The history of KVRE dates back to 1957, when the first papers were filed with the Federal Communications Commission seeking a new AM station licensed to Santa Rosa.
It was March 1962 before the station actually began transmitting from a tower in the Bennett Valley area. A lengthy list of partners on the original application had been changed to an entity named Santa Rosa Broadcasting Company. The company included Joe Nixon and Tom Brennen, both veterans of Long Beach station KFOX, which proclaimed itself “The Country King” of Southern California.
The new owners quickly launched a memorable newspaper advertising campaign, making humorously outrageous claims for the benefits of listening to KVRE, offering to share color slides of their weddings, and recruiting customers for a Zeppelin training center at the station’s transmitter site…among others. A collection of the offbeat ads was published in The Press Democrat on New Year’s Day 1963 and makes for enjoyable reading.
Nixon and Brennen billed the station as “The Voice of Progress in Sonoma County”, though the music mix was decidedly not progressive, focusing on country standards. Nixon held down an air shift, calling himself “Jolly Joe”. Another notable air talent: Black Jack Wayne, a well-known radio and TV personality, who moved to Sonoma County and joined KVRE in mid-1965.
By late 1965, Nixon and Brennen had apparently had enough of the fun. They sold the station to Bill Colclough and Ed LaFrance for a reported $102,000. LaFrance would manage and program the station while serving as its morning host for the next dozen years.
LaFrance initially moved the station toward a tighter playlist, sort of a “Top-40 gone country” approach. The move coincided with the emergence of the “Nashville Sound”, featuring artists like Glen Campbell and Roger Miller.
Colclough and LaFrance’s KVRE, Inc. launched an FM station in 1974, using it to simulcast KVRE’s programming.
In 1975, LaFrance re-tuned KVRE’s sound again. This time, it was in favor of “progressive country” artists. It was a shift that would draw the attention of Billboard magazine, which published a feature story about the station in 1976. Shanna Santomiere, who had been holding down the evening shift on-air, was named music director in mid-1976 and is credited with helping define the KVRE version of “progressive country”.
In 1978, Colclough and LaFrance (and their wives, who were listed as co-owners) sold both stations to the creatively named Visionary Radio Euphonics, controlled by former Century Broadcasting executive John Detz Jr.
In 1981, Detz announced a big change for KVRE. It was ending the country music format it had carried (in one form or another) since its launch almost twenty years earlier. In its place: what Detz called “modified oldies”: popular singers from the 1940s through the 1960s.
And, in an effort to clearly differentiate KVRE from its more-popular FM station (still playing “progressive country” music as part of an increasingly freeform format), the call letters were being changed to KQTE.
