[HCDX] Quito Ecuador War of the Worlds Story

[Don Moore <donmooredxer@xxxxxxxxx>]

In 1992 Monitoring Times published an article of mine about a War of the Worlds broadcast gone-wrong from Radio Quito. The story can be found here: 

http://www.pateplumaradio.com/south/ecuador/martians.html

My references were slim and the information was sketchy. A few years later Ken MacHarg did a feature on this on HCJB's DX Party Line. He interviewed me and he interviewed Javier Almeida, then director of Radio Quito. Sr. Almeida was very interested in the story and had tried to research it locally, but hadn't been able to learn much more so many years after the event. Many of the principal characters had moved out of the country in the years immediately following the event.

Just yesterday I received an e-mail from the son of Leonardo Paez - the main man behind the Quito War of the Worlds broadcast. Ivan (the son) corrected a few details of my story. Ivan also pointed out that his father had written a book about the event: 
http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/gall_r12.htm
That article included a link to this article which gives a lot more detail about this interesting story.
http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/war_worlds_quito.htm
It turns out there was an earlier Latin American version of this story in Chile in 1944:
http://www.war-ofthe-worlds.co.uk/war_worlds_santiago.htm

There is some good reading here for radio history fans.

But, there is more to this. The son tells me that Leonardo Paez moved from Quito to Merida, Venezuela in 1955 when he took a job as director of Radio Universidad in Merida, which he held until about 1978. (He passed away in 1991.) L. Paez is listed as director of Radio Universidad in the WRTH during the 1970s. That station should be familiar to longtime shortwave DXers. Radio Universidad was an easy catch on 3395 kHz in the 1970s when I was first active. I have over a dozen loggings of it from that time period. I remember it as being the strongest of Venezuela's 90 meter outlets back then. I wonder if anyone has an old QSL from them signed by Leonardo Paez?

The Radio Universidad connection is more noteworthy to me as I visited the city of Merida for two weeks after Christmas 1994. While there I visited Radio Universidad and had a long talk with the then-manager, who was the daughter of the station founder (not Paez). So, I spent spent some time sitting in Paez's old manager's office. If I had only known of the connection then, I could have learned a lot more about this story. 

Regardless, it's fun to bring together some details from one of the more interesting stories in Latin American radio history.

Don Moore   ---   donmooredxer@xxxxxxxxx       

   Thinking outside the box isn't always enough. Sometimes you have to turn around and moon it.
Radio & Latin American website: http://www.pateplumaradio.com/


      
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