Originally licensed to the owner of a radio store on Adeline Street, Berkeley’s KRE went on the air on March 11, 1922. The station’s original transmitter site and studios were at the Claremont Hotel. It would only be a matter of months before an ownership change, with the Berkeley Daily Gazette newspaper becoming the licensee although Maxwell Electric continued to actually operate the station.
Early programming was typical of radio’s pioneering era: a mixture of live musical performances, readings, and lectures.
An early employee was Wilda Wilson Church, a drama teacher who–like many dramatists of the day–was working to adapt the art of theater to the new medium of radio. She would become one of the pre-eminent network radio producers of the 1930’s and is a member of the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame (2016).
KRE would later be licensed to a church and then a mausoleum known as the Chapel of the Chimes. In 1937, work began on a studio and transmitter site on tidal flats near Ashby Avenue in Berkeley. The station moved into the new building the following year, with the transmitter tower within view of thousands of daily commuters on the Eastshore Freeway (today’s Interstate 80).
The station was sold to Wright Broadcasting in 1963 and the call letters changed to KPAT, echoing the call letters of Wright’s WPAT in Paterson, NJ.
Notable KRE alumni include Carter B. Smith (BARHOF 2017). And of course, no telling of the KRE story would be complete without a reminder that the memorable Wolfman Jack scenes in the film American Grafitti were filmed in the main KRE studio.
The KRE building would become home to the California Historical Radio Society for many years before the organization moved to its present home at “Radio Central” in nearby Alameda.
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