During most of the 1980s, I woke up every morning at 06:30. By then my mother was already awake, preparing breakfast and getting ready for work, usually starting her day half an hour earlier than me.
I vividly remember that Sanyo (or was it a Sharp?) huge digital radio alarm clock next to her bed, one of those with bright green LEDs, which would invariably wake her (and me, sometimes) with the same loud music every morning: the opening credits of “Magdalena Tempranísimo”.
It was a wildly popular morning radio talk show with news, weather, interviews, and political commentary, widely considered today as one of the most important radio shows of all times in Argentina. The host of the show, which aired from 1987 to 2006, was the late Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú, and back in the 1980s, it was part of the standard program of Radio Mitre
In particular, one of the memories I have of that show was waking up every rainy morning to the music of the film “Singing in the Rain” when it was raining… or with the voice of Ms Ruiz Guiñazú telling us to “dress like bears” during the short but rather intense porteño winters.
Here’s an anecdote: in 1996, years after we moved to Switzerland, I got my first dial-up internet connection at home, and to demo the power of the Internet to my mother, I pointed my Netscape Navigator browser, bundled with the classic and (at the time) unique RealAudio plugin, to the Radio Mitre website.
I kid you not, fate dictated that at this precise moment, the opening credits of “Magdalena Tempranísimo” would be playing, and of course, my mother got very emotional. We both stayed there listening to the news, in silence, just like a decade earlier in Buenos Aires, with my mother barely believing what was blasting through the speakers of my 486 PC.