On the Road with Neal Cassady and XELO

"Clint, Texas!" said Dean. He had the radio on to the Clint station. Every fifteen minutes they played a record; the rest of the time it was commercials about a high-school correspondence course.

The narrator is Sal Paradise, Jack Kerouac's character in "On The Road." Dean (Moriarty) is his best friend Neal Cassady. They're on an adventure that started in New York City, in Dean's new 1949 Hudson, on what's now Texas Route 20 that hugs the Rio Grande, a little east of El Paso. With them is Marylou, in real life LuAnne Henderson, Neal's eighteen year old companion, to whom he'd become closer in the weeks since the annulment of their two year old marriage.

In the Louisiana night, they had become lost on back roads that wound through thick, steamy swamps. Marylou, curled between Dean and Sal in the big car's front seat, was still frightened. "I'm glad we got out of there," she said. "Let's play some more mystery programs now."

But now Dean had control of the radio, and tuned it to 800, the frequency of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico station XELO, whose United States mailing address was a post office box in Clint, Texas.

"This program is beamed all over the West," cried Dean excitedly. "Man, I used to listen to it day and night in reform school and prison. All of us used to write in. You get a high-school diploma by mail, facsimile thereof, if you pass the test. And the music is always cowboy hillbilly and Mexican, absolutely the worst program in the entire history of the country and nobody can do anything about it. They have a tremendous beam; they've got the whole land hogtied."

XELO was one of several high-powered Mexican radio stations in border towns that broadcast, in English, programs for American listeners. Many were infomercials, like the one Dean remembered for mail-order high school diplomas. Baby chicks, Bibles, rosebushes, patent medicines and, later, oldies-but-goodies anthologies, were also sold. Stars of American country music-Jim Reeves, Johnny Horton, Hank Thompson-recorded shows for broadcast on the border stations, on which they plugged their records and songbooks.

The North American Radio Broadcast Agreement of 1941 designated XELO as the dominant station on 800, the one whose signal everyone else on at night had to protect. Pretty much everywhere in the lower 48 U.S. states, outside the northeast, XELO came in loud and clear. It didn't matter where you were, Dean observed; Colorado, Wyoming, wherever, you got Clint, Texas, Clint, Texas.

Where I was, CKLW from Windsor, Ontario is what you got on 800. I heard the Juarez station as XELO only once, in Indiana, on Christmas night 1968. The Record Roost show was on. Its hosts had eponymous radio names: Rick Needle, Frank Album, James Turntable. Cousin Billie read recipes listeners had sent in. Dogs barked, chickens squawked. A lion roared. Record Roost was an extended version of the mailbag show format, but unlike any I'd ever heard.

I made some notes, and, when I got home, sent a reception report; not to Clint, Texas, but to the Juarez mailing address Cousin Billie had read. That meant I had to put extra postage on the envelope. The first-class rate to Mexico at the time was eight cents. Back came the oversized postcard pictured; not a QSL conformation since it has no date and time, but still a treasured radio souvenir franked with a 20 peso Mexican stamp.

In the 1970s, some Americans leased XELO's entire broadcast day and turned it into an English top-40 station. New call letters also appeared. As XEROK, "X-Rock" became the CKLW of the west. It played all the American hits, but bent radio rules and format conventions because it was licensed to a foreign country. Only the legal IDs in Spanish gave away its location. Kids in remote towns tuned X-Rock and got the same kick Neal had from listening to the radio.

We saw the high antenna beyond the shacks of Clint. "Oh, man, the things I could tell you!" cried Dean, almost weeping.

Neal Cassady, womanizer and career petty criminal, loved radio. The red marker lights on XELO's tower winking in the night turned him nostalgic. He had radio stories to tell; no doubt about times when the yellow glow of a dial provided the only light in the room, when the voices coming through the grill cloth seemed to be speaking to only him. If Fate had pointed him in a different direction, he may have become a DXer, submitting reception reports and collecting QSL cards.

By the time I made my western road trips, XEROK had dropped top-40 for Mexican norte�as and rancheras, and become "La Ca��n" (in literal Spanish, "the cannon"). I still listened. In the parking lot of a drive-in in Elk City, Oklahoma, in a motel in Gallup, New Mexico, on Andy Devine Boulevard in Kingman, Arizona, I tuned the radio to 800 and thought of old Dean Moriarty.

Sources:

Fowler, Gene, and Crawford, Bill. Border Radio: Quacks, Yodelers, Pitchmen, And Other Amazing Broadcasters Of The American Airwaves. Texas Monthly Press, 1987.

Kerouac, Jack. On The Road. Viking Press, 1957.

Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography Of Jack Kerouac. Evergreen Press, 1984.