We're Digitizing the Teenager Party Correspondence
We are glad to announce that we have started to digitize the letters young Hungarians had sent to Teenager Party, the popular music show on Radio Free Europe. The participatory project involving university and high-school students aims to make the letters preserved at the Archivum searchable and readable online in 2026.
In 1959, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Hungarian Desk introduced the popular music program Teenager Party, edited by Géza Ekecs (known to listeners as László Cseke). The show targeted Hungarian teenagers beyond the Iron Curtain, playing the latest hits in Western pop/rock music primarily from the US and the UK, accompanied by commentary from Ekecs. The quick success of Teenager Party engendered, in the 1960s, the launch of its twin program, Délutáni randevú (Afternoon date); while the latter explored current international top lists, the former reflected Ekecs's taste more. Eventually, the programs evolved into request shows: letters, occasionally including multipage song lists, started to arrive at RFE/RL's mail boxes in Munich and London by the hundreds.
Ekecs seized the opportunity, and asked listeners to complement their mottoed messages with personal stories, whether on love, hitchhiking, or school escapades. From the resulting stream of remarkable messages, the letters from 1971–1976 are preserved today at the Blinken OSA Archivum, as part of the Records of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute.
The more than 5,000 items (letters and postcards) are described in the Catalog on a folder-level, accessible only personally in the Research Room, in Budapest, Hungary. The aims of the digitization project include enhancing the Catalog with item-level descriptions and digital access copies of the letters, and creating a dedicated website with tailor-made browsing and searching tools assisting the discovery of scanned messages and their transcripts.
We have started the project together with university and high-school students, who participate in surveying the collection, designing the website, and digitizing the items.
Summer interns:
- Kincső Balogh
- Flóra Dobos
- Viktor Kisiván
- Botond Magyar
- André Müller
- Loretta Szatmári
Would you like to join the Teenager Party digitization project as part of a university internship? Apply here!
While the project is running, access to the Correspondence Relating to the Program Teenager Party is limited and subject to prior consultation.
