Pedro Lilienfeld

I grew up in Quito, Ecuador, a somewhat remote corner of northwest South America. Around the age of nine or ten I discovered radio and the link it provided to the rest of the world. I always had access to radio sets as they were being repaired by my engineer father. Eventually, we owned a very advanced set as both he and I became radio amateurs, hams in the vernacular of that cohort.

Cultural activities in remote Quito of the 1940s and 50s were, at best, limited and listening to short wave broadcasts became an invaluable educational source to which I became virtually addicted. Very soon, I became uniquely competent in finding and identifying stations around the world many of which transmitted in those languages with which I was familiar: Spanish, French and German. Gradually, I listened increasingly to transmissions in English, a language that I began to learn through that medium.

As I mentioned in my autobiography, short wave radio was my family’s and my most immediate source of information about the course of WWII. After all, that war is what we had escaped and landed us in faraway Ecuador.

We listened, preferentially, to the BBC from London, as well as the notorious Atlantic Sender, with its secret British impersonation of a Nazi armed forces station. Occasionally, we listened to the Voice of America, Radio Moscow, and an assortment of other world stations that were not under Axis control, such as Radio Australia. I learned to identify stations by their characteristic call that often preceded the start of their transmissions. For example that Australian official station had the laugh of the kookaburra bird as identifying call. The BBC English transmissions during the war would start dramatically with the first four notes of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, the Fate Symphony (Schicksals-Sinfonie, in the original German) as stark reminder of the tragic upheaval of WWII.

Starting in my teenage years, I tuned into stations that would include classical music in their programming. There were two local stations which featured such music. I remember one of them: Radio Casa de la Cultura with good programming but less than optimal sound quality. To complement such sources, I frequently listened to selected shortwave stations such as the Radio Nacional de Colombia, the BBC, and a few other European ones. Obviously, I had to suffer the shortcomings of shortwave listening, the accompanying interference noises, the fading fluctuations, etc. In time, I became adept at subconsciously tuning out, at least partially, such acoustic annoyances, concentrating on the musical content.

A most annoying aspect of shortwave radio after the war was the widespread presence of Soviet interference stations. These were directed at masking transmissions of western stations broadcasting in eastern European languages that were countering communist propaganda. Those jamming transmissions consisted of mostly grating wailing noises superimposed on stations like the BBC and the Voice of America, among a few others. These jamming signals stopped in 1987.

I remember some momentous radio transmissions. Most poignant was listening to Radio Paris playing the Marseillaise when Paris was liberated by the Allies on August 25, 1944. On the 29th of May of 1953 I happened to catch Radio Ankara, Turkey, transmitting much martial music, it was the commemoration of the half-millennium anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

Radio listening has fallen in disuse, especially shortwave radio. Many of the stations transmitting in those latter bands have ceased to operate or have curtailed their operations. One of the most notable broadcast services on shortwave was that off the BBC in Spanish as I described in my autobiography. It has now ceased its transmissions. Obviously radio, in general, has been replaced by other media such as the internet, satellite service, etc. But I bemoan the disappearance of shortwave radio, with its  sense of the exotic, of adventure, of challenge in tuning into stations thousands of miles away whose signals were being bounced off the ionosphere into your radio receiver. You could hear a multitude of languages, of politics, of opinions, of musical genres ranging from folk to classical, etc. It was a veritable kaleidoscope of the human experience.