While it took decades for Santa Rosa to get its second AM station, the local FM dial filled up fast during the ‘70s. By the end of that decade, broadcasters looking to serve and profit from the growing city and surrounding Sonoma County communities needed to take advantage of frequency allocations for other nearby towns.
In 1975, the FCC allocated Channel 225—92.9 FM—to Healdsburg. A couple of years later, a construction permit and a license were granted to North Coast Communications, which asked for the call letters KNRG..
Station Manager Keith Jones said the idea was to call the station “K-Energy”, noting you could “run (promotional) campaign after campaign” with a name like that. But the FCC said the KNRG call letters had already been assigned and it randomly assigned KJHP instead.
The Press Democrat quoted Jones as saying:
“Why would anybody want something like that?”
North Coast also was fighting City Hall and losing. It wanted to build a four-unit apartment complex and offices for the radio station at 840 Healdsburg Avenue, and was turned down by the planning commission. A subsequent appeal was also denied.
That eventually got worked out, as did a new set of call letters. A new acting station manager, Randy Wells, announced in the Press Democrat in March of 1979 that the station would sign on, hopefully sometime that summer, as KREO.
Deadlines are hard to meet when putting a brand-new radio station on the air. The site for KREO’s tower was 200 feet above Geyser Peak, and yet another station manager, this one Jack Lawyer, a former manager of WLW in Cincinnati, reported that all the materials, including cement, cinder block, the tower and the transmitter and other electronics all had to be taken to the site by helicopter from Oakland.
That was expensive, at an estimated $1,000 an hour, and it was also time-consuming. A new scheduled air date was set for mid-December. They made that target, premiering with an automated soft rock format that could be heard static-free as far north as Ukiah, as far south as San Rafael, on the coast to the west and in the Napa Valley to the east.
So KREO was on the air, (soft) rockin’ in stereo in Northern California in the 1980s. The logical first contest would be:
Win A Ton Of Coke.
Obviously, that could be misunderstood, which is what KREO was counting on. But to make it clear to listeners, the FCC and possibly the DEA, they took out an ad in the Press Democrat explaining.
“Ton” in this case meant “a lot” and “Coke” in this case meant Coca-Cola. Guess how many cases of Coca-Cola would fit in the trunk of the “K-93 FM Rockin’ Rolls” (a classic late 50s/early 60s Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud I) and you’d win that much Coke.
The “outlaw” theme continued with KREO’s next big contest—the “$10,000 Bank Heist”.
And again, it was a contest name with some literary license to it. The $10,000 in small bills ($100 and under) spread out over the floor of the Crocker Bank in Healdsburg belonged to KREO, not Crocker and its customers, and three winners were given the chance to grab as much as they could in a given amount of time, as long as they could carry it on their person.
So, did crime-themed contests pay? Absolutely. In KREO’s first rating survey, it came in number one among Sonoma County radio stations, and fourth overall, trailing the-then big three from San Francisco: KGO, KFRC and KCBS. Another survey, six months later, showed KREO increasing its share of the local audience from 7.3 to 8.0.
KREO started its second full year, 1981, by giving away a trip anywhere in the world (the winner chose Iceland so she could visit relatives). That was followed up two months later by a contest for a brand new Toyota. All the winner had to do was keep his or her hand on the car, parked inside Coddingtown Mall, until everyone else fell asleep or gave up.
Next up—gasoline at 93 cents a gallon for two hours at a Fourth Street gas station and car wash. 364 cars filled up with more than 2,000 gallons of gas and KREO paid the difference between the 93 cents and the actual pump price.
All of this was a level of promotion more often seen in San Francisco than Santa Rosa, and it paid dividends.
So did the move in the fall of 1982 from automation to live broadcasting and the addition of bigger-market disc jockeys like Donovan Blue from Sacramento , J.J. McKay from Tallahassee and Bill Richards from Minneapolis, who was also the new Program Director. The station, when talking to the newspaper, no longer described itself as “soft rock”, but as “sort of an adult Top 40.”
By 1983, the “adult” was gone from the description. KREO was now what the industry calls “Contemporary Hit Radio”, and Program Director Richards listed a job opening in Radio & Records for a “Hot morning jock”. When Richards was promoted to Operations Manager, KWSS San Jose’s Randy Chambers was hired to be KREO’s new PD.
By the fall of 1984, KREO’s sound was appealing enough that people were tuning in from long distances. The Arbitron rating book for San Francisco showed KREO tied with KEZR in San Jose and KOIT-AM (the former KYA). It was a fraction of a rating point, but it was remarkable.
In the mid-80s, it was clear that audiences that wanted to hear music on the radio wanted to hear it on FM. Over on the AM dial, the venerable KSRO had been beefing up its news and traffic coverage and dialing back on music. Owning an FM station would allow it to offer listeners—and advertisers—both. In October of 1985, KSRO’s owners, Finley Broadcasting, paid $2.6 million to make KREO their own.
As KSRO’s sister station, KREO kept the hits comin’ and kept the promotions hot, continuing to give away new cars and used cars (a classic 1966 Mustang), but as often happens in an ownership change, there was a lot of turnover of the on-air staff.
And then the new morning team, Randy and Robin, told a blatantly racist joke on-air. Program Director Scott Mitchell tried to downplay the controversy to the Press Democrat, but within five days KREO let the morning duo go.
KSRO/KREO General Manager Frank McLaurin, who’d had his job for 35 years at that point, told the paper the duo was on their way out anyway because ratings were down, and then added this:
“KREO has given me more gray hairs in the year we’ve owned it than all the years at KSRO. The kids get in that FM format and seem to lose all reason.”
McLaurin went on to say that “morning zoo” type shows worked well at stations like San Francisco’s KMEL, but “this is not for Finley Broadcasting.”
That quote was the sound of a countdown clock ticking. Within a year and a half, KREO and KSRO would both be under new ownership, and the call letters KREO would vanish from 92.9 FM.
