KATD replaced KRVE at the 95.3 FM dial position in Los Gatos in September 1985.
The two remaining owners of KRVE, Joe Rosa and Batista Vieira, had decided to take a shot at a Top 40 format. They brought Bob Harlow over from KEZR to serve as program director.
The station’s highly-visible studios on busy N. Santa Cruz Avenue in Los Gatos served as a no-cost marketing tool at a time when Los Gatos was changing from a sleepy suburb of San Jose into a Silicon Valley wealth-infused redoubt. The sidewalk studio window also served as a handy “request line”; passersby could scrawl a song title on a sheet of paper and wave it at the air talent.
While “The Cat” tried to claw its way into the South Bay ratings against dominant CHR station KWSS as well as AOR heavyweights KSJO and KOME, Joe Rosa was consolidating his ownership of the station.
In the summer of 1987, Rosa acquired Batista Vieria’s shares. Two years later, Rosa cashed in, selling the station to Thomas Gammon’s Crown Broadcasting for $5 million. At the time, Gammon owned KKIS in Pittsburg and KKIS-FM in Walnut Creek.
The sale led to yet another set of call letters at 95.3 FM–the fifth since the station went on the air in 1966. KYAY (for a few months) and then KRTY switched to a Country format.
A postscript: within a few years, Joe Rosa would wind up owning KKIS, carrying his old Los Gatos call letters with him and changing the Pittsburg station to KATD.
