KPER came to life in 1957. Licensee Bernard and Jobbins Broadcast Company was a partnership of James Bernard and Charles “Chuck” Jobbins. Jobbins was a 35-year-old man who owned a Menlo Park electronics company. The two would bring in a third partner, John Gregory, in 1959 and rename their partnership Radio KPER.
The station, Gilroy’s first, began as a 500-watt daytime-only operation. When the inaugural broadcast took place on September 7, 1957, general manager Monte Guardino was able to get the attention of newspapers as big as the San Francisco Chronicle. Despite the modest signal, Guardino was quoted as saying “the signal transmitted by the KPER antenna is expected to be an extra strong one for Gilroy is recognized as the garlic capital of the world.”
The station’s launch included recorded messages from Governor Goodwin Knight, U.S. Senator William F. Knowland, and local congressman Charles Gubser.
The media-savvy Guardino was able to get an item in the San Francisco Examiner a few weeks later, with columnist Dwight Newton noting that KPER offered “the most unique disc jockey combination in the country: 15 year old David Guardino, who does a Saturday teen-age caper, and 65 year old Red Schumaker who does daily ad libbing on the good old days.”
The then-sparsely populated South County area had no other local licensed radio stations at the time. Hollister, in neighboring San Benito County, wouldn’t get its first radio station for five more years. Thus, KPER had the “market” to itself.
Programming included several hours a week in Spanish as well as a few hours in Portuguese. The station picked up an affiliation with the Keystone Broadcasting System, which provided content to more than 600 mostly-rural stations across the country. In 1958, ownership applied to increase the station’s power to 1,000 watts. That was approved in early 1959 and within months, an application was filed to boost the power to 5,000 watts with a directional antenna array. That approval came in 1961; the station remained a daytime-only operation.
The station was touched by tragedy twice in 1959. Disc jockey John Pigg, 28, died in an April car crash on Monterey Highway, just outside Gilroy. His wife and three children under the age of 10 were in the car but survived the crash. In July, Garnett “Red” Schumaker, who’d been a familiar voice on the station, died of a heart attack at age 66.
Booming San Jose was just a few miles north, but KPER was a decidedly small-market station. A Little League baseball game between the teams from Gilroy and Hollister was worth an ad buy in the Hollister newspaper in the summer of 1960.
By 1964, the station had boosted its signal to 5,000 watts and was broadcasting almost exclusively in Spanish.
In June 1966, Radio KPER sold the station to South Valley Broadcasters, a group which listed Fresno station owner Richard Ryan as general partner. Others in the partnership included Ryan’s wife Nancy and a couple from Saratoga: Ed and Florence Barker. Ed Barker had put San Jose’s KLOK on the air in 1947. Florence worked there as a copywriter and the two would soon marry. FCC records indicate the license transfer was conditioned upon Barker’s disposal of his interest in KLOK (FCC ownership rules in that era would not have allowed him to have ownership of two AM stations in the same market).
Several months later, South Valley Broadcasters applied to change the call letters to KAZA. That change took effect on July 15, 1967.
