San Francisco’s 104.5 MHz FM frequency was first heard on the air on February 4, 1960–with the call letters KBAY. The station was launched by Los Angeles theater owner and impresario Sherill Corwin, who was trying to put together a network of what he called “Heritage Music” stations.
FM stations were still battling a fundamental problem: FM receiver ownership was nowhere near universal, and advertisers worried that the broadcasts wouldn’t be heard.
Just over a year after launching KBAY, Corwin sold it to International Good Music, Inc., controlled by Pacific Northwest broadcasting pioneer Lafayette Rogan Jones.
Jones would struggle with the same math that hamstrung Corwin, and after less than two years of ownership, he sold the station to Oakland-based Kaiser Broadcasting, part of industrialist Henry J. Kaiser’s empire.
Kaiser changed the call letters to KFOG, received Federal Communications Commission approval for an increase in power, and on March 1, 1963 adopted the relatively new FM multiplex technology to broadcast its “beautiful music” format in stereo. The foghorn sound effect that would become a KFOG signature for many years was adopted at this time.
The KBAY call letters would be resurrected in 1967 by United Broadcasting for its San Jose station originally known as KEEN-FM.
Through the 1960s into the 1970s, KFOG stuck to the “background music” format.
The station changed hands in 1974, when Kaiser Broadcasting sold KFOG to General Electric Corp. In 1982, GE did away with the beautiful music format and changed to a syndicated NBC format called “Timeless Rock”. A year later, KFOG was sold to Susquehanna Broadcasting.
KFOG quickly positioned itself as “The Home of Quality Rock & Roll”, what San Francisco Chronicle columnist Ben Fong-Torres would call “an unironic and witty update of the album rock format that dominated the FM band from the late ’60s into the early ’80s”.
The KFOG of the ’80s, ’90s and the first decade of the 2000s built a large and loyal audience with strong air talent; memorable programming elements such as Ten at Ten, My Three Songs and Acoustic Sunrise; and outreach such as the KFOG Kaboom fireworks shows and the Live From the Archive CD series.
Many “Fogheads”, as the station referred to its listeners, date the “beginning of the end” to the 2007 sale of the station to Cumulus Media followed by the 2008 retirement of morning personality Dave Morey. KFOG would continue to tweak its branding and music mix for the next ten years.
On September 6, 2019, KFOG officially became a part of Bay Area radio history. The station shifted to a simulcast of co-owned KNBR and changed call letters to KNBR-FM.
Cumulus Media assigned the KFOG call letters to a station in Little Rock, AR, a move that ensured no other Bay Area station could benefit from the legacy value of the callsign.