KTOB succeeded KAFP on January 10, 1961. Lloyd Burlingham had become the sixth owner of a station that was barely ten years old when he purchased it in 1960.
On the occasion of the call letter change (where KAFP had stood for Krowing Always For Petaluma, KTOB stood for Top Of the Bay, a reference to Petaluma’s geographical location at the mouth of the Petaluma River), Burlingham took out an ad in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, introducing the station’s staff. The ad included this line: “Thanks to one and all who have helped make KAFP a SUCCESS…the new KTOB will be even greater.”
Newspaper program listings from the early 1960s show KTOB leaning heavily on symphonic music while also delivering local news and current events coverage.
The change of call letters didn’t stop the ownership changes for Petaluma’s radio station. In June 1962, after two years of ownership, Burlingham sold the station for $115,000. Purchaser William Stubblefield had just sold a radio station in Leesburg, VA.
It didn’t take for Stubblefield’s Top of the Bay, Inc. to run into trouble. Barely a year after his purchase, creditors (including previous owner Lloyd Burlingham) were arguing in court that the company was bankrupt.
In an October 1, 1963 article headlined “Top o’ Bay Radio Hits Bottom”, the Petaluma Argus-Courier reported William Stubblefield had been unavailable for comment, and his home phone was disconnected. KTOB was off the air, with station manager Paul Ward telling the newspaper that the station needed new transmitter tubes and he had no money to pay for them.
A federal judge ruled Top of the Bay Inc. was indeed bankrupt, a receiver was appointed, and former owner Burlingham was named to manage the station. He said he was shocked at the condition in which he found the facility, pledging an all-out effort to restore the station. Ten days after it went dark, KTOB was back on the air.
It wasn’t all bad news for the station in 1963. That same year saw the hiring of Ron Walters, whose morning show featuring jazz and adult contemporary music was called Sunrise Serenade. Walters would remain with the station until he finally was pushed aside in 1994, a move that led numerous Sonoma County residents to write letters in defense of the man who’d come to be known as “The Voice of Petaluma”. By then, he’d awakened a couple of generations of Petalumans and called thousands of hours of local sports play-by-play.
Walters, who stood 6′ 7″, had a knack for tapping into the soul of his adopted hometown. Within a few months of starting at KTOB, Walters heard KSFO host Dave Niles mock Petaluma on the air. Walters fired off a challenge, proposing a showdown basketball game between KTOB’s “Henhouse Five” and the KSFO disc jockeys. Wrote Walters, “We just want to find out if you really are ‘The World’s Greatest Radio Station’.” There’s no record that the game ever happened, though Walters did play-by-play of plenty of local games over the course of his career.
By the summer of 1964, former owner Lloyd Burlingham had managed to get the station back above water. Clifford Hansen, who had an interest in a radio station in Everett, WA, arrived to help run KTOB. Hansen would become an owner of KTOB as he and Burlingham created Sonoma County Broadcasting Company. Burlingham, for his part, eventually owned stations in several other states.
Its finances apparently stabilized for the time being, KTOB settled into a small-town groove, offering “Instant News” at the top and bottom of each hour, reading the day’s school lunch menus on the air, and covering local school sports contests.
Don Davis, who’d been station manager when KAFP changed to KTOB, returned in that same role in the spring of 1966. Davis would remain with the station, wearing a variety of hats, for many years.
KTOB was sold again in 1968. The buyers were Joseph and Agnes McGillvra, who’d previously owned KCKC in San Bernardino. They paid $142,000. The McGillvras moved to Sonoma County.
But ownership changes never seemed far away for this station, and in 1971, Joseph McGillvra announced that illness in the family had led he and his wife to sell KTOB. The buyers, KTOB Inc., were a group of well-known local figures headed by former newspaper reporter and city councilman Robert Lipman, who would serve as president and general manager of the station.
In the summer of 1972, KTOB achieved immortality of a sort. A key scene in the film American Graffiti, in which Curt drives to the edge of town to get disc jockey Wolfman Jack to broadcast a message to his dream girl, used the KTOB transmitter building and tower on Rovina Lane for the exterior shots (the studio scenes were shot at KRE in Berkeley).
The station promoted live coverage of Petaluma’s quirky World Wrist Wrestling Championships, an event which grew from a barroom challenge match to a regular fixture on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.
In 1980, Lipman announced plans to move the radio station a few blocks from its longtime home on Washington Street to the new Golden Eagle Shopping Center. Lipman blamed a lack of nearby parking for the decision to shift locations.
A 1981 Press Democrat article about the challenges of covering local sports on Sonoma County radio stations offered a fascinating look at the economics of small-market radio. Ron Walters described the “Sportsman Club” he’d created in the mid-1960s. It offered local advertisers an annual rate. Once KTOB knew how much advertising revenue was in the till, it could decide how many high school and Little League games it could afford to cover.
In the mid-1980s, KTOB decided to up its game. The station got FCC approval to boost its signal from 250 to 1,000 watts and brought in Al Sturges to run things. Sturges had owned a station in Santa Maria, and among other things, he arranged an affiliation with Mutual Radio (bringing The Larry King Show to Petaluma) and launched local traffic reports to start 1985. The station tightened its musical offerings to aim at the coveted 25-54 age group. Sturges also oversaw an increased focus on local news coverage, at a time when Sonoma County ratings indicated San Francisco stations were dominant.
The California League’s Redwood Pioneers had been heard on KTOB in the early ’80s. After the team’s stellar 1984 season (carried on KSRO), KTOB announced it would become the team’s radio home for 1985–and for the first few weeks of the season, it was. That’s when station general manager Al Sturges said the baseball team’s owners rejected the station’s plan to shift to weekend-only coverage. The upshot: KTOB carried the first game of a July doubleheader, but the rest of the season’s Pioneers games vanished from the station.
Not long after that, Bob Lipman sold the station. San Rafael resident Ed Gardner, who’d worked for Westinghouse Broadcasting, and Southern Californian Bart Fenmore paid $1 million in 1986 to acquire KTOB, saying they saw the southern Sonoma-northern Marin County corridor as a solid growth market. Fenmore’s money made the deal work; Gardner would run the station and own a quarter of North Bay Broadcasting, Inc. Lipman would stay on as a consultant.
The sale triggered a lawsuit. David Devoto, who’d been one of Lipman’s partners in the 1971 purchase, and longtime announcer Ron Walters (who’d ended up with a share of ownership) accused Lipman of funneling station funds to himself and of inflating the value of his consulting deal with the new owners. Lipman denied the charges.
In September 1987, Ed Gardner became the sole owner of KTOB, buying out his partner Barton Fenmore for a price reported to be in the neighborhood of $500,000. In what would prove to be a prophetic quip, Gardner told the Petaluma Argus-Courier, “that means I get all the bills.”
In the fall of 1988, KTOB added The Ed and Alan Show to follow the long-running Ron Walters morning broadcast. Ed Weber and Alan Goldstock had created a weekly community-issues program on KFTY television a year earlier and saw an opportunity to expand their concept into radio.
In July 1989, just weeks after a laudatory article about KTOB in The Press Democrat, Ed Gardner died. He’d been battling cancer, and his death presaged another challenging chapter in KTOB’s history.
While general manager Tom Holmes inherited the job of running KTOB, Gardner’s widow June literally inherited the station. It wasn’t long before June Gardner, who’d been active in the effort to increase public access to Olompali State Historic Park, realized a hard truth: KTOB had bankrupted her.
June Gardner filed for personal bankruptcy in the fall of 1989, citing a mountain of debt run up over the last year of her ailing husband’s life. KTOB was, for the second time in its existence, in the hands of bankruptcy trustees. The station itself was trying to find an audience with a “golden oldies” format but one oldie didn’t fit: Ron Walters was removed from the morning show he’d hosted since 1963.
The spring of 1990 brought hopeful reports to those rooting for Petaluma’s radio station. A man named Geoffrey Grant was reported to have paid $10,000 to acquire 90% of North Bay Broadcasting, Inc. in an arrangement that also required him to assume $800,000 worth of debt. Grant told The Press Democrat that the station was profitable on a cash-flow basis but was facing a mountain of debt. He said he was working with creditors to find a way out.
But it wasn’t that simple. Former owner Bob Lipman and a few others still held title to the Rowina Lane parcel where the KTOB transmitter sat, and they claimed they were still owed $400,000 from the earlier sale. The property was to be sold at a sheriff’s auction. And the late Ed Gardner’s former partner Bart Fenmore revealed that Gardner didn’t pay cash to acquire Fenmore’s share of the station; rather, Fenmore took a note for $300,000.
And then things got really weird. By the summer of 1990, Geoffrey Grant acknowledged that his 21-year-old daughter Erin was actually the majority shareholder of the entity that had acquired KTOB from the bankruptcy trustee (it was money from her trust fund that was used). A petition was filed with the FCC, arguing that the Grants’ concern, Petaluma Radio (KTOB) Partners, didn’t own the station’s license because it never filed for a license transfer.
September 1990 saw the departure of Ron Walters. Since leaving the morning slot a year earlier, he’d had his hours cut, been reassigned to do newscasts and told the Petaluma Argus-Courier, “What I was doing had absolutely no significance as far as I could see.”
And then things got really, really weird. The question of who actually held KTOB’s license dragged on through 1991, as did bankruptcy court skirmishes over lease payments. In December of that year, general manager Tom Holmes and program director Ken Carpenter changed the locks and fired Geoff and Erin Grant, despite the fact that the Grants claimed ownership of the station.
A few weeks later, the Grants said they had fired Holmes and Carpenter (Carpenter would wind up at another troubled station, KMXN). But while the Grants resumed control of the station, they still didn’t have an FCC license.
On Valentine’s Day, 1992, KTOB went off the air in the midst of a major storm, forcing local officials to scramble because the station was Petaluma’s designated emergency information channel. FCC inspectors had arrived at the station the previous night and demanded to see proof that the station was being operated by bankruptcy trustee Raymond Carey, whose name was on the FCC license. As for the Grants, an FCC official said, “They claim they are the owners, but being the owner doesn’t mean you have a license to operate.”
For the next year, sporadic reports suggested a new life for KTOB but it wasn’t until mid-1993 that a credible buyer appeared. It turned out to be someone who knew the station well: former part-owner (as part of Bob Lipman’s KTOB Inc.) and major creditor Dave Devoto, who owned the land on which the transmitter sat. FCC records show Devoto paid $20,000 to the bankruptcy trustee to acquire the station; he immediately set about getting a license issued.
Devoto secured the license in August 1993, hired former disc jockey Daniel Hess as general manager, and brought in KCBS newsroom veteran George McManus to serve as news director. On October 11, 1993, KTOB was back on the air.
The latest version of the station leaned toward ’80s and ’90s pop music, with a familiar voice anchoring the morning show. Ron Walters was back, on a station now billing itself as The Voice of Petaluma.
And less than a year later, Walters was gone, again. This time, he was dismissed by station management. Walters said it was because he wanted the freedom to do the show his way while management wanted him to stick to a music mix aimed at a younger audience. As Don Bennett would write in the Petaluma Argus-Courier years later, “In one of those moves that should always be taught in business school, the new management let their only remaining asset, Ron Walters, go in a cost-saving move. The end was inevitable.”
The latest re-jiggering of KTOB, branded “Great Rock Oldies” with a promised addition of a stereo AM signal, never caught on.
Dan Hess departed the general manager’s job in early 1995, and the English language left the station in August 1996.
KTOB had switched to Korean-language programing. Dave Devoto, who’d reportedly been seeking a buyer for some time, had apparently found one named Kim Broadcasting Corporation. Radio station brokerage The Exline Company reported the deal as an asset sale worth $450,000 in cash.
Local newspapers noted KTOB was the only Korean-language programming to be heard in the area, but it didn’t last long. By 1997, the station was carrying Spanish-language programming, though a quirky show called Duke and Banner continued to air in English from 11 PM Saturday to 1 AM Sunday each week and would continue to do so for several more years.
Whatever deal Dave Devoto had made with Kim Broadcasting had apparently fallen through. State of California records show Kim Broadcasting had a very short life and was considered inactive by 1998.
It would take a while for newspaper radio listings to catch up with the language shifts at KTOB; well into 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle continued to show the Spanish-language station as broadcasting an “Asian” format.
In late 2001, KTOB changed hands once again. The buyer was Moon Broadcasting, one of many endeavors of Abel De Luna. De Luna had emigrated to Sonoma County from Zacatecas, Mexico at the age of 19. By the time he was in his 30s, he’d started a number of businesses and became Healdsburg’s first Latino mayor. His music distribution company Luna Music would become the largest independent Latin record label in the country.
De Luna paid a reported $1.28 million for KTOB. He already owned Santa Rosa’s KRRS (the former KVRE) and several other stations, all broadcasting some variation of Mexican regional music.
In 2011, De Luna sold KTOB and KRRS to Ambrosio Vigil’s California Broadcasting Company for $300,000 (he would wind up re-acquiring the stations in the 2020s).
In November 2014, California Broadcasting Company changed the call letters to KZNB and the tale of KTOB came to an end.
