Fray Castano took off his habit

The impact on Spanish radio of Pepe Domingo Castano has been so great that the most famous phrase on football Sundays for many years was not about football, it was not pronounced by him and his product seriously harms health: “Pepe, a cigar.” . But everything about Jose Domingo Castano Soler ended up being legend. So much so that he had to publish an autobiography last year, Until I run out of words (Aguilar), to leave in writing a life that ran the risk of not being told by himself, of becoming a popular song.

A life in which the second of twelve brothers is sent at the age of nine to a convent in Asturias to become a friar, left at 14 without telling his parents and returns home on an endless train journey (he meets a soldier and lies to him saying that he was a student, to which the soldier responds: “Well, you have the face of a priest…”) and suddenly shows up at home (“how dare you?”, his father snaps) causing a family drama (“there are days in life that are made for crying. And you have to cry, because it dignifies men to be able to demonstrate what is stinging their blood”); a day that he remembers, sixty years later, with these phrases: “I never understood why my parents brought a child into the world every year. To suffer, perhaps; to not suffer alone, perhaps () I loved my brothers, almost always from afar, but I loved them, I remembered them, I longed for them. But there were so many It is so difficult to love so many at the same time.”

He had to keep his first exclusive: his father, drowned by the family economy, got involved in a tobacco smuggling plot that the teenager Castano discovered by sneaking into the house. One day a ship was captured and the cargo scattered; The Civil Guard promised the kids that they would take some of the tobacco they found, and he participated “so as not to arouse suspicion,” although he spent those days biting his tongue because he knew the details better than the authorities. Fed up with his job, his town, his people and his life, when he was already a singer for Blue Sky, a band that performed in Galician towns and villages, one night he returned with the rest of the group in a white Seat when he suddenly heard on the radio: “Attention, dear listeners of Radio Galicia, of the Spanish Broadcasting Society. Through this statement, this station calls for a contest to choose new voices.”

That announcement changed his life and would end up brightening ours. She had dreams of greatness and she didn’t hide it. He wondered what they would say in A Picusa, the tanning factory where they had placed him after his career as a priest was frustrated. And his imagination flew so much, imagining luxury radio stations, charming people smiling and cutting-edge technology (“the great temple of the word with shiny crystals, microphones everywhere and well-pitched voices that presented records and gave news from time to time”), that When he arrived at that Radio Galicia his heart sank: rickety stairs, a dark floor with chips, a microphone hanging from the ceiling and a lady knitting socks and playing records who, from time to time, approached the microphone to say Four things. Above all, a huge queue of candidates. He was the second to last to take the test. He did it so well and in such a way that they called the last one out of courtesy (“don’t go, stay and wait for this one to do the test”).

One of his last interviews – or the last, who knows – was given to the Dominican website, the religious order of his childhood and adolescence. It was at the beginning of July. There she told two splendid things. One, the moment when he decided that the priesthood was not for him: “When they started calling me Fray Castano, when they put the habit on me in Palencia, in the convent of San Pablo. He looked at me in the mirror, he saw me with that habit and I didn’t believe it and he told me: ‘What am I doing here if I really came here to study?’ I never thought about being a friar but of course, the contact with them, then the novitiate, you are there all day praying”. And the second, when two months before he died he tried to imagine a sports radio, his Game Time on the Cope Network, without him, without Pepe Domingo Castano: “Don’t try to look for another Pepe Domingo, because on the radio people are not welcome.” imitations. I covered a stage, I made a radio that revolutionized advertising a little and I hope that another person comes after me, man or woman, who also revolutionizes advertising in their own style and who does what I have done but with other ideas.

When he decided to lie at the factory so he could go to Santiago to take the announcer test, he fantasized that, if he won the contest, they could listen to him on Padron every day, which is something that many radio and television stars do: In order for someone to listen to them at home, they go to the entire country. He did it for so many years and with so much success that he ended up dying without retiring. Two years ago he wrote that neither television nor songs were going to enter the trophy room of his nostalgia. “There will only be true friends, family, teachers who helped me speak and live, and the radio, that kind of sound divinity that I have worshiped and will continue to worship until I run out of words.”

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