Seventy-five years ago this spring, a pacifist and World War II conscientious objector named Lewis Hill waited nervously before a microphone. Hill’s nonprofit organization, the Pacifica Foundation, had recently been given the license for a radio station on the burgeoning FM broadcast band, and he and a group of volunteers had been frantically outfitting the sixth floor of a building on University Avenue in Berkeley over the past few months to get it ready for broadcast.
It was nearing 3 p.m., when the station would go on air for the first time. But as described in historian Matthew Lasar’s book, “Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network,” engineer Edward Meese was nowhere in sight. In his place in the control room was Gertrude Chiarito, the station’s accountant. Meese was on the roof, of all places, adjusting an antenna. He’d given Chiarito instructions to flip the switch marked “Lew” when the clock struck three.
The clock ticked. Hill waited. The smell of the carpet, which had been installed just hours earlier, still hung in the air. Then Meese yelled from the roof, Chiarito flipped the switch, and Hill leaned forward and said into the microphone for the very first time: “This is KPFA, listener-sponsored radio in Berkeley.”
KPFA and the listeners who support it will celebrate that moment from April 1949 with a series of events this spring.
They include an April 6 program with Amy Goodman, whose show “Democracy Now!” got its start on Pacifica Radio before growing into a mainstay of progressive media at First Church of Christ, Scientist in Berkeley. A talk titled “Rebel Airwaves” about the history of the station by Liam O’Donoghue, host of the podcast East Bay Yesterday, will play clips from the station’s archive in June.
He’ll have plenty to choose from.
Over the past 75 years, listeners to KPFA have heard the likes of Rosa Parks, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Alan Watts, Ken Kesey, Pauline Kael and other luminaries. They’ve heard Huey P. Newton broadcasting from jail, Patty Hearst reading communiques from the Symbionese Liberation Army, a live interview with Che Guevera months before he was killed in Bolivia, Allen Ginsberg reading his controversial poem, “Howl.” They’ve heard an announcer being dragged off by armed guards live on air.
They’ve also heard the first on-air discussions of the effects of marijuana and the first broadcast about gay rights.
“There’s so many firsts with KPFA,” said O’Donoghue. “They were way ahead of the curve on a lot of issues.”
An ethos that ‘the truth is always left of center‘
The station was also the nation’s first successful listener-supported radio station — though there were plenty of times when that was in doubt.
Sixteen months after going on air for the first time, KPFA was already deep in debt and low on subscribers, forcing it to shut down and lie dormant for nine months. But the few subscribers the station did have realized there was something special about KPFA, and nearly $22,000 was raised to put the station back on the air.
Still, KPFA needed a more steady stream of funds to continue operating — and advertising was out of the question.
“Lewis Hill regarded advertising as a threat to his mission,” Lasar told KPFA host Brian Edwards-Tiekert in a 2019 interview. “He understood that advertising was a source of censorship.”
Instead, Hill set his sights on the Ford Foundation, which had a huge pool of money and funded causes that promoted “The Establishment of Peace” and “Education in a Democratic Society. Hill secured a $150,000 grant from the Ford Foundation in 1952, steering KPFA from its financial crisis.
Sadly, Hill, who suffered from debilitating spinal arthritis, died by suicide in 1957.
Elsa Knight Thompson began volunteering at KPFA that same year. She soon became the station’s public affairs director and the person many consider most responsible for shaping the sound of KPFA.
Where Hill and his Pacifica co-founders wanted to present all points of view and find common ground, Knight Thompson was unforgivingly partisan, famously saying, “The truth is always left of center.” She was also feared.
Alan Rich, who served as KPFA’s music director, once said of Knight Thompson, “I worshiped her and was terrified by her.”
However, Knight Thompson was responsible for some historic programming, including what is considered to be the first gay rights radio documentary, when she invited members of the Mattachine Society, America’s first gay rights organization, to speak on air. This was in 1958, when same-sex acts were still considered criminal in the U.S. and homosexuality was seen as a mental illness.
“Gay people in San Francisco listened in stunned delight,” Lasar wrote in his history of Pacifica Radio.
McCarthyism comes for Pacifica
In 1959, Pacifica launched its second station, KPFK-FM, in Los Angeles, and in 1960, a philanthropist gifted WBAI-FM in New York to the foundation. Pacifica now had a bigger reach than ever.
But a bigger reach meant more trouble. In 1960, the House Un-American Activities Commission and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee began investigating Pacifica for airing what they considered subversive programming.
KPFA broadcaster William Mandel was hauled before a 1960 HUAC hearing in San Francisco. As protestors gathered outside, Mandel was asked, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
His reply, immortalized in the documentary film “Berkeley in the Sixties,” has gone down in KPFA lore: “If you think that I am going to cooperate with this collection of Judases, of men who sit there in violation of the United States Constitution, if you think I will cooperate with you in any way, you are insane!”
Edwards-Tiekert said of Mandel, “Many people who write the history of the McCarthy period credit those hearings in San Francisco as being a turning point.”
Another historic broadcast took place in 1969, when the American Indian Movement occupied Alcatraz Island. Edwards-Tiekert recalled hearing stories about the episode from Steve Hawes, an engineer at the station. Hawes set up a broadcast antenna for the occupiers on the island and “an elaborate contraption” connected to a speaker in his bedroom.
“The people on Alcatraz Island could at any point get him out of bed and send him running to the studio to put them on the air live,” said Edwards-Tiekert.
It was a testament to the type of people who work at KPFA.
“That’s just not how a lot of people have ever treated their jobs,” he said. “Or probably should.”
Another occupational hazard of working at Pacifica is dealing with bomb threats.
In 1970, Pacifica station KPFT-FM in Houston went on air, only to have their transmitter tower bombed by the Ku Klux Klan. Twice. Federal agents arrested a KKK Grand Dragon for the bombing, and for plotting to bomb KPFA in Berkeley and KPFK in Los Angeles.
‘The Battle for the Berkeley Airwaves‘
While the station has long had to worry about various external threats, many of KPFA and Pacifica’s more recent troubles have been self-inflicted.
In a 1999 episode The New York Times dubbed “The Battle for the Berkeley Airwaves,” the executive director of Pacifica abruptly fired KPFA’s general manager, Nicole Sawaya, triggering protests inside and outside the station. Things came to a head in July when armed guards cleared the KPFA studios and shut the station down. Later that month, over 10,000 listeners gathered in Berkeley to demand the station reopen.
In 2010, in a move that echoed the events from a decade prior, Pacifica laid off its “Morning Show” staff, including Edwards-Tiekert, and replaced them with volunteers. Again, listeners protested, and Edwards-Tiekert was eventually reinstated.
Eight years later, KPFA nearly lost its studio when Pacifica was sued by a New York-based real estate company for back rent. But, like years past, supporters came to their aid and offered the network a $2 million loan, once again saving KPFA.
It is fitting that the theme for this year’s anniversary celebration is “75 years of community trust,” since the community has come to the station’s aid again and again.
Edwards-Tiekert, who will host the anniversary event with Amy Goodman, saw that community trust on display during his very first day at the station. He began working at KPFA as part of its internship program in 2003. His first day happened to be the day the U.S. invaded Iraq. Earlier that day, Edwards-Tiekert attended an anti-war protest in San Francisco, where he promptly got arrested. Luckily, he was released in time to make it to the station that evening to begin his training.
“I got to KPFA, and there’s a little speaker over the entrance of our studios that plays whatever’s on the air,” he said. “There was just like this impromptu vigil of people who had collected around their radio station. On the street, on MLK, after dark, at night.”
It was a moment Edwards-Tiekert would never forget.
“That was my first impression of what it meant for a media outlet to be embedded in and supported by its community,” he said. “And that made a really lasting impression on me. It’s one of the reasons I’ve stuck around.”
Update: A concert at the Freight & Salvage that was scheduled on April 15 featuring Russian Telegraph and French LaBeau has been canceled.
