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Radio KKUP: the city's 'lost' voice
First of three parts
By JON HOORNSTRA
In the beginning, it was a daunting three year struggle to build a radio station from scratch. A handful of young men, ready to take on all obstacles, had no license, no transmitter, no studio, no music library, no sponsors, no money. But they made it happen anyway.
Today, more than 30 years later, Cupertino's nonprofit radio station, KKUP (91.5 FM) is, by any measure, a great success story. It is bigger and stronger and unique among the nation's 12,641 radio stations. KKUP stands alone as the only station supported solely by its listeners, according to the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. All others either run commercials or take corporate and institutional underwriting.
Although the station's colorful history and success involved many area residents, it remains a largely unknown story. This column will explore that history in three parts, beginning today and continuing over the next two weeks.
KKUP started broadcasting in May 1972. It was born, not in a Cupertino garage, but only by chance events at a private school in Los Altos in 1969. In January of that year, Richard Nixon moved into the White House. The Vietnam War and protests dominated the news.
Against a background of expanding anti-establishment sentiment, four young men, none older than 22, none with more than two nickels to rub together, unexpectedly stumbled onto what major corporations pay huge sums to lawyers to find--an FCC broadcast license.
Everyone involved with KKUP names well known Bay Area radio personality Dana Jang as "the first" among the station's founders. A graduate of Palo Alto's Cubberly High School, Jang today oversees programming for 13 suburban Chicago radio stations. But in 1969 he was a 22-year-old recent graduate of Santa Clara University, working on an MBA at San Jose State University possessing little more than inborn love of radios and broadcasting. He took any opportunity to learn the broadcast business. He worked at San Jose State's campus station, KSJS, as well as part-time at KSJO, one of the first FM rock stations in the country, and KARA in Santa Clara.
It was early 1969 when Jang began to produce programs for KPSR, a low-watt educational station licensed to the private Pinewood Elementary School in Los Altos. Few people at Pinewood today, including principal Alice Johnson, ever knew the school once had a radio station. And it's unclear what the school's founder, the late Gwenn Riches, had in mind for the station in Pinewood's overall curriculum. But the need to resolve disputes over programming eventually led Riches to abort her plans. Jang, along with fellow programmers Kevin McCaffrey and Dave Hurd, were stunned when Riches announced she was shutting the station down and would surrender her license back to the FCC. They also recognized it as a rare opportunity and decided they would do something about it.
Moving from that moment of opportunity to the station's first broadcast in 1972 would be the adventure of a lifetime. The young men set in motion forces that would eventually see the station grow from a meager 10-watt voice originating from a Monta Vista "hole in the wall" to a mature 200 watts transmitting from the highest peak in the Santa Cruz mountains.
Next week: decisions made in 1969 were the start of an intense civics lesson. KKUP's founding crew had to overcome government bureaucracy, get around military secrecy, learn the value of congressional help, cope with a sometimes eccentric mountain property owner and, above all else, raise money. We will also revisit some Cupertino leaders with foresight and a willingness to mentor, traits that, sadly, fell by the wayside as time passed. Of course, every story of pioneers has colorful characters on stage. This story is no exception.
Stay tuned.
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Cupertino, California Since 1947
