Gallatin native thrives with Latin jazz format

By RON PAGLIA

For the MV Independent

As a teenager growing up in Gallatin in the 1960s, Tony Vasques spent considerable time listening to the music of such popular radio disc jockeys as Porky Chedwick and New Eagle native Terry Lee (Trunzo).

Some 50 years later, Vasques, a 1970 graduate of Elizabeth Forward High School who also attended St. Anthony School in Monongahela, produces and hosts his own radio show, “Latin Perspective.” He is based in the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood, Ohio, where he and his wife of 22 years, Ana, a native of Caracas, Venezuela, make their home.

“Back in those wonderful teen years, there were no jazz or Latin-oriented music stations to listen to,” Vasques recalled. “So we listened to TL and Porky and the other Pittsburgh and local disc jockeys and enjoyed their music. I also often listened to shortwave radio and hearing myriad voices from around the globe created ‘visions’ of how life was in other parts of the world.

“I am often asked where I went to broadcasting school and my answer is that I attentively listened to a lot of radio stations while growing up in Southwestern Pennsylvania.”

The British Invasion that brought The Beatles and The Rolling Stones to America in the mid-1960s also influenced Vasques, the son of Adolph Vasques of Gallatin and Rose Maksim March, a native of Smithfield who now lives in Elizabeth.

“I began playing the drums with a couple of local garage bands,” he said.

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