Note: the KEAR call letters have appeared on numerous Bay Area radio stations. This exhibit concerns the 97.3 FM station heard from 1956 to 1978.
After Stephen Cisler purchased San Mateo’s KSMO in 1952, installed a format of mostly classical music, and changed the AM station’s call letters to KEAR. He then set about acquiring an FM station.
It turned out there was one available. Oakland’s Warner Brothers, the owners of KWBR, had launched KWBR-FM in 1947. Armed with a tiny transmitter literally built into a home in San Francisco’s Diamond Heights neighborhood, the station carried a simulcast of KWBR’s Am programming.
The Federal Communications Commission decided that AM and FM stations licensed to different communities couldn’t share call letters, so KWBR-FM became KGSF in mid-1949.
Not long after that, KGSF went dark and the license was returned to the FCC (not an uncommon thing for early FM licenses; the “chicken and egg” problem of getting enough people to buy FM receiver sets was a big one).
Cisler acquired the former KGSF facilities, re-launched the station as KXKX, and proceeded to simulcast KEAR-AM’s programming beginning in early 1952. Sort of. Longtime engineer and announcer Fred Krock would remember the initial programming: “From 3 to 5 PM KXKX-FM played records. From 5 to 11 PM it simulcast KEAR programs. It was off the air from 11 PM to 3 PM the next day.”
When financial problems forced Cisler to sell his AM station in 1956 (it would become KOBY), he held onto the FM station, changing the call letters to KEAR. Cisler’s days as a Bay Area broadcast operator were numbered, though he had interests in stations in Monterey and Inyo County as well as outside California.
Cisler’s bailout came from a new religious ministry, Family Radio, formed by a group led by Richard Palmquist and evangelist Harold Camping. The group was organized in 1958 under its official name, Family Stations Inc., and began to broadcast February 4, 1959 on newly-acquired KEAR. Cisler’s company accepted $100,000 for the license.
Family Radio moved the transmitter from Diamond Heights to Sausalito’s Mount Beacon and installed a new transmitter boasting an effective radiated power of 82 KW.
Family Radio billed its spiritual offerings as “high fidelity with a high purpose”.
By the summer of 1959, KEAR could claim to be the most powerful FM station in the region as well as the first of the 19 FMs then broadcasting in the Bay Area to maintain a 24-hour programming schedule.
Station manager and co-founder Dick Palmquist noted the history of religious involvement in Bay Area radio broadcasting, pointing to the fact that pioneering KQW (later KCBS) had been launched by San Jose’s First Baptist Church.
“Because KEAR is picking up where KQW left off,” Palmquist told the Peninsula Times Tribune, “it might logically be called the spiritual descendant of the world’s first radio station.”
A year later, Palmquist would be named president of the newly-formed Western Inspirational Network, a group of eight Western radio stations carrying religious programming.
In 1965, Palmquist left Family Radio and Camping became general manager. For the next 45 years, Camping’s teachings (including numerous predictions of dates for the “End Times”), became central to Family Radio’s programming
Years later, in a three-way frequency swap with KMPX and with CBS, the original 97.3 FM frequency of KEAR wound up as the frequency of the CBS-owned San Francisco FM station now known as KLLC (“Alice”). Family Stations programming and the KEAR call letters moved to 106.9, the former home of KMPX, where they would stay for another 27 years.
Family Stations received $2 million from CBS and paid National Science Network $1 million in the 1978 frequency swap deal.
RELATED EXHIBITS:
KSMO and Successor Stations on 1550 kHz
A Brief History of 106.9 FM in San Francisco
