KOFY was born in 1958 when station owner Intercontinental Broadcasting changed the format and did away with the station’s original 1946 call letters KVSM.
In 1959, the station made news by bringing former KSMO host Jim Kerr, AKA “The Scotch Gardener”, aboard. A San Mateo Times compendium of Bay Area stations said KOFY was “The Peninsula’s own music station”, carrying albums and easy-listening music and featuring plenty of Peninsula news.
By mid-1960, KOFY was carrying an increasing amount of Spanish-language programing under the ownership of Scott Kilgore’s Tele-Broadcasters. Kilgore would own or co-own radio stations as far-flung as New York and Guam and assumed complete control of KOFY in a 1967 transaction. Kilgore’s control evolved into a holding company called Spanish Broadcasting System.
In 1976, longtime Bay Area radio personality Doug Pledger and a group of co-investors including adman Robert Day bought the station for $800,000, calling their ownership group Radio Español.
KOFY chugged along into the 1980’s, carrying San Francisco Giants games in Spanish along with news and music programming. By 1982, there were six Bay Area stations broadcasting in Spanish.
In 1986, KOFY’s programming changed dramatically. Bay Area broadcasting legend Jim Gabbert’s company FM Broadcasting acquired KOFY for $2,000,000 and began broadcasting music from the 1950’s and 1960’s on what Gabbert called “The Nifty 1050”.
Gabbert had acquired a 1,000 watt daytime-only station. He had hopes of boosting the power to 50,000 watts, broadcasting 24 hours a day, and building a new antenna array on an abandoned landfill site in Hayward. Within a year, the FCC had given Gabbert approval to boost the station’s power and Hayward officials gave him the go-ahead to build his new towers. In the process, Gabbert became part of a lengthy environmental remediation process designed to cap the old Hayward landfill.
By 1991, Gabbert was marketing KOFY as “AM Super Stereo KOFY 1050”, still playing oldies records in a syndicated format called “Kool Gold” (named after the originating station, KOOL in Phoenix).
The oldies came to an end in October, 1991. Saying KOFY was losing $35,000 a month, Gabbert switched to a format featuring Mexican hit records. For the bilingual Gabbert, who’d been a Spanish-speaking DJ on KLOK years earlier, it made perfect sense.
In 1997, Gabbert decided to liquidate his Bay Area media empire, including KOFY-TV (Channel 20). KOFY-AM was sold to Susquehanna Broadcasting for $14.5 million. Susquehanna immediately shifted programming to focus on sports, billing the station as “The Ticket” and changing the call letters to KTCT.
ADDITIONAL EXHIBITS: