Alfonso Espinosa de los Monteros fell in love in Guayaquil, in a game show

As if it were the script of a movie or the plot of a novel, this is how love came to the life of the Ecuadorian journalist Alfonso Espinosa de los Monteros, 80 years old. Holder of a Guinness record, as the anchor with more uninterrupted screen time, it was 55 years ago, according to his account, that he met his wife, Priscilla Rendon Morlathe Guayaquil woman who conquered his heart and with whom he formed his family.

“When I started working at Ecuavisa, which is my other love, I presented a game show called Who is who?, where you had to guess a character among four contestants while I was revealing clues. She successfully contested, she won the contest. She asked all the right questions, that was how I met her. A friend of the channel, Pepe Ulloa Vernimenn, was the one who took her to the channel because he was always looking for the prettiest girls to compete. He took her to the program, but I felt crushed and what I did was that we finished the program that was live and I continued the conversation and even took her to her house, ”reveals Espinosa de los Monteros, about the occasion in which he met to the mother of his two children, Paula Alfonsina and Juan José.

In times when there were no cell phones or social networks, Espinosa de los Monteros kept in touch with her when they exchanged their conventional phone numbers. “We established a relationship that later became infatuation and in the year 71 we got married, on December 11. Now we are a happy family, we have a lot of stability and we have two children who are wonderful. Everything that unites us makes us happy. We were dating from 1967, when the channel started, until 1971, and from there we got married”, she says.

“The first thing we did was exchange telephones, at that time there were no cell phones, it would have been a great advantage, but with the conventional telephone in our respective houses, we spoke every day and had long conversations, and I also asked her out, we We would suddenly go out for dinner or a snack or a walk around Guayaquil, which is so beautiful, and ultimately that strengthened the relationship that became a marriage. My children were also born in Guayaquil, which is the city that gave me the opportunities to get ahead, at a time in my life when I was very young and what I wanted was to develop my purpose, my vocation as a communicator in an environment that it was the most promising for a person like me. I went from Ibarra to live in Guayaquil, in 1962. I feel a great love for Guayaquil”, she maintains.

In 1982, Don Alfonso -as the public affectionately calls the communicator- moved to the capital with his family for work issues. “I did it thinking above all that for my work, the city of Quito is the center of political activities in the country and in the news we are always linked to that issue, it also happened that Ecuavisa it had channel 8 of Quito and formed the chain that was called at that time Cadena de la Unidad Nacional. Later, both companies disassociated themselves and we had to form a UHF television channel, channel 23 in Quito, and I began to travel frequently between Guayaquil and Quito, because we had to form a journalistic team. So, this coming and going at a given moment made me think that my workplace had to be here and that’s where I came”, he relates.

The love in your life

His mother

“My mother was a wonderful person, we all see wonders in our mothers. She was a great support in all the moments of my life and she always showed me a kind even of preference at a given moment, although she always shared herself to give love to the eight brothers that we were, she always found ways to make us feel very well. She was a wonderful person, she left very young, she was barely 54 years old, a cancer killed her and deprived us of her when we still needed her, but her memory lives on for all of us ”, mentions about her mother, Luz Guadalupe Rueda Bustamante, whom her close ones called Guadita.

Your brothers

Don Alfonso is the third of eight brothers, on many occasions he has acted as counselor with them.

“I have shared many things with them, above all, in this world of communication that also came from our father, so I have five brothers who are also dedicated to communication. I was the first, but my brothers followed the same path. My brother Gabriel, on the radio. I have a wonderful relationship with everyone, we share many things, including musical ambitions. Due to the greater proximity of age and the connection of work, with whom I have gotten along the most or who I have been closest to is my brother Gabriel, we have worked together, he was several times in Ecuavisa. He worked with me directly, we shared things about work, I helped him to train and he helped me to train, that union has been maintained until now, strongly, I can say that he is the brother who is most closely linked to my feelings and to me. heart,” he says.

Their children

“I have always had a very stable relationship with Priscilla and we dreamed of having children. When Paula Alfonsina was born we felt incredibly happy, because she was also a girl who needed a lot of care in her first time and Priscilla gave herself completely to her care. With her support for the boys and for me, which is well reciprocated by me too, we started forming this family. Five years later my son Juan José came,” she points out.

Paula Alfonsina is a psychologist and Juan José is a marketing specialist and professor at the Universidad San Francisco and the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico). “I am proud of both of them, they love what they do, they dedicate themselves fully to it and I feel that, ultimately, everything that their mother and I put in their favor has been a profitable seed.”

His son is the one who convinced him to open his first Instagram account last year, in which he already has 340,233 followers (until the closing of this edition).

Her grandson

This is the great love, he assures. “When the grandson appears, it is a kind of novel that suddenly changes our lives, because it is not the same responsibility as with children, but love comes quadrupled. We enjoy him as good grandparents, we don’t educate him so much because he has his parents for that, but we do enjoy his affection, he is very affectionate. Antonio turned 3 years old in December, and this Monday he will go to school and have contact with other children. He is very lively, he speaks incredibly, with a fairly large vocabulary for his age, we have high hopes of what he will do with his life, ”he says very excited. “He is a very essential part of our lives and family”; he emphasizes.

The music

He grew up in a very musical family. His father and his uncles sang very well and there were no shortage of musical gatherings at meetings. Although he wanted to learn guitar since he was a child, his father advised him not to do so to prevent him from neglecting his studies. “I didn’t pay much attention to him and I learned something about the guitar with a friend and by myself, I can’t say I’m a guitarist, but I learned to play something,” he says.

Espinosa de los Monteros assures that he learned to sing the themes of his father’s generation without neglecting the search for new proposals so as not to be outdated. “I discovered Joan Manuel Serrat, who I could say is my favourite, although Alberto Cortez is next to him. One day I was in the car and heard the song autumn ballad on the radio Show, and I called my friends, there I had my friend Gustavo Woelke and I asked him about the singer, he gave me all the instructions and I actually bought the album and listened to it until scratching it, Serrat always surprised me a lot, because of that creative capacity, I like it and I sing some of its songs. He also sang boleros, rancheras and tangos”, he mentions.

His career

“I always say, I was born a communicator and I am a communicator, so I felt the vocation since I was practically a child,” he says. He remembers that it was after a walk in Ibarra, at age 11, the occasion that made him discover his desire to pursue this profession.

“The teacher told us to write a composition about the walk, I did my work and it caught his attention, he praised it and made me read my work. He told me: ‘You should send it to the newspaper’ and I followed his recommendation to the letter. I sent it to the newspaper Trade, that had a page on provinces, and he published my essay. When I received the newspaper in Ibarra, which I went to buy with my mother, suddenly I had a newspaper in my hands with a text written by me, that moment I felt the first call of communication and I told myself how nice it is to tell things to the people. There I discovered this world of communication and my vocation as a journalist. Only on television I am 55 years old and 8 years prior I worked on the radio”, recalls the anchor from televiewfrom Ecuavisa.