California broadcasting history finds a new home in Alameda.

MEDIA

Old radios, microphones, and televisions lined up everywhere. Fifteen hundred stacked boxes of vacuum tubes, books, magazines, photographs, phonographs, amplifiers, audiotapes, testing equipment, and old signs. These are among the artifacts at the new home of the California Historical Radio Society at 2152 Central Ave.

The society-which encompasses the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame, the Bay Area Radio Museum, the James Maxwell Communications Library, and Archives of the Society of Wireless Pioneers-took possession of the building in April.
Faced with losing its home at historical KRE radio in Berkeley, society President Steve Kushman and the board worked fast in late 2013 after being asked to vacate the space it had renovated and occupied rent-free since 2003. Until then, it had led a flea-market existence for 30 years. The society built galleries of radio by era, television, HiFi, communications gear, test equipment, and restored the KRE control room. “At KRE, we learned how to be a museum. But instead of lamenting our loss, everyone took up the challenge. It was good for us. It gave us the impetus to buy our own place. As a nonprofit, we needed to control our own destiny,” Kushman says.

In a fundraising mode since 2012 when the chance to buy the KRE building surfaced, the society raised $940,000, ultimately for the Alameda property, which at 7,300 square feet, is 2,700 square feet larger. The society raised an additional $105,000, specifically $55,000 for the building’s renovation and $50,000 for an emergency fund.
The museum’s collection includes 2,500 radios, televisions, phonographs, speakers, microphones, records, and CDs. Sixty percent of the devices work. The museum’s oldest radio is a working crystal set from 1900. Other notables include a Pilot TV from 1948, which has a 3-inch picture tube, and a Du Mont Royal Sovereign television from 1952 with a 30-inch screen and is just one five working ones in the world.

Board member Denny Monticelli helped find the Alameda building, a California Mission Revival-style structure built by The Sunset Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1900. It had telephone cables running from the basement and was built to handle 10,000 customers. On the main floor, women operators worked 24 hours a day to connect calls.
Kushman, society president since 1996 and a news editor for KGO TV, can’t help but see a connection. “We came from a historical radio building to a historical telephone building: from a wireless communication building to a wired communication building. It’s all talking to people, one to one, and ear to ear,” he says.

Each year, the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame has a Radio Day by the Bay, the society’s largest annual fundraiser. This year’s event held in July at Alameda High raised $25,000, and featured several Alamedans: KCBS radio’s Stan Bunger served as master of ceremonies, while KCBS sports anchor Steve Bitker was named a member of the 2014 Class of the Hall of Fame.

The history of Bay Area radio stations, broadcasting, personalities, DJs, engineers, and executives is rich. Casey Kasem, Merv Griffin, Jim Lange, and Gary Owens all got their starts, or worked at local radio stations, as did comedian and former Alameda resident Phyllis Diller, who worked at Oakland radio station KROW as its secretary and traffic reporter in the late 1940s. The legendary Don Sherwood and poet Rod McKuen also graced the KROW airwaves.

Monticelli, the society’s director of education and an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley, says the rate of adoption of radios by the general population in the United States in the 1930s was 80 percent, an unparalleled figure for a piece of technology, except for smart phones today. “Radio was number one. It’s all the more startling because it was the Depression. It was an affordable way for people to have entertainment. But it was also the first real-time information. It was transformational,” he says.

The society has 400 members and about 35 core volunteers who have been energized by the purchase of the Alameda building. They grew up when radio had a much larger influence on the culture than it does in the fragmented media world of today. But they share a fondness and fascination for radio and its magic: human voices and music coming from a box. “We want to pass on the history of radio. It was such an important part of our culture and its development,” Kushman says.

For more information on the California Historical Radio Society, go to: www.CaliforniaHistoricalRadio.com.

This article appears in the September 2014 issue of Alameda Magazine
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