104.9 Magic AM Radio

Nationality: USA
Age: 28
Occupation: Oil/Gas
Residence: Midland, TX
Performance Date: 1//20/18
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

The following story was relayed from a cousin during a night at home in south Texas. On frequent occasion during family gatherings, cousins will gather on the porch following dinner to share cocktails, beers, cigarettes, and conversation. When the night has progressed for a few hours more, the conversation shifts into each member of the conversation sharing humorous anecdotes and stories one-by-one.

 

The cousin who told the story works and lives exclusively in south Texas, and being out of college is more privy to hearing the bizarre ramblings of local radio stations in the coastal areas surrounding Corpus Christi. The labor culture that exists in this area is predominantly a mix of English and Spanish-speaking idiosyncrasies, drawing from distinctly Hispanic and Anglo modes of speech.

 

On the night of documentation, the cousin in question told a story of a particular AM radio station known as ‘104.9 Magic’, operated by a 60-something Hispanic man named Lolo Aguilar. As described by my cousin, Mr. Aguilar’s sessions on the radio center on no topic in particular and extend for sometimes a matter of hours consisting entirely of him simply speaking into the radio from whatever is on his mind, with the only interruptions coming in the form of homemade commercial breaks celebrating the popular basketball team of the San Antonio Spurs.

 

One of Mr. Aguilar’s daily ramblings proceeded as follows (to be read/imagined in a Hispanic-American dialect):

 

“Today I thought I’d talk about presidents. Couple good topics the last couple days, but I figured today I’d hold off on having people call in and just talk about a few things that’ve been on my mind lately.

 

Now, you know…the thing about presidents, and we have a lot of good ones too, throughout the years. There was Ronald Reagan. Theodore Roosevelt, uh…Abraham Lincoln. George Washington, he goes without saying. And not just them by themselves either, we had too many good ones. And people normally talk about a few when they’re talking about things like that.

 

But you know who was, maybe, perhaps the best president that nobody talk about too much like the others is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They call him FDR. He was president during Worl’ War Two, and also, he was president The Great Deprechon [Depression]. And you know, he was in office for four times. Which was the most terms of any other president. He had a lot of really goo things going for him in these time. But the thing is, he die. So he could not be president no more.”

 

What particularly stands out to me from my cousin’s story, later tuning in myself the next day to wind up listening to a ten minute discussion on Crayola’s success being measured in how many colors they offer in crayon boxes, is his encapsulation of perhaps not the exact words of Mr. Aguilar, but undoubtedly the spirit with which he carries his day-to-day personality on the airwaves. The most important notion for my cousin to capture and feed our complete understanding (as an audience to his own recollection) depends not on perfectly remembering every comma, pause, and word, instead relying on a sensory recreation of what it feels like to listen to this man on the radio.

Point Vicente Lighthouse ghost

The following story is one that was told to me by a classmate regarding a supposed haunted lighthouse in his hometown. As the subject explained, the lighthouse in question does not involve much of a personal experience, but that of his local community.

For the sake of convenience, I have included the subject identified as ‘A’, with his interviewer denoted as ‘Q.’

His explanation proceeded as follows:

 

A. We have this lighthouse, Point Vicente.

 Q. Is that PV?

 A. P.V., it’s short for Palos Verdes. Green Sticks.

 Q. What’s that?

 A. That’s my hometown.

 Q. No, the type of story.

 A. Oh, it’s a ghost story.

 

So yeah, we have this lighthouse, Point Vicente. It’s this big famous lighthouse.

 

The story goes that, um, there is a ghost lady who lives at the top because she’s the widow of some sailor who lived or- who sailed on the- I forget, there’s some boat…The Destroyer? That’s wrecked in one of our bays, I forget. Or one of our, I forget what it’s called. I think it’s the Destroyer, the SS Destroyer, but that sounds like a made-up boat name!

 

Anyways, so there’s this shipwreck, it’s like an army boat.

 

And the story goes that she is the wife of one of the sailors. And so every night she comes out and like, moans. And you can see her silhouette if you look at the top of the lighthouse. And I remember as a kid, if you go- if you’re like driving by, and you look up, it looks like there’s a person up there walking around. Every night. Even if it’s like 5 a.m. and you’re coming back from somebody’s house or something, there’s- it looks like a person. It’s bizarre.

 

Another version is that she was the wife of the Vanderlips, who were this rich family that lived in P.V.. And they’re the reason there’s peacocks in P.V., because they had a pet peacock and it escaped, anyways, that’s another story.

Anyways, Mrs. Vanderlip is also said to be the widow. But no one knows.

 

 

Q. Where did you hear it?

A. I think I heard about it at the Point Vicente Cultural Center, but I also read about it a bit online, because there’s this whole thing about like, ghosts in P.V. It’s a good read. Spooky.

Personally, I find it interesting that so many ghost stories are set at lighthouses or center around them. Such makes one consider what kind of specific aesthetic appeals (for lack of a better word) delineate the lighthouse that make it such a prominent candidate for spectral suppositions, stories, etc. than others. Their isolation and distinct architecture could be a candidate, along with their arguably spectral functionality in the popular image, being that of a lone shining beam cutting through the fog on lonely, misty coastlines.

As for the trope of the wife eternally waiting for her perished sailor husband to never return home, such also makes for an easy pairing that contributes to a particular image of ominous nature. One mention in particular of being able to see the ghost at any time of day prompts me to believe that the specter is, in fact, an optical illusion of some kind. However, debunking a mystery serves no purpose other than to ruin fun, and in the case of a hometown’s distinct cultural facet of having a community ghost story everyone is familiar with.

 

Demon Dog story

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 3/27/18
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Below is a supernatural story told to me by a classmate whose family hails from the Mexican state of Michoacán, the subject of the story being her grandmother at a young age encountering an evil supernatural entity, possibly a demon, with her siblings.

For the sake of convenience, I have identified the interviewer in the following interaction as ‘Q’, and the subject as ‘A.’

The story was told as follows:

Q. Let’s hear a ghost story.

A. So In Mexico, my grandma told me this story- my grandma was born in Mexico. Um, my grandma told me that at a certain time, so you had to cross this river to get back, but her and her brothers and sisters, they would go and get fruit. But like, you had to cross the river- it was a long way. So you basically had to leave early to get back before sunset and you have to cross this river 

If you were to cross it before sunset you would see a dog, but it was like a demon dog. And it would turn its head and look back at you and like turn its head upside down

She said one time, her and her sisters, they were fighting. They were fighting over a banana. And the sun had already set, and the oldest sister was all like, if y’all stop fighting and we all stay quiet and be calm, the dog won’t come.

But because her and her sister were fighting over a banana, the dog ended up appearing. Like, she said that they saw the dog, and uh, the only way they could outrun him was to like, swim in the river. So they had to swim in the river. The dog ended up catching up to them, but by the time he did, they were already like, in their house. And what they had to do was all like, get together, under a table, and just like apologize to each other and like hug each other.

So once all of them, basically like, were good, the dog- they just stopped hearing the barking. 

Q. What part of Mexico was this in?

A. Michoacan 

What stands out about this story is its similarity to many classic tales in utilizing supernatural elements to form a moral or some kind of concluding lesson.

Whether the incident happened or not is not the matter. What does matter is the scenario of a grandmother giving her granddaughter a story involving the escape and overcoming of assailing evil forces by the power of familial love, something that could only have been accomplished if each of the family set aside their qualms and focused on the issue at hand rather than continue to fight.

 

Such small, personal tales demonstrate the power of narrative in illustrating lessons for successive generations in a manner that can be properly understood and perceived in a child’s eyes, hence the presence of a monster (the demon dog).

Dropping the Baton sports belief

Nationality: USA
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 3/27/18
Primary Language: English

The following interaction illustrates a folk belief relating to a former student-athlete in high-school track & field relating coach/student view that dropping a relay baton during practice will bode ill for the actual race.

 

For convenience, the interviewee has been marked as ‘A’, and the documenter has been marked as ‘Q.’ The interaction proceeded as such:

 

A., I don’t know if this is true for every track and field team, but if you drop the baton like if you were on the relay team and you dropped it any time during the week before the track meets, during practice. Then you’d have to run a mile, because then for sure if you drop the baton during practice then for sure you were gonna drop the baton during the actual race.

 

My coach really believed it, and she would get like severely distraught any time someone dropped the baton, because it was…sacred.

 

…

I also dropped the baton and had to run a mile.

Actually, I dropped the baton multiple times. People really shame you for that.

Q. You learned all this from your coach?

A. Yeah.

Q. What does it mean to your coach?

A. What does it mean to my coach? It means we’ve just lost.

 

I thought it was just that particular coach, too. But we had 3 different coaches in 4 years when I was there, and all of them were like ‘you drop the baton, you go run a mile.

 

And I’m like, what? There’s no correlation.

I get the whole ‘practice the way you perform’ thing, but I also think that just because you drop the baton during practice that doesn’t mean you’re gonna drop it during the race.

 

The caution surrounding and seemingly arbitrary enforcement of a folk belief on the part of the coaches illustrated here pulls back the deep-seeded roots of those that inhabit the field of sports, in which the beliefs can take a limitless amount of forms.

 

As indicated here, most of them center on the matter of luck and future implications of success/victory/winning, along with their mirror image counterparts. The matter of keeping the baton in one’s hand does not determine whether one will win, but dropping it will certainly determine if the team should lose.

 

The most interesting aspect is the enforcement of the belief from multiple coaches throughout the years who, presumably, would not have colluded with each other for something so trivial. However, such consistency across rotation highlights the strength of certain sports beliefs no matter who or where.

Bible Study Prayer

Nationality: Nicaraguan
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/12/18
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

Each Wednesday, I meet with a small group of fellow university students for a peer-led Bible study at the USC Catholic Center. Each week has a similar layout in terms of procedure, although in this particular meeting, the primary topic was centered and prayer for the recent passing of a close friend and classmate. Because her death greatly affected many of my fellow classmates (and needless to say, her family, who I also knew), much of the prayers given were subsequently aimed in consideration of these others.

 

The following frames the course of a typical Bible-study meeting procedure, although in the case of an exceptional incident:

 

The same eight members of the study meet in the same room, a quiet second-floor conference area, each week beginning at 6:50 p.m., and lasting for around 45 minutes to an hour. Our study’s leader, Javier, had brought me into the group the preceding year. He starts the session having already brought a dealing of snack foods (Oreos, chips & dip, etc.), seating the members around a circular table.

 

The meeting is formally started with the members bowing their heads, crossing their hearts, and reciting in unison the ‘Hail Mary’ traditional catholic prayer, which goes as follows:

 

Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

 

Each member then goes one-by-one relaying their personal ‘highs and lows’ since the last meeting, followed by an ‘coming to God moment,’ meant to illustrate an incidence or realization of spirituality and faith.

 

At this point in the meeting, the leader then transitions to a pre-selected lesson, involving the reading of a particular passage of scripture that exemplifies the day’s lesson, followed by a group discussion of what in the passage stood out during the reading, what conclusions they have drawn, or otherwise. This day’s topic involved a passage from the book of Philippians (2: 5-8),  that highlights the humbled passage of Jesus through the realm of man by taking on the form of a man himself.

 

Two smaller, supplementary readings are typically held that reinforce the day’s lesson. However, the leader took the opportunity to discuss the topic of my passed friend, which I had disclosed to him earlier. The group then held a loose discussion of life and death from their various points of view.

 

Each meeting is subsequently closed with an extended prayer from the leader himself. He took the opportunity to center it exclusively on the topic of the passed friend.

 

While the circumstances did not figure appropriate to record the prayer in its entirety, the leader’s points of acknowledgment and hearkening to God included my own emotional health, that of the deceased parents and her friends/classmates at school, as well as for potential victims of suicide (given that these were the circumstances under which she passed).

 

Perhaps the most important aspect of this particular meeting to analyze is the adaptation of a group’s normal schedule to briefly accommodate and address a member’s trying circumstances. In this case, it was to provide a sense of comfort and counsel by means of spirituality, along with the personalization of holding it among people familiar with each other.

 

The leader’s extended prayer stood out to me the most, for unlike the established prayer recited at the start of each meeting, this prayer was devised entirely in the moment, lasting for a total of five uninterrupted minutes devoid of ‘ums’ or silences in thought.

 

A small, but important point that can also be acknowledged in the general scheme of the meetings is the inclusion of snacks as an attracting factor. By providing food, the study leader is able to provide an incentive for members to arrive and enjoy treats, but also to keep hands and minds from wandering or growing idle during/in between each topic of study.