KPEN 101.3 FM Atherton, CA | Bay Area Radio Museum & Hall of Fame

Launched in 1957, KPEN would morph into one of the nation’s most influential FM radio stations.

The station began with the realization by a couple of Stanford students, James Gabbert and Gary Gielow, that FM frequencies were available. The two were involved with the Stanford campus station KZSU and thought having their own commercial station might be a fun thing to do after graduation.

Gabbert and Gielow each borrowed $3,000, each pledged $2,000 worth of labor, and when young Peninsula real estate investor John Wickett tossed in $5,000, the two 21-year-olds were in the radio business. They called their new company Peninsula FM. The 101.3 FM frequency was available because KLX had abandoned the FM dial several years earlier, one of many “first-wave” FM broadcasters to give up before the FM band gained traction.

Gielow would recall a few years later, “We had to succeed quickly because we’d forgotten about operating capital. We had nothing left to eat on. While Jim manned the station, I went out and sold.”

What Gielow was selling was a station unlike any other in the country. They programmed what they wanted to hear, taking advantage of a boom in high-fidelity sound recordings and the new stereo FM broadcast technology to deliver a sound that hadn’t been heard before. KPEN was the first multiplex stereophonic FM broadcaster in California.

Four years later, stereo FM was still a bit of a novelty, but KPEN was all-in. Peninsula Times-Tribune columnist George Willey would write, prophetically, in 1961: “KPEN is the best thing to ever happen to expand FM in the Bay Area and may well turn out to be the best thing to ever happened to multiplex in the United States.”