The FM station that would come to be known as KUSF (a low-powered AM campus-only version of KUSF went on the air in 1963) began as a project of the evangelical Christian and Missionary Alliance. The organization traced it roots to 1881, when Pastor A.B. Simpson set up a mission in New York City.
The organization would eventually launch a Bible college in Seattle. Simpson Bible College moved to San Francisco in 1955 (it would later relocate to Redding, CA and rename itself Simpson College).
In 1963, the Federal Communications Commission issued a construction permit for a 10 watt FM station on the 90.3 frequency. The licensee, Simpson Bible College, would request the call letters KCMA in honor of its parent organization, the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
KCMA began transmitting in August 1964 as a Class D non-commercial educational station.
For the remainder of the ’60s, the station showed up in newspaper listings which noted its format as “Religious”. A 1968 report in the Redwood City Tribune noted that KCMA would be one of a half-dozen Bay Area stations carrying the Standard School Broadcast, the venerable Peabody Award-winning educational series sponsored by Standard Oil since the 1920s. Russell Marshall, Simpson Bible College’s director of fine arts, served as station manager.
In 1970, the station received approval to boost power to 250 watts and install a new transmitter. The format had become more modern: mornings were given over to what was described as “MOR gospel music”, afternoons were “Christian folk rock geared to young people”, and the evenings featured classical music. The station’s signal was capable of reaching as far down the East Bay as Hayward.
By 1973, Simpson Bible College had vacated San Francisco to move to Redding, and an enterprising economics major at the University of San Francisco saw an opportunity. Steve Runyon was already managing the campus student station, and he engineered a deal by which USF paid $1200 to acquire KCMA. The transfer was approved by the Federal Communications Commission on May 25, 1973. An application was soon filed to change the call letters to KUSF.
USF had actually started the process of putting an FM radio station on the air in the 1950’s, securing a construction permit from the FCC in 1960. For a combination of reasons including the death of the faculty member overseeing the project, that project foundered.
While newspaper radio listings from 1974 to 1976 showed KUSF broadcasting on 90.3 FM, it was actually not until April 25, 1977 that the first broadcast was made from the station on the ground floor of USF’s Phelan Hall (now Burl Toler Hall). At the beginning, the station was only on the air from 7 PM to 11 PM. Programming at the outset included old Lone Ranger episodes and a Wednesday night opera broadcast. The air staff was made up of USF students in the university’s Mass Media Studies program (Runyon would become director of that program).
KUSF carried USF basketball games beginning with the 1977-78 season, when the Dons reached the NCAA Tournament behind star center Bill Cartwright. The station also aired USF men’s soccer games as the program built by coach Steve Negoesco cemented its national reputation.
The station won acclaim for a lengthy series about heart disease prevention and treatment. The Heart of the Matter was the work of Arlene Turqueza, whose family experience after her father’s two heart attacks drove her to learn more and share it with the radio audience.
By the early ’80s, though KUSF was still carrying classical music and intellectual discussions, it was making the change that would put it on the national map. An 11 PM to 2 AM show called Harmful Emissions was the toe in the water for a new sound. Punk rock music was hitting hard, and KUSF began to ride the wave. The station went to 24-hour programming in 1981, and the overnight hours became a launching pad for music that was not being heard much on commercial stations.
The station went into the newspaper business in 1981, launching an eight-page publication called KUSF Wave Sector. It was full of concert and record reviews as well as interviews with punk and new-wave musicians. The USF student newspaper San Francisco Foghorn noted the new paper: “So here’s to the KUSF Wave Sector, a new and alive music publication in a city in need of a good one. Good luck.”
A 1982 San Francisco Examiner report on the new Bay Area rock music scene singled out KUSF. “The spirit of KMPX and KSAN, the two San Francisco stations that, under the direction of the late ‘Big Daddy’ Tom Donahue, created progressive rock radio in the late ’60s and early ’70s lives on at KUSF,” reported the newspaper. In fact, former KSAN DJ’s Richard Gossett and Beverly Wilshire were helping KUSF dial in its format.
415 Records co-founder Howie Klein was a familiar figure at KUSF. Not only did his label champion many of the the punk musicians being heard on the station, but Klein had his own show called Rampage Radio that ran for a number of years. Late-night DJ “Germ” (Jim Smith) became a magnet for new bands, offering to play demo tapes for acts that hadn’t released a commercial recording.
By 1986, KUSF’s place in the Bay Area new music scene was rock-solid. San Francisco Chronicle pop music critic Joel Selvin noted that the newly-launched “Live 105” format on KITS had picked up former KUSF DJ’s “Big Rick” Stuart and Jimmy D., adding, “But that’s not really news. This little college radio station has been influencing the so-called mainstream radio sound in this town for years.”
A 1987 article in the San Francisco Chronicle perhaps encapsulates how big a deal KUSF had become. In then same story, it’s reported that KUSF DJ Linda Ryan was one of only three US radio personalities chosen to perform a live interview with the members of the band U2 and it’s also reported that Ryan was spotted hanging out with R.E.M. members Peter Buck and Mike Mills after they’d made the trek to KUSF to promote their newest release. As a postscript: that live U2 interview was carried in the Bay Area on KOME.
KUSF would win four “College Radio Station of the Year” awards from the influential industry publication Gavin Report.
It wasn’t all rock and roll at KUSF. Despite its outsized influence on the new-music world, the station continued to air classical music, jazz, foreign-language shows, literary readings, and June Kessler’s interview program called Fighting Back. For years, one Bay Area newspaper listed KUSF’s format as “Alternative rock, etc.”
In the early ’90s, with commercial radio veteran Kate Ingram serving as program director, KUSF became home to Jive Radio, a weekly homage to the gone and lamented “Jive 95” KSAN. A number of former KSAN air personalities took part in the project, playing the songs they’d loved and adding the freeform touch that had been KSAN’s hallmark. Ben Fong-Torres launched the project and was its first producer. For further details, Norman Davis’ version of the Jive Radio story is worth a read.
A fundraising event launched in 1983 as “KUSF Rock and Soc” featured live bands and an auction. Re-dubbed “KUSF Rock ‘n Swap”, the event would become the largest and longest-running college radio station-led record fair in the Bay Area, far outlasting the radio station’s on-air years.
A 1995 San Francisco Examiner profile of KUSF called it “arguably the most respected college station in the country”. But the story also took note of a change of direction under Kate Ingram’s leadership. She told the newspaper that the station had succumbed to record-industry pressure “to run the station in a more mainstream way”. Her response was to dump playlists and encourage the volunteer disc jockeys to play whatever they wanted. Steve Runyon, still officially the general manager of KUSF, called the approach “rather immature and childish” but Ingram said, “I think it’s always youth’s job to protest, in whatever way they can, what they see is wrong with the world.”
KUSF was an early adopter of Internet streaming, offering its sound to the world beginning in the mid-1990s. As fate would have it, the Web would eventually wind up being the only place to hear KUSF. The station would also create a library of shows that ran into the thousands, allowing on-demand listening well before that was a common industry practice.
Ingram left KUSF in 1999. In 2001, the station was in the news after its transmitter failed, leaving the station with a puny 50-watt signal. The need for funding to replace the equipment led to the station’s first-ever pledge drive.
Marking its 25th anniversary in 2002, KUSF was lauded by San Francisco Chronicle pop music critic Neva Chonin as “one of the most influential indie music outlets ever to blast its way across the airwaves.” Chonin took note of the influence KUSF had had on the alternative-rock format that had flourished on numerous stations nationwide. Program director Lisa Yimm said, “We’ve always been good at listening to people and giving them what they want to hear–or in some cases, what they didn’t even know they wanted to hear.”
It all came to an end at 10 AM on January 18, 2011. KUSF was gone from the airwaves, the result of a three-way deal involving the University of San Francisco, radio station owner Entercom, and the University of Southern California. USF received a reported $3.75 million from USC, which was adding stations to carry the programming of its classical-music station KUSC via an enterprise called The Classical Public Radio Network. Entercom added the programming of its San Jose station KUFX to the 102.1 frequency held by KDFC, and KUSF’s 90.3 signal became KDFC.
USF President Steven Privett said he made the decision because the station, dominated by outside volunteers, “was of minimal benefit to my students.” “This was not a crass business decision about dollars,” Privett said. “This was about ensuring our programs involve our students. Our primary mission is to our students, it is not to the community at large.”
There was instant outrage. A “Save KUSF” movement formed immediately after the swap, which took many by surprise (longtime station manager and USF faculty member Steve Runyon said he’d had only an hour’s notice before KUSF went off the air). It was all to no avail.
Today’s KUSF is the online version of the station.
