KJBS was one of San Francisco’s pioneering radio stations, going on the air on January 3, 1925 with the unfortunate (and apparently randomly-assigned) call letters KFUQ. In very short order, the call letters were switched to KJBS, standing for Julius Brunton and Sons, operators of the licensee, Willard Battery Company.
The station began with only five watts of power, and in an era when interference from competing stations was a significant challenges, KJBS adopted a unique strategy: it would transmit only when the other stations were off the air. This led to a crazy-quilt programming schedule. Also, in radio’s early years, frequency shifts were common.
By 1930, KJBS had settled at 1070 on the AM dial (a frequency that would be shifted one final time with a 1941 nationwide reassignment of frequencies) and was part of a groundbreaking change. The station installed the first Western Electric phonograph equipment on the Pacific Coast, which gave it the ability to transmit the highest fidelity of recorded music possible at that time. This spawned a revolutionary change in programming, as KJBS became one of the very first all-music radio stations.
1930 also saw KJBS begin what it called its Owl Program Service: overnight broadcasts at a time when other stations were silent. It was a Bay Area first, and captured a solid audience of graveyard-shift workers and other night owls,
That overnight programming served as a lead-in to another 1930 KJBS innovation: the hiring of Frank Cope, who was probably the world’s first bona fide disk jockey. His daily 5:00 to 8:00 a.m. “Alarm Klok Klub” was San Francisco’s most popular radio program for nearly twenty-five years. Cope, a native of Utah, arrived at KJBS in March 1930 from KLO Radio in Ogden, Utah, and stayed at the San Francisco station until 1959, except for a short hiatus in the early thirties.
An increasing number of stations went on the air after World War 2, television began to chip away at radio’s dominance of the broadcast space, and KJBS faced increasing competition from other stations offering various music formats.
When Ray Rhodes and Gil Paltridge purchased KJBS in 1960, they tried something different. Their Argonaut Broadcasting launched KFAX, billing it as “America’s first all news station”. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Terrence O’Flaherty called the new format “the most noteworthy innovation in the Bay Area’s radio world in a decade.”
KFAX’s “Newsradio” format was on the air nearly a decade before Westinghouse and CBS launched numerous all-news stations in the late 1960s. Lacking the news gathering economy of scale later enjoyed by those industry giants and unable to attract sufficient national advertising dollars, Argonaut threw in the towel a year later. The newly-authorized 50,000 watt signal began to broadcast a religious format.
Salem Media Group purchased the station in 1984, continuing the religious-focused format. In 2025, KFAX nodded to its KJBS heritage, celebrating the station’s 100 year anniversary.
