KONG was among a number of early Bay Area FM stations owned by a local newspaper. In this case the licensees were Abraham and Sara Kofman, the owners of the Alameda Times-Star. Hal Altman, who’d worked for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs earlier in the 1940s, was listed as station manager. Not long after the station actually began broadcasting, Bill Ely’s name appeared in trade publications, listed as manager of the station. Veteran broadcast engineer Merlin Haag served as chief engineer. Announcers included Mark Marrymount, Harry Bartolomei, and Larry Samuels.
The station’s inaugural broadcast was on September 19, 1947. A brief item in Broadcasting magazine noted the arrival of the new station and added that it had signed up 22 sponsors by the time it took to the airwaves. The 750-watt signal would have covered the island city of Alameda but not much more. Operating hours were from 3 PM to 9 PM daily. Two studios were built inside the new Times-Star building on Oak Street in Alameda; the station’s 115-foot antenna was erected on the building’s roof. The entire station took up 2,300 square feet on the building’s third floor.
The Times-Star ran a full-page salute to the new station in November 1947, pointing out the fact that KONG was Alameda County’s first FM station to go on the air. The article also took note of the “polycyndrical form” of the walls in Studio A, ensuring that music performed in the room would “go into the microphone undistorted by unwanted reflections.”
Nearby Alameda High School’s football games could be heard on KONG in the fall of 1947. The station ran a regular feature called Know Your Times-Star Carrier, spotlighting the paperboys who delivered the hometown newspaper.
Like all other pioneering FM stations, KONG faced the chicken-and-egg problem of having enough FM receivers in the homes of listeners to make the broadcasting business viable. KONG management was appointed to a committee in early 1948 as Northern California FM broadcasters attempted to build momentum for their new slice of the radio industry. The Kofmans also applied for an AM license but were out of the broadcasting business before it was ever granted.
KONG was among the many independent stations of the era that subscribed to the Lang-Worth programming service, operated out of New York City by Langlois & Wentworth. Lang-Worth provided music on transcription discs. In early 1948, the station carried a program produced at KSFO entitled To Secure These Rights. Moderated by San Francisco district attorney (later to become California governor) Edmund G. Brown, the series examined the state of civil rights in the Bay Area.
The station’s life was brief. On October 30, 1948 at 9 PM, the station shut off its transmitter. The Times-Star referred to the shutdown as temporary while ownership pursued an AM station license and still proudly proclaimed KONG to be “reputedly the best equipped station among those of comparable size in the Bay Area.”
A brief item in the November 1948 issue of TV Digest listed KONG as one of a number of early FM stations “dropping by [the] wayside”, including another short-lived Bay Area station, KPNI-FM in Palo Alto. KONG’s owners told the Federal Communications Commission they were shutting down “due to tremendous losses in the operation of the station”. The same FCC agenda included approval of the deletion of another newspaper-owned Bay Area station. KSMO-FM never got on the air; San Mateo Times publisher Amphlett Printing Company cited “serious economic problems confronting the permit at this time” in requesting the deletion of the station’s construction permit.
A year after shutting his station down, Abe Kofman delivered a quote to the San Francisco Examiner for an article questioning whether the arrival of television on the scene in (KPIX became the region’s first TV station in December 1948) was killing off FM radio before it could get started. “Television isn’t squeezing FM out–it already has,” Kofman said. “People are not buying FM sets. They say, ‘I’ll wait for television.’ I think FM is through.”
