The Reverend George W. Phillips was born in Jamaica, making his way to the United States at the age of 23. He worked his way through college and divinity school by working as a beekeeper. He would become a pioneer of radio evangelism.
After leading congregations in Wyoming and Ohio, Phillips was pastor of Oakland’s Tenth Avenue Baptist Church in 1924 when he began appearing on KGO (then broadcasting from Oakland) to deliver religious sermons. His daily appearances, known as The Hour of Prayer, quickly drew a following. But KGO management had other ideas for the airtime and Phillips was without a radio voice.
A fruitless search for another outlet led Phillips to decide his church should have its own radio station. He convinced the Tenth Avenue Baptist board of directors to fund the project and in August, 1925, KTAB (for Tenth Avenue Baptist) went on the air with a 500-watt signal.
A few weeks after launching the station, Phillips and KTAB made news when a listener in Bloomfield, NJ reported hearing the station from 3,000 miles away.
Phillips kept Sunday programming religious in nature. The Hour of Prayer was back on the air (and indeed, would run on various Bay Area stations until the 1970s). An independent organization, The Associated Broadcasters, was formed to take responsibility for programming KTAB Monday through Saturday.
Phillips and the church struggled to keep KTAB afloat, and help arrived in the person of Wesley I. Dumm, a banker who’d heard Phillips on The Hour of Power, sought the help of prayer for a serious illness, and remained in contact with Phillips after his recovery. Dumm helped Phillips set up a new financial structure that separated the church from the radio station.
KTAB went through a number of changes until 1933, when Tenth Avenue Baptist again fund itself with full responsibility for the radio station. Again, Wesley I. Dumm offered the answer: he bought the station, which would become KSFO. Phillips and Tenth Avenue Baptist retained the right to air The Hour of Prayer five days a week.
Rev. Phillips left Tenth Avenue Baptist (today’s Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church) in 1942, though he continued to deliver sermons at churches around the Bay Area. He also created an on-air ministry called “Cathedral of the Air” and wrote a number of books including the 1962 title God In the Space Age.
George Phillips died in 1972 at age 93.