History Lesson 
Salvation Worries? Prostate Trouble?
"A raffish assortment offering everything from baby chicks to techniques of seduction to stock in gold mines."
(Page 2 of 3)
"One time in 1951 I was doing local news and spinning country records for Station KCRS in Midland, all for the grand sum of $70 a week, when this thin fella with a prominent adam's apple and sporty two-tone shoes walked in and introduced himself. Looked something like a 1930's road drummer come on good times: big sparkly rings and gaudy string tie and big car and hard essence of ambition. Said he had heard me on his car radio, just passing through, and I had the kind of palaver and down-home delivery that would make me a fortune if I would let it—and him—just do it. I said for money I would just about do anything, and he explained how he was connected with that Del Rio/Villa Acuna station. Described himself as an independent time contractor, which meant he bought up time in blocks of 60 minutes from the station and used it as he wished. He then sub-contracted to guys like me who could impersonate some evangelist, say, preach a little, sing a little, then give a spiel for etchings of the Last Supper or prayer cloths to be placed anywhere you happen to hurt. He said they even once tried selling bottled Holy Water from the Rio Grande.
"Or I might come on as Uncle Buddy or Cowboy Jim or whatever, so long as people liked me enough to buy tonics or hymnals or unsexed baby chicks or genuine simulated diamond rings. Yes, the deal was he would pay me $125 weekly to start, and more if I was good at it, plus a percentage of whatever came in from the good folks out there in Radio Land. If I liked it, and proved to have the talent he thought he saw in me, then he would sell me some of his own time and I could invent my own programs and characters and keep all I made—and conceivably become a big-time independent contractor like himself."
King remembers it as "about the best offer I ever had, and I damn near took it." Then he adds: "After a week, maybe, of searching what little soul I had, I decided that life called me surely to more noble roles, so I declined..."
Brinkley and his imitators along the border were never diverted by such irrelevant concerns. Not that there weren't casualties now and again along the way. There was Norman Baker, the cancer quack who served time for mail fraud. Up until the early Sixties there was the Rev. Charles Jessup who nightly appealed for assistance in his own personal care and feeding: "Keep this little ole boy from the clay hills of Alabama on the air. I'm your brother, and I'm doin' the best I can. Won't you, dear friends, send me your offering today?"
In 1964 Jessup was arrested and charged with mail fraud, specifically for the use of donations to buy property, big cars, boats, seaplanes, and dabble in illegal cock fighting. The indictment claimed Jessup represented himself as "a holy and devout man whose whole life was devoted to God's work, a man who had talked with God." He had also talked with lady friends, the indictment charging him with concealing the fact he had been married four times, obtaining two divorces by false statements and courting and marrying a 15-year-old while still married to his third wife. His Fellowship Revival Association, the indictment claimed, was used to solicit donations, evade taxes, maintain reduced mailing privileges, and otherwise enrich himself personally.
Jessup was subsequently fined a few thousand dollars, and sentenced to a year in prison plus five years probation during which he would be forbidden to engage in any self-promotion ventures.
Bringing down the Brinkley empire was considerably more complicated. It was not until 1941 that pressure from the U.S. finally provoked the Mexican government to deny XERA its wave-length assignment and send in the Mexican Army to tear down the station and its towers. And before Brinkley could be brought to trial for mail fraud in 1942, he was dead of larger-than-life natural causes: heart blockage, kidney ailments, incomplete healing of an amputated leg. Within a few years, Brinkley's former associates were back in business and carrying on in the glorious tradition—XERF was established as a successor to XERA, and the U.S. continued to be jolted nightly by the big voice from little Del Rio advertising pyorrhea cures, penny-a-day burial insurance, engraved tombstones.
The formula has seldom been tampered with to this day. The format of Station XEG in Monterey is practically identical to XERF, and XELO in Juarez tailored much of its broadcast time to similar programming until a recent change of ownership signaled a perceptible shift to soul-station trappings. Other faces in the cloud are PJB, powered by half a million watts from the Netherlands Antilles, beaming a signal north and south, and XETRA in Rosarita Beach, Mexico, covering Tijuana, San Diego, all of Southern California and just about anyplace else an effective signal strength of a quarter-million watts might reach.
The superpowered border radio has been more or less condoned by Mexican authorities from the outset, presumably because the U.S. and Canadian governments had arrogantly divided between themselves the entire long-wave broadcast band, leaving neither Cuba nor Mexico any clear channels at all. The border stations, traditionally owned by American investors, have always cut into wave lengths used by U.S. and Canadian stations which are forbidden by law from stoking up their own transmission facilities. With the border stations' more powerful means of transmission, American advertisers were able to exploit their products throughout most of the U.S.
The hellfire and lamentation manner might have caused more sophisticated listeners to view the programs with contempt, but the economic rationale was incontestably sound.
The boondock listening audience was enormous, intensely loyal and infinitely patient—always desperate to invest a few more hard-earned dollars in suitably-packaged propositions guaranteeing anything from guitar lessons ("Don't you-all know guitar players make lots of money?") to relief from hemorrhoidal pain to mere eternal nirvana in the heavenly kingdom. Even conventional broadcasters began marketing products chiefly popular with country people: Black Draught, Wine of Cardui, Garrett Snuff, Nehi and Royal Crown, Redman Chewing Tobacco and Light Crust Flour.
In The Story of Country Music, the border stations were credited with the principal role in the dissemination of country music throughout the U.S. "If one could endure the seemingly never ending advertising," the book notes, "he could occasionally hear a hillbilly song of the best quality." XERA, for example, carried the Carter Family in the last three years of their professional recording career (1938 to 1941), and other stations carried such strong traditionalist groups as Mainer's Mountaineers, the Callahan Brothers, the Delmore Brothers, the Pickard Family and Cowboy Slim Rinehart. It was generally assumed that New York and New England were the only areas where such programming did not claim wide appeal.
Nor do operational problems differ markedly from the time 40 years ago when Brinkley was obliged to prettify his own house with at least the appearance of nominal Mexican ownership. The stock ownership of the Villa Acuna Broadcasting Company was shifted, by bearer certificates, to Brinkley friends on the Mexico side of the river who just as obligingly handed the stock back to Brinkley. Whereupon the Mexican Department of Communications concluded that XER belonged to a group composed entirely of Mexican nationals, that the station was run legally and in accordance with all regulations, that it did not interfere with U.S. stations, and that any person could use it for "business, scientific, cultural or literary broadcasting."
A contemporary broadcaster is compelled to play similar games. Border stations are ostensibly owned by Mexican nationals with exclusive sales rights leased to U.S. corporations which handle actual station operations. In practice, all shares of stock are signed over (as "bearer certificates") at the time of issuance and are held in American banks. The procedure is standard for American companies doing business in revolutionary Mexico—and a matter of well-rehearsed negotiable routine for Mexico City law firms.
A broadcaster with a good many years of experience along both sides of the border states flatly: "There is no problem in successfully operating a Mexican radio station in the United States. If the Federal Communications Commission was as easy to get along with as the Mexican government, there would be few problems in operating any stations today!" He admits that there are, of course, "basic techniques" of ownership of Mexican stations which must be followed, but these present no problem with proper legal guidance.
Then, too, and surely not the least among the plus factors of such operations, there is the delightful fact that Mexican stations are licensed for 30 years rather than the three years common in the United States.
Just how staggeringly lucrative a border station beamed toward Yankee buying power can be is suggested by the example of XELO in Juarez, recently purchased for close to a million dollars by a group of El Paso businessmen-investors. The seller was one Jack McVeigh, also from El Paso, whose father-in-law had personally built the station before the war. When prospective buyers began appraising current profits and future possibilities, it was noted straightaway that the broadcast concession was good until 1989 and that there was virtually no upward limitation on its broadcast frequency. Current gross revenues were $300,000 yearly, which, with low operating costs typical of border facilities, produced a cash flow of $130,000 a year. This was the kind of money still circulating even after the McVeigh family had paid themselves approximately $70,000 in salaries as employees of both the station and their own advertising sales agency.
None of which, however, should suggest the McVeigh ownership was realizing XELO's full potential. Consultants were quick to point out that refinements in equipment and in programming would produce dramatic results—juicing up effective signal strength from 50 to 100 percent and attracting a vastly larger listenership on both sides of the river. One critic noted the station was about where it was in 1944: "It simply does not program in a modern manner and thus fails to attract the Mexican audience in El Paso to the degree it logically should."
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