Late at night back in the 60's, did any of you other "older" guys tune into 1570 AM on your radio's dial and listen to 250000 clear channel watts of Wolfman Jack playing true R&B and other music you didn't hear on top 40 stations or hawking baby chickens or ? .... or perhaps listen to the bible thumpers or other charlatans (you could buy an autographed picture of Jesus Christ)?
Picked up the tail end of a discussion of the above on NPR yesterday and did it bring back some almost forgotten memories of those days.
Starting in the 30's, radio station XER then XERA and finally XERF broadcasting out of Ciudad Acuna Mexico opened up a whole nother world of radio broadcasting: "A quack doctor. A million watts. Goat testicles. Hitler. Wolfman Jack. Now, this is radio"! as the story goes.
At one time in the 30's, XER was broadcasting at one million watts and over the years those stations broadcast at anywhere from 100000 watts to one million watts but usually in the 250000 range all clear channel and could be heard all over North America and in much of Western Europe including Russia.
All of this started by a quack doctor (John Romulus Brinkley ) who was run out of Kansas for hawking cures to your virility and other problems (including implanting pieces of goat gonads in testicles !!). One of those to strange to be true stories but is all true.. this articles just hits the high points:
The Story of XERF Never Published