San Francisco’s “Poor People’s Radio” is actually the second station to bear the KPOO call letters. The first KPOO became KIQI in the 1950s and the call letters stayed on the shelf until the 1970s.
That’s when a group of community activists with no prior radio experience decided to pursue a license for a new FM station. Aided by veteran community radio figures Lorenzo Milam, Jeremy Lansman, and Ron Grele, Poor Peoples’ Radio, Inc. got the license from the Federal Communications Commission and put the station on the air in 1973.
It wasn’t long before Milam and his associates realized they weren’t “community” enough for the community station they’d helped launch. As veteran Haight-Ashbury activist David Whitaker told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1974, “The original KPOO was called poor peoples’ radio but actually the people there were neither poor nor of the people. They were overwhelmingly white, middle class, and media freaks. It tended to be a pale KPFA [a reference to the longstanding listener-supported station in Berkeley].”
Whitaker became one of the board members of the collective that assumed control of the station. With no paid staff and little technical know-how, KPOO relied on all sorts of volunteer help. Odis Evans was a typical example: he worked in an East Bay factory by day but used his broadcast engineering skills (he held an FCC First Class license) to keep the station on the air.
Programming was literally and figuratively all over the map. KPOO’s station history documents a lengthy list of “firsts”, driven by the general sense that the station was a place where people could say what they wanted to say.
There were a few rules, as enumerated in an early station policy document. One of them: there should be a one-minute break between programs.
KPOO found itself in the news in 1975 when the station received several communiques from a radical group called the New World Liberation Front. One of the messages, delivered a few weeks after the capture of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, castigated Hearst for rejecting the Symbionese Liberation Army, which had abducted her in 1974. Another followed the bombing of a South San Jose PG&E facility and demanded free utility service for unemployed people.
A later New World Liberation Front communique delivered to KPOO threatened the jamming of San Francisco parking meters unless the city allocated $100,000 for free medical clinics.
KPOO’s physical home moved many times, from Pier 39 to a number of ramshackle temporary homes to an old Victorian home in San Francisco’s Western Addition before a final move in 1985 into a Divisadero Street facility whose colorful streetfront mural speaks to the tapestry of content carried by the station since its launch.
