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BORDER BOY II Second in A Series |
Elias Castillo grew up on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. In his second column for TheColumnists.com, he continues his reminiscences about life as a "boy of two worlds."
By
ELIAS CASTILLO
for TheColumnists.com
El Centro is where my family took its first great plunge into
the world of hi-tech. It's where we found the fabulous magic
radio and brought it home to Calexico.
El Centro, Calif., is exactly six miles north of Calexico. The former is the uncrowned capital of Imperial Valley, the latter is known only for the fact that it sits across the Mexico-California border from Mexicali, the capital of Baja California Norte.
During World War II, we had a living room radio that was encased in a fluted, darkly stained, heavily polished, but awesomely ugly cabinet. It had seen better days.
Some of its dents were partly my fault. My grandmother told me that when I was a toddler she had heard a strange pounding sound from the living room. She entered from the kitchen and found me holding onto the radio, kicking it and simultaneously babbling, "Feo, feo, feo!" That's the Spanish word for ugly.
In another radio incident, she pulled me away just as I was about to stick my hand into the open back that exposed radio tubes -- and a tangle of dangerous wires. This time I was saying "Tripas, tripas, tripas!" That's Spanish for "guts." She reasoned I was about to rip out the radio's innards.
She pulled me away just in time, and, in
later years, laughingly described how severely she admonished
me to never, on pain of death, go near the back of that Frankenstein
monstrosity of a radio.
Yet, despite my apparent hatred for the radio, some of my first
memories were of my grandmother and step-grandfather sitting
next to the machine in the living room, listening, with grim
faces, to what I later deduced was the war news.
My incompatibility with the radio and my grandmother's attraction to newness was why eventually my brother, my grandmother, step-grandfather and I all drove to El Centro, a city that could, like the rest of the Imperial Valley, be the international standard for absolute zero as far as having anything attractive to see.
We were finally going to rid ourselves of the radio.
I remember entering the coolness of the appliance and radio shop, located on El Centro's main street. It had a vast array of radios, ranging from small countertop models to console combinations of radios and phonographs. They all were neatly arranged with cardboard ads proclaiming their wonders.
However, standing in a corner, surrounded by a vast array of ads, was the grandest audio machine I'd ever seen. It wasn't dark nor tall nor ugly. Instead, it was encased in a cabinet of blonde wood, so beautifully polished, so smooth, that it literally sparkled under the spotlights that set it off from all the others.
I remember the salesman loudly proclaiming it was the only one of its type in all of Imperial Valley, a rare piece befitting only the grandest of connoisseurs of music, radio, sound and hi-tech.
We stood in awe, as he revealed, first, a programmable wire recorder with microphone. Remember, this was 1940s America and neither tape recorders or CD players yet existed. The magic radio could record, on a thin spool of wire, any program you wanted to hear. And you didn't even have to be there!
It could be set to start by itself simply by pulling a series of small metal tabs surrounding a round faced clock. When you arrived home, you could listen to the program at your leisure.
Second, it had a phonograph built in. And that wasn't all. It also had, arrayed on its front, an amazing assortment of tunable radio bands. There was FM, AM, two shortwave bands and a fifth band allowing you to monitor police and fire calls. Underneath were two rows of push buttons and a big knob.
We bought it.
When it was delivered, I instantly became the envy of every kid in Calexico. No one, and I mean no one, had a recorder. I could, seemingly by magic, record their voices, body and mouth sounds, which I won't describe. We could even listen to the police and fire department calls, even though all we heard most of the time was a steady hiss, since nothing ever happened in Calexico that warranted anyone ever having to call the police or fire department.
But best of all was the clarity and realism
of the sound that heightened the make-believe world of the family's
favorite programs: "A Man Called X," "The Big
Story," "Dragnet," "The Phantom,"
"Boston Blackie," "One Man's Family," the
Boston Pops Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, "Gangbusters,"
"Sam Spade," "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,"
"The Telephone Hour," "Night Beat," "The
Great Gildersleeve," and a horror program from Mexico City,
hosted by a narrator, who would intone in a rich, sonorous voice,
in Spanish, "Nowwww, sit back in your favorite chair, dim
the lights and prepare to be frightened out of your wits."
The broadcast from Mexico featured great plots of the most evil of ghouls, ghosts and goblins that would force me, before I went to sleep, to check under the bed and then push it hard against the wall to seal off that potential attack route.
I spent many pleasurable years listening to the magic radio. But, eventually, the great audio machine gave way to television. The wire recorder, by now broken, was a useless relic and the phonograph was way out of date.
The last memory I have of that once-marvelous machine was seeing it abandoned, just a piece of forgotten furniture, forlornly sitting against the living room wall.
© 2000 by Elias Castillo. The radio drawing is from the IMSI Master/Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA 94901-5506, USA.
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