D.C. while preparing for the F.C.C. First Class Radiotelephone operator’s license. At the same time, joined EZ Communications as operations manager for WEZR in suburban Fairfax, Virginia as well as assisting in the transition of the company’s WEZS in Richmond from classical music programming to Beautiful Music. Additionally, I did market research and community ascertainment for an application to construct a new Class B FM in the Norfolk, Virginia area.

Objective of this move to the U.S. was to establish a relationship with a company that was rapidly expanding into FM broadcasting and in which a substantial investment would be possible upon the sale of stations in South America.

1970. Unable to immediately sell the stations, returned to Ecuador and in partnership with the Bank of Guayaquil, built individual AM stations in Cuenca, Quito and Guayaquil, the country’s top 3 markets. (My associate and partner in this venture, Attorney Jaime Nebot Saadi, was the leading presidential candidate in the 1996 elections and is presently the Mayor of Guayaquil) The Guayaquil station, using the Canal Tropical format from Quito, quickly rose to #1 in the million plus market of Guayaquil.

Failure of Bank of Guayaquil (closely associated with 1970’s losing political party, the CFP), and dangerous political unrest forced a hasty emergency departure from Ecuador, in late 1970.

HCRM 1 transmitter site in Bellavista overlooking Quito.
This station fell silent in 1996, 32 years after making radio history
as the first Top 40 station in this corner of the Andes.

The Radio Musical Mini in the Ecuador cross country motor racing event in 1967. Ing. Eduardo Cruz drove the car.

Ing. Cruz next to another of his vehicles which I helped sponsor, the HCTT "Teleonda Musical" VW. HCTT was Ecuador's and the Bolivarian nation's first FM station.

This is a good moment to mention all the fine people who were
part of the Núcleo Radión team from 1964 to 1970.
Guillermo Jácome Jiménez
Jorge Endara
Pepe Rosenfeld
Gabriel Espinosa de los Monteros
Pedro Chassi
Roberto García
Edwin Almeida Marañon (QEPD)
Ulpiano Orozco
Jorge Obando
Lucho Castellanos
Fabricio Cifuentes
Patricio Toro
Patricio Moncayo
Ing. Eduardo Cruz (QEPD)
Ing. Al Horvath
Alberto Rivadeneira
Byron Guerra
Matilde Lalama
Marco Díaz
Srta. Játiva
... and many many more.
(If In BLUE and underlined,
there is a link to more about this person)

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