Wesley Dumm was born in Ohio and graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University, practiced law in Wyoming, and was a banking executive in Colorado before moving to California in 1924.
He was recuperating from a serious illness when he heard Rev. George W. Phillips delivering his “Hour of Prayer” program on KGO. Dumm wrote to Phillips, who in turn asked his audience to pray for Dumm’s recovery. This began a friendship that led Rev. Phillips to reach out to Dumm in 1933.
Phillips’ KTAB (named after his Tenth Avenue Baptist Church in Oakland) was in financial trouble again. Dumm worked out a deal: he paid off the church’s $100,000 debt, took over control of KTAB under a new corporate umbrella–The Associated Broadcasters–and set out to lift the station out of the doldrums.
In May 1935, Dumm announced the station was changing its call letters to KSFO, a nod to San Francisco and Oakland, for the station now had upgraded studios in Oakland’s Insurance Building as well as facilities in San Francisco’s new Russ Building.
Dumm and his general manager, Phil Lasky, reached out to the operators of the independent Los Angeles station KNX to create a two-station network known as the Western Network. That lasted until 1937, when CBS bought KNX and KSFO emerged as the San Francisco outlet for the new CBS network.
In the following years, Dumm teamed with Lasky and former KQW owner Fred Hart to buy Oakland station KROW. Dumm was forced to divest himself of KROW in 1944, when new FCC “duopoly” rules took effect.
As World War II approached, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Dumm for help in organizing what would become the Voice of America radio service. Dumm was also asked to build two shortwave stations in the Bay Area. The result: 100,000-watt KWID and 50,000 KWIX (later KWID-II).
Dumm and The Associated Broadcasters received Northern California’s first television license, putting San Francisco’s KPIX on the air on Christmas Eve, 1948.
Dumm sold KPIX to the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company in 1954 and KSFO to Gene Autry’s Golden West Broadcasters in 1956.
Dumm was well-known in Southern California. He bought the Pasadena mansion known as Fairview in 1939 and renamed it Pegfair, in honor of his wife, Margaret, and Mary Pickford, who with her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, had built the famous Pickfair estate.