What years did KARA play 50's and 60's oldies? I picked up a 7" reel to reel of the station playing oldies. Mike
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KARA-FM "Kara of Santa Clara" !
- Thread starter mikecroaro
- Start date
1970s into the 1980s.
Yes, Robert Kieve and his co-investors. A very decent man, not what you would typically expect to find in a station owner.
I've worked for a variety of station owners, from George Mooney (Mooney Broadcasting, WERC, WKGN, WMAK and others), Metroplex (Norm and Bob), UnoRadio (Jesús Soto), Lotus (Howard Kalmenson,) Emmis ( Jeff Smulyan), Heftel (Cecil Heftel), HBC (Mac Tichenor) and several others. All were "good people". The only one I'd prefer to forget is LBI (Lenard Liberman).
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I'd like to forget him as well, and I never worked for him.
I don't even know him and I want to forget.
Should I ask why you all want to forget him?
Never mind, forget I asked....
c
I remember from my time living in the Bay Area in the early 80s. The station seemed to have no life. Just the automation and the female voice saying "This is KARA in Santa Clara".
Another culprit was KDON-FM in Santa Cruz. What made it worse was doing automation and boring, dry liners... on a CHR station.
Yes. And it some of the liners would have hiss in the background that came on before the liner started. It was loosey-goosey. But back then most FMs were automated if they weren’t AOR. It was the AMs that were tight. I do remember KSFX being tight when it Top40 through. And K101 was live.
No. It was "KARA of Santa Clara". As a broadcast, "in" doesn't make sense. The station was based in and represented Santa Clara. Note the aircheck at 1:25 and 3:52.
Maybe later, but in the automated days I distinctly remember the sweeper being (in a female voice) "Hi - this is Kara in Santa Clara". And they were co-owned with KLIV.
You're right. When I first moved to the Bay Area in 1982, KARA was running an automated oldies format, and their tag line was "KARA in Santa Clara". It was usually voiced by Kim Vestal, who also voiced AM Drive. (I spent a bit of time one day doing an informational interview with Bob Kieve, around 1985, and that big, honkin' automation system was still running in the next room over from the conference room where we chatted.) Later they modernized the music and eliminated the automation, at least in the daytime hours.
And here's an irony: in that SoundCloud aircheck that @sf1pd posted, the jock was Michael McGolly (sp?). He currently reports traffic overnights on KCBS (and KNX). And who's their PM Drive traffic reporter? Yup, that very same Kim Vestal.
Glad everyone is enjoying talking about KARA-FM. I remember listening to them up unti their demise.
I worked at KDON-FM (and sometimes the associated AM, which used KDON, KLCZ and KZXR when I was there) in the mid to late 80s, a few years after they had gone "live and local." In the 70s and early 80s, the AM was live and the FM used the TM Stereo Rock format, with everything voiced by the late John Borders (I think he was from Texas) - as a kid, I never understood how the DJ was able to work 24 hours a day. Sometimes they would simulcast the automation in overnights on the AM. Then around 1980 or1981 I used to pick up KREO (K-93 FM) in Healdsburg/Santa Rosa from my bedroom in Monterey. They also ran TM Stereo Rock and I would often hear the exact same rotations within the same week as KDON but at different times. At that point I knew the same DJ couldn't be moonlighting 24/7 for TWO stations that were a couple of hundred miles apart, so I figured out that it had to be a service.
It was pretty dry and although it was a CHR format, it tended to take the place of an A/C and AOR station as well with a pretty liberal format for Top 40.
Here is a demo for the format. If you search for "TM Stereo Rock" there are a few audio examples of the format and how it worked.
Well, to be fair, back then KARA was essentially a traditional AC station that had a slightly wider Gold playlist. So your currents and recurrents were probably being played every few hours,with the rest of the songs probably having a rotation of every one to two days.