JUAN VELARDE FUERTES PRESENT!

A few days ago, on my visit to Salas to pray at the tomb of Bishop Valdés, founder of the University of Oviedo, I remembered another distinguished Salas man: Don Juan Velarde, who just passed away at 95 loaded with years, merits and virtues. He was a hero of our Court of Accounts, champion of the economic progress of Spain.

At that time I went to a bookstore where he bought his books. I found it closed. The business sank, we are running out of paper.

MacLuhan is outmaneuvering Guttemberg.

But, don't worry, what would a Galician say. Professor Velarde reminds me of those booklets that he published in ABOVE on Sundays that he read avidly.

I didn't even know about economics, I'm literate, but I liked those rants by don Juan referring to saving public spending, improving roads, full employment and so on.

He also talked about his trips by road to the Villa del Inquisidor that lasted almost ten hours from Madrid. You had to go through La Espina and he would get off at Cangas de Narcea, go into a pastry shop and load up casiadielles and enfiladas for the madriles.

He must have had a sweet tooth, he didn't smoke and although I didn't personally treat him, I heard him at a conference. He was speaking in torrents. Great sight, even if he was nearsighted.

He was redone, optimistic, jocundo, avuncular, like a good Asturian, let me tell you. And to demonstrate it, there are his booklets in the newspaper archives in the organ of the Movement's presentation that made me reconsider the social and economic advances of José Antoniano's thought.

We were then the ninth industrial power in the West.

Compared to some of my English colleagues in Fleet Street, I was paid three times as much as they were, he had an office in London and not a writing desk like the ones at the Financial Times.

He was not, with everything and that, of the correspondents the one who earned the most. José Antonio Plaza of happy memory, I think he had a salary of two thousand pounds.

  At that time, sterling was at rock bottom and many weekends charter planes loaded with Spaniards flew to Heathrow from Madrid, traveling to the English capital to go shopping on Oxford Street.

Many Englishmen were envious of us.

And I let that thought shine through in my book “I was a correspondent for Franco, Quo vadis Spain?”.

When he returned to Oviedo to see the girl, he told his colleagues: we are a rich country. They didn't believe me, but life was better in Spain than in the British Isles of all, all of them.

  Those were the times of lo in lo out, the Beatles, developmentalism, the new sexual freedoms. I wrote my chronicles about the miners' strikes in that winter of discontent when England was left in the dark because of the confrontation between the Labor government and the Unions. But he had other commitments to attend to.

From Madrid, my colleagues ordered all kinds of things from stethoscopes to pocket televisions.

  On a certain occasion, someone whose name I don't remember asked me to buy a contraceptive DEW for his wife on Harley Street, the street of the doctors, since she had seven babies and didn't want any more children.

I packed it and sent it by express mail. The item did not arrive.

So I told Pepe Meléndez, the beloved journalist who ran the Efe agency office on Bouverie Street. Meléndez, very bullfighting and very funny, was a bit of a stutter and he told me with his broken tongue:

─No, don't worry… pp Parrita. I… there will be it then… this is the woman from the Cooorreos.

Jokes aside, the Salense who has just died almost a hundred years old was one of the great architects of that good economic management that began with the Falangism of the left. Rest in peace. Juan Velarde Fuertes… present!

 

Sunday, February 5, 2023