In the mid-1960s you could stand on California Street between the Fairmont and the Mark Hopkins on Nob Hill and know that two different San Franciscos were being invented a hundred yards apart.
KSFO lived inside the Fairmont. KYA lived at One Nob Hill Circle, the annex that had once belonged to KSFO. They had traded rooms a few years earlier. The adult station and the kid station were living in each other’s former houses.
I listened from Westlake in Daly City. I was in high school. We had just moved from Ohio. It seemed strange, even then, that one of the voices came out of a hotel.
I was deep into ham radio then, so I studied how the stations actually worked, not just how they sounded. At the Fairmont you could see into the KSFO studios through glass walls. KYA’s transmitter sat on the hill above Candlestick. Both were 5,000 watts. Nothing special. Up on San Bruno Mountain, James Gabbert would fire up KPEN — later KIOI — licensed for 120,000 watts and the first FM stereo west of St. Louis. I knew the difference between those numbers before I knew much else about the city I’d landed in.
On KYA the first voice I recognized was Johnny Holliday’s. I had heard him years earlier on WHK while we lived near Akron. He did not talk so much as blaze — the words came out of the speaker already late, already committed. When that same rush turned up on 1260 I felt the small private thrill of a familiar engine turning over in a new city. Russ the Moose Syracuse owned the hours after everyone else had gone to bed, captain of the All-Night Flight on what he called the Super-Freak 1260. He made staying awake feel like a destination instead of a problem.
“Emperor” Gene Nelson had the morning drive on KYA and always seemed to me to have way too much energy!
Across the street, Don Sherwood ran the mornings — six to nine, and I could never decide whether he was drunk or simply wacky. The show didn’t seem to care which. Al Jazzbo Collins took the evenings, different room, different weather, as if the station had decided San Francisco required both a lunatic and a host.
Tom Donahue was the opposite temperature from all of them. Velvet. The voice wrapped around a record instead of racing it. He was a huge man — so large I wondered how he got around. It must have been good for the voice. I met him, and his wife Raechel, at KMPX just before the station became KSAN, right at the edge of the Summer of Love. By then the city was changing frequencies in more ways than one. The first time I knew that voice, though, it was still coming from the hill.
KSFO called itself the World’s Greatest Radio Station and played a theme called “The Sound of the City.” From Westlake the claim sounded both ridiculous and exactly right.
I flipped between the two AM frequencies the way you flip between two versions of yourself. One station was still trying to figure the city out. The other already lived there and had stationery to prove it.
You did not choose the next song on either of them. Somebody chose it for you. You trusted them, or you didn’t, but you kept listening because the voices were coming from buildings you could, in theory, walk past — even if most days you were listening from a kitchen or a car in Daly City.
I did not know then that I was living inside an era.
You never do.