Oakland native Preston D. Allen played a significant role in the early years of the Bay Area radio industry.
As a high school student, he’d already obtained one of the first amateur radio licenses issued in the US and held down a job as a Western Union telegraph operator. Next up was a commercial operator’s license, which Allen used for several years at sea as a marine radio operator for the Marconi Company.
When World War I broke out, Allen joined the Navy. He worked in naval radio operations until his discharge as a Lieutenant at the end of the war. Allen went back to work for the Marconi Company n Hawaii.
In 1921, he returned to Oakland and set up the Western Radio Institute, training radio operators from a two-room office at the Hotel Oakland. Soon, Allen built a small radio station for use as part of the Institute’s curriculum. Its transmitter was battery-powered, drawing DC current from the system that ran the hotel’s elevators.
By September 1921, Allen had acquired a commercial license, using the call letters KZM. Programming included photograph records as well as the reading of news supplied by the Oakland Tribune.
Allen’s relationship with the Tribune led him to work out a deal with publisher Joseph Knowland: the newspaper would get its own radio license and finance the operation of the station. Allen would run things from his school.
In 1922, the Tribune‘s KLX went on the air. Allen would manage the station until he was called back to active military duty at the outbreak of World War II. Along the way, his voice was heard on the first radio broadcast of the annual football “Big Game” between Cal and Stanford in 1924 as well as on Oakland Oaks baseball games.
After the war, during which Allen rose to the rank of Commander, he was hired by the State of California as the chief of the new state Department of Communications.
KLX was sold by the Tribune in 1959. The station would later be known as KEWB, KNEW, and KKSF.