Tigre’ starts to roar in Greeley

GREELEY — When Ricardo Salazar arrived in Greeley two years ago to take charge of KGRE-AM 1450, he had a tortoise, not a tiger, by the tail.

The station had three advertising clients, including the bus company that owned it. The other two hadn’t paid their bills for six months. The Spanish-language voice of Northern Colorado was a whisper, losing between $5,000 and $10,000 a month. Battered reel-to-reel tape recorders, wobbly turntables and scratched LP records made up the equipment inventory.

Two years later, “El Tigre” is climbing the Arbitron charts that track Northern Colorado’s radio listening habits, advertisers are beginning to…