04th
Feburary 2010
Radio Caribbean’s
pivotal role in development of local radio
From Request Time
to News Spin
 That
HTS program on Historical Footnotes took me
down local radio’s Memory Lane the other
day. On Monday, it focused on Radio Caribbean
having made its first English broadcast 36 years
earlier to the day -- on 1st February 1974.
As correctly recalled, Radio Caribbean was a
European-owned station that broadcast in French
from Vigie, mainly to audiences in Martinique.
Not much was publicly known of the station’s
management and administrative operations back
then. Some of those who listened knew of a fluffy-haired
white Kweyol-speaking French announcer called
Mano, who lived and worked here, but who was
a star in Martinique. (Another little known
historical fact was that the station was once
under the control of Pierre Salinger, a former
Press Secretary to President John F. Kennedy.)
With Radio Caribbean’s switch to English,
the star announcers were Emelda Charles, Vaughn
Noel and Hervan Henry, with Tom Foster taking
care of technical matters.
A star show back then was The Request Program.
It communicated greetings. You simply wrote
a letter to the program (you couldn’t
call back then) sending “a request”
to someone, wishing them anything – Happy
Birthday, Happy Anniversary, Happy Day, Happy
Anything... It didn’t matter what. What
mattered was that you took time off to write
the letter, to post it, to wait up and listen
to your “request” being read on
the air -- and for everyone else to hear as
well. (There were some people who actually sent
requests to everybody they knew, every Sunday
– to friend, to family, even to foe.)
But there’s one Radio Caribbean name that
wasn’t mentioned – that of Rodinald
“Roddy” DeCoteau. Taking nothing
away from Emelda, Vaughn and Hervan, Roddy’s
was a distinctive voice that resonated with
the Sunday “request” crowd. To them
he was “Mr Request Time”. I always
listened to Roddy on a tiny blue transistor
radio that my father bought me. I wanted to
see who were the people behind the voices, so,
one day, I risked dog bites and strap lashes
and walked all the way to the station at Vigie,
near St. Mary’s College. (Without today’s
Castries Waterfront and the San Soucis Highway,
that was a trip by itself back then…)
From that day on three and a half decades ago,
Radio Caribbean has continuously played a significant
role in the development of local broadcasting.
Earl Huntley pioneered Kweyol broadcasting there,
leading the likes of Sam Flood and Hilaire Aleander.
Marcellus Miller, Charles Popo and others also
cut their teeth at Radio Caribbean.
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