Known as “The Birthplace of Broadcasting”, the Bay Area has always been a place where technology and creativity have combined to produce memories.
Our mission at the Bay Area Radio Museum and Hall of Fame is to collect archival broadcasts, historical documents, photos, music surveys and biographies that tell the stories of Bay Area radio.
We have a lot of this stuff, and we’re gathering more all the time. But it hasn’t always been easy to dive into the stories of Bay Area radio stations and broadcasters on our website. We’re a volunteer organization and frankly, sometimes we get so excited about a newly-surfaced artifact that we forget our “customers”: you, the visitors who are looking for information.
That’s why we’ve launched a project that will eventually offer–at the very least–a capsule biography of every Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame inductee (285 as of the installation of the Class of 2025) and every radio station that ever broadcast in the Bay Area.
To do this, we’re cross-linking our “BARHOF Bios” with our “Station Bios”. Every BARHOF inductee’s bio will include links to the bios of each Bay Area station where he or she is known to have worked. And every station bio will show the names of BARHOF inductees known to have worked there.
As of October 2025, every BARHOF inductee is represented. We have some work to do on the station bios, and here’s why.
We could have simply chosen to take a given frequency–106.9 FM in San Francisco, for example–and created a history tracing all of the owners, call letters, formats, and personalities associated with that frequency in a single document.
But there have been six quite different “radio stations” to occupy the 106.9 slot on the FM dial since it went on the air in 1959. KPUP is a very different story from KEAR from KMPX–yet all have occupied that address on the dial over the years.
Thus, what we’re hoping to accomplish is a more-focused “biography” of a station that takes into consideration the eras and changes that have made Bay Area radio so dynamic. It’s a big project: there are easily several hundred definable “stations” for which we need to gather information.
Some of this information is already in our archives and on our website (our “Station Bios” will provide easy access to that harder-to-find content). Other data needs to be rounded up and confirmed. It’s a slow process, but our goal is to offer the most complete available resource for those interested in how radio happened here in the Bay Area.
Of course, we hope our displays trigger memories of your listening experiences. Each BARHOF Bio and Station Bio includes an opportunity to comment, which we hope you’ll use.