KREP was brought to life by Bob Podesta, a well-known Santa Clara Valley advertising and public relations man who was also one of the founders of the Bank of Santa Clara as well as one of the original owners of the San Francisco Warriors basketball team (later the Golden State Warriors).
Podesta was a graduate of San Jose High School and Santa Clara University. Friends said it was while serving as a US Army officer during World War II that he began dreaming of a radio station whose call letters would bear his initials (his full name was Robert E. Podesta).
Podesta and his wife Marcella began efforts to secure an FM license in the early 1960s, gaining an initial favorable decision from a Federal Communications Commission hearing officer in late 1961. That decision referred to a station broadcasting at 103.3 MHz; by the time KREP actually went on the air in 1964, it was found at 105.7 FM. The station’s transmitter site was on the slopes of Mt. Hamilton, east of San Jose.
Though KREP was licensed to Santa Clara, its original studios were in neighboring San Jose and in fact, KREP received FCC permission in 1968 to give its legal station ID as “KREP, Santa Clara-San Jose”. This was many years before other Bay Area stations would adopt a similar approach.
KREP joined an increasingly-crowded FM band, full of stations hoping to leverage the perceived higher-fidelity FM signal by programming classical or other “quality” music. KREP’s version was called “Continental” music. According to San Mateo Times columnist Bob Foster, “included in this programming is an announcer who sounds like he got his training at the BBC.”
KREP’s musical mix would evolve to include a mixture of jazz, folk and rock tunes. The station also carried San Jose State University sports. Air talent included John Jensen, later the general manager at KMPX. Jensen hosted live Koffee Klub remote broadcasts from the Mayfield Mall shopping center in Mountain View.
The station was very much Bob Podesta’s baby. The man who would later draw cartoons for a Honolulu newspaper focusing on interesting Hawaiian words once came up with a gimmick unlikely to have been found at any other radio station. Realizing that the dial-in line used to offer ski reports to listeners was unused much of the year, Podesta launched a service offering a three-minute rendition of a children’s fairy tale, updated daily. He conceded that the service, though it generated tens of thousands of calls, was not a money-maker.
In 1972, Podesta sold KREP for $470,000 to Bob Kieve and Empire Broadcasting, the owner of San Jose’s KLIV. Kieve changed the call letters to KARA.
