Eduardo Sánchez Junco, the owner of ¡Hola! and Hello!, who according to this piece kept editorial control firmly in Madrid for his overseas editions, died recently. The magazine was founded in 1944 by his father, with the tagline “La Spuma de la Vida” (The froth of life).
The Guardian published his obit today here, including this oft-forgotten nugget showing how seemingly harmless gossip can be part of society’s problems:
¡Hola! played a role in remoulding Spanish society under the Franco dictatorship. It promoted Catholic morality, featuring weddings, baptisms and first communions, directing its readers’ attentions to these formal activities of Spain’s upper-class, whilst ignoring their affairs, profiteering and corruption.
The first big success of ¡Hola! came with its coverage of the Eucharistic Congress, a major church assembly which helped break down the isolation of the dictatorship, and which was held in Barcelona in 1952.
A typical 1950s front cover featuring Franco can be seen here.
A historical footnote: ¡Hola!‘s editor in chief since 1966, Jaime Peñafiel, left the magazine in 1984 to become editor of La Revista (The Magazine), whose masthead looked very similar to that of ¡Hola!. The similarities ended there, however: an early edition published exactly the opposite kind of story to what Peñafiel had spent the previous twenty years perfecting: “The agony and death of Franco”. Front cover here.
Bonus link: The band Playground Legend recently released their own PDF Hello! spoof, downloadable here (5.5MB, PDF).
