The other day while clearing out a box of what I had thought were unneeded documents and old newspaper cuttings from the remote past, I came across some of these forgotten relics.
Among the QSL cards I received in the mail a half century ago are the following: one from the CBC’s foreign service, and another from that of the BBC, yet another from The Voice of America, and one card from radio station HCJB in Quito, Ecuador, the world’s first Christian missionary voice, then broadcasting in English and Spanish, but now in fourteen languages, including Quechua, the Andean indigenous language. The station’s call letters are an acronym for the words “Hoy Cristo Jesus Benedice” or “Today Jesus Christ Blesses (You).” In addition, I found cards from Radio Moscow and Radio South Africa. All of the last three were, I recall, messianic in nature. I use the word in its secondary sense of fervent or passionate proselytizing, thus conveying both sacred and secular implications. As the last two were most active in the long-gone era of South African apartheid and Soviet Cold War belligerence, their most important function was as vehicles of state propaganda, mouthpieces for their governments’ attempts to counter the world’s disapproval of their shared denial of their own peoples’ basic human rights. I never heard for example, an acknowledgement, let alone a defence, of the brutal response to riots in the black townships of the former, or an admission of the existence of Siberian gulags in the latter, but only chatty touristic pablum about sun, fun, and sports in South Africa, and the boring but allegedly stupendous achievements of science and industry in the former Soviet Union. I remember finding both efforts peculiar because so obviously false.
Elsewhere on short wave I heard again the addictive rhythms of Latin American music, and folk songs from lands I have yet to visit, much of this for the first unforgettable time. It is this cultural gift– the French songs of Francoise Hardy, Mireille Mathieu, and those folk songs of The Seekers from Australia, plangent Russian songs of the people like Podmoskovniye Vechera (Moscow Nights) and Polyushko Polye ( Meadowlands), the defiant songs of the Mexican Revolution, La Adelita and Juana Gallo among them, those Slavic songs of the CBC’s sadly vanished Ivan Rebroff Singers, the first unforgettable chords of The Animals’ version of ‘The House of the Rising Sun,’ heard first from Europe before North American transmission, and famously, the British comedy of absurdity, of Round the Horne and The Goon Show, and the earnest evangelizing on HCJB and a host of other long-buried memories– that were brought suddenly and memorably back to life quite unexpectedly by this recent discovery in a shoebox.
Nowadays, teenagers do not appear to have any such interests. Despite the best efforts of National Public Radio in the United States to elevate public discourse in commercial-free broadcasting of high quality, listeners prefer the brag of rap or twang of country to serious music, drama, or socio-cultural discussion, and teenagers and adults alike are addicted to video games and the brutal world of ‘social media.’ Perhaps the next generation will find quite peculiar today’s obsessions. And perhaps not. Maybe some of them in their later years will find, as I did, a box in a disused closet and remember the companionship its contents once brought them long before…
