Palo Alto’s first licensed commercial radio station made its inaugural broadcast from studios built into the Sky Cafe at Palo Alto Airport on September 11, 1949.
The call letters were a nod to co-owner and station manager Millard Kibbe. He and partner Donald Deming operated KIBE as the D and K Broadcasting Company, which had first applied for the license three years earlier. The 250-watt signal emanated from a transmitter in East Palo Alto.
The daytime-only KIBE quickly announced that it had poached talent from San Mateo’s KVSM. Betty Wing Jr. and Bob Seaman brought their program Betty’s Guestbook (and its sponsors) down the Peninsula to KIBE. Wing’s The Whirling Dot and Seaman’s Whodunnit and Luncheon in Los Altos came along as well.
The owners recruited Byron Phillips, who’d played a key role in getting Stanford radio station KZSU on the air, to work as a sales representative. Virginia Teale was named director of women’s affairs and hosted a number of programs.
Former KLOK announcer Bill Powell hosted a program called The Character Record Shop, during which he’d shift voices to play nine different characters who’d walk into his fictional record store to request songs that Powell would air.
Less than a year after launching the station, Deming and Kibbe sold KIBE to Associated Grocers president J.B. Rhodes for $45,000.
1951 saw KIBE announce plans to boost power to 1,000 watts. The station found itself in the national spotlight in August of that year when a United Airlines DC-6 crashed while approaching the Oakland Airport, killing all 50 on board. KIBE chief engineer Paul Farrelle hiked seven miles into the East Bay hills to reach the crash site, then arranged a radio call through a marine relay station in Sausalito that provided the first on-scene coverage of the disaster.
In 1953, the Federal Communications Commission granted KIBE’s request to increase its daytime power to 1,000 watts, and also approved the sale of the station to Sundial Broadcasting, the licensee of KDFC. The Commission also granted permission for Sundial to feed its classical music programming from the KDFC studios atop Mount Beacon in Sausalito, ending KIBE’s Peninsula-focused era.
KIBE remained on the dial as the AM counterpart to the FM station KDFC until 1984, when ownership changed the AM station’s call letters to KDFC.
