Bay Area Radio
BAY AREA RADIO
Book by John Schneider, Arcadia Publishing
Review by Craig MacDonald
In its early days, radio was as important as the Internet today. With no TV, everyone relied on it for news, entertainment, exercise & shopping. KFRC had “Tonight’s Best Buys,” which ran on 20 West Coast stations. “Your bargains and the things you want to sell were broadcast free,” Schneider writes.
Most people don’t know that the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose Bay Area was a key national radio broadcasting center during the first several decades of commercial radio.
San Jose had the world’s first broadcasting station in the Garden City Bank Building (1909). Charles Herrold conceived the idea of broadcasting to the public and founded a voice radio station—using the call sign FN—that played weekly phonograph concerts. It would evolve into KQW (1921), then KCBS (the Bay Area’s all-news radio station, now located in San Francisco).
Reviewer Craig MacDonald grew up in the Bay Area and was a good friend of Chet Casselman, legendary news director of KSFO. He once wrote popular comedy entertainment scripts for Chet, who broadcast them. Read his review of the book, Bay Area Radio.
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