The Bay Area’s 1550 AM frequency first came to life on March 17, 1947 bearing the call letters KSMO, a nod to the San Mateo Times, whose parent company Amphlett Printing Company had obtained the license. The 1,000 watt station featured studios in downtown San Mateo and a transmitter site on marshy land near the Bayshore Freeway in Belmont.
There would be many ownership, format, and call letter changes over the next two decades (a fairly detailed accounting by onetime station engineer David Wigfield can be found here and another, with even more detail, by longtime chief engineer Fred Krock here) before owner Frank Atlass, now operating the station as KKHI, switched to a classical music format in the mid-1960’s.
Atlass had acquired the former KQBY AM and FM in 1961, re-christening the stations as KKHI to take into account the AM station’s spot high on the dial. The previous “fine music” format was ditched in favor of more popular tunes.
KQBY had gone off the air in July 1961 and a battle between the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians (NABET) and new ownership led to picketing that delayed a planned October 16, 1961 relaunch.
The new format finally got on the air two weeks later, with freshly-hired announcer Jim McShane pulling 18-hour air shifts. “We’re making the point that he’ll be on more than any other radio personality in town today,” Frank Atlass told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We’re not trying to bait the union in the least,” he added–perhaps not altogether convincingly.
Atlass was able to obtain a waiver of Federal Communications Commission rules prohibiting simulcasting of co-owned stations, installing a classical music format on both stations. His finances ran dry, and in 1965, the stations were sold to Buckley-Jaeger Broadcasting Company (later Buckley Broadcasting).
The simulcast stations enjoyed a fair degree of success through the ’70s and ’80s before their sale to Westinghouse Broadcasting in 1994. Westinghouse switched the twinned stations to a news/talk format as KPIX AM-FM that never quite gained traction against established powerhouses KCBS and KGO, though the station managed to leap into the list of top-rated Bay Area stations by carrying the O.J. Simpson murder trial live and surrounding the live coverage with hours of daily analysis.
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