How Steve Crosno Changed El Paso Radio

There is a specific kind of Sunday afternoon that only El Paso can produce. The light goes gold and wide. The Franklin Mountains hold everything in like cupped hands. Time slows down, not because nothing is happening, but because everything feels exactly right. My uncle Victor used to soundtrack those Sundays with cassette tapes he had recorded off the radio. Recorded off a man named Steve Crosno.

I was too young to catch Crosno in his prime. But Funkle Victor made sure I didn't miss him. Those recordings were full of oldies, yes, but they were also full of something harder to describe. A warmth. A voice that talked to you like you were the only person in the room. Like you were already friends and like Crosno genuinely wanted to be there, right there with you.

My uncle had recorded those sessions onto cassettes back in the day, but by the time I finally got my driver's license, he had burnt all of it onto CDs. My cousin and I would load them up and cruise. Two generations of audio sitting in a jewel case. We didn't need a destination. Crosno was the destination.

That's when I knew I wanted to come home to El Paso someday and be on the radio. Crosno inspired me years after his time and miles away from his home. My home.

An El Paso DJ That You Could Feel

Steve Crosno started on his 16th birthday in 1956, hosting a Saturday show at KGRT in Las Cruces. By 1959 he was at KELP, El Paso's premier Top 40 AM station, and he took to the Borderland like he had always lived here. He left once, chasing a bigger paycheck at a national station in San Diego, and came back. "I missed the people of El Paso and the climate," he said. "The people here are really warm and friendly."

Crosno became the first El Paso DJ to play Spanish-language music on an English-language station. He broke away from rigid playlists and opened the dial to R&B, blues, and the Latin sounds his listeners were already living with at home. He wasn't imposing taste, he was listening to the city. Longtime Fox 92.3 host Mike G  called the approach "revolutionary." What emerged from all those listener requests wasn't so much a format as the city itself. Later it became what locals called the El Paso Sound, known nationally as Chicano Soul.

Crosno wore extravagant wigs after a 1959 hiking accident left him without hair. He leaned into it. He had five-inch sideburns and a nasal twang that became a signature. He was eccentric by any measure, but the eccentricity was in service of connection, not spectacle. "He was truly a celebrity," one longtime associate said, "but he didn't carry himself that way."

In 1962 he launched The Crosno Hop, a weekly dance show on KELP-TV. Later he hosted Studio 14, a weekly dance program described as part American Bandstand, part Soul Train, a place where young El Pasoans from every corner of the city could see themselves reflected. The show was the radio made physical. It was the community gathered in one room.

That was always the point. The music was the reason, but the community was the mission.

What Sun City Radio Used to Be

It is worth pausing here to say something about what radio was, and what it meant.

Before streaming, before algorithms, before a playlist could be assembled entirely around your own listening history and never surprise you again, radio was a connective device. It reached into neighborhoods. It played what your neighbor was requesting. It reminded you that the city you lived in was bigger and stranger and more beautiful than your particular corner of it. It was, at its best, a mirror held up to a community, and a hand extended across the room.

Crosno understood that intrinsically. He didn't broadcast into El Paso, he moved through it. He threw events. He showed up. He was at the dances. He knew the faces behind the requests. The intimacy in his voice on those recordings wasn't performance. It was the sound of a man who genuinely loved the place he had chosen.

That is what made those Sunday afternoon sessions feel the way they did.

Trying to Carry That Forward For The City

I don't sling oldies on the air. The morning show format is a different animal but when I think about what I'm trying to do on Iris & Grizz, and what I try to do when I step off the air and into the city, Crosno is always somewhere in the back of my mind.

The Plaza Classic Film Festival. Barbed Wire Open Mic Series. Community events, local organizations, the artists and the historians and the dreamers who are out here doing something real. Radio can still be a connective device. It can still remind people how big and beautiful this city is. But only if the person behind the mic actually believes that, and acts like it when the mic is off.

Crosno was part of the connective tissue of El Paso, listening to the people on air and off. Those dances where everybody showed up because everybody felt welcome? That's not the kind of legacy you build by chasing fame but the kind you build by showing up, genuinely, for the place and the people you love.

There's a mural of Steve Crosno on the wall of La Nave Grocery at 4th and Campbell. On a grocery store wall in the middle of the neighborhood. That's where he belongs. Not up on a pedestal. Right there in the middle of it.

That's where I want to be too.

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