Though I worked as a volunteer at the time of both bombings, I never visited the remote transmitter site either before or after the bombing. The KPFT studios were then in the Atlanta Life Insurance Building at 618 Prairie (corner of Louisiana and Prairie).
I saw photos from both bombing incidents at the time and heard more than a little discussion at the station about the incident from those visiting the site, but anything I can relate is inherently second hand.
Even so, my recollection is that the first time the transmitter was bombed, someone apparently broke into the small building (shack) housing the transmitter at the antenna site and used a well placed charge to destroy the transmitter. As I recall, someone commented that the charge was sufficient to accomplish the total destruction of the transmitter, without damaging the overhead lightbulb lighting the building, which seemed to show a fair amount of sophistication with explosives.
After the first bombing, a concrete bunker was constructed to house the transmitter. Again, from what I recall based upon what I was told at the time, the perpetrator placed a charge on top of the bunker beneath some sandbags to direct the charge. The second blast caused the collapse of the bunker roof onto the transmitter, crushing it.
*
I think that the contributor who recalled the second reopening as without much fanfare has the reopening incidents reversed, but I will certainly confess that my memory is cloudy and might be failing me. My recollection is that it was the second time that Pacifica was bombed that the station's reopening attracted much more widespread national media attention.
I ought to have a much clearer memory, as I was given the honor of turning the transmitter on for this grand re-opening. I was one of the teens who worked the afternoon program and held an F.C.C. Third Class Radio Telephone License at age 14. I had also transitioned to being the "news engineer", which meant that I handled the studio mike levels, cued and played the news audio tapes from interviews and otherwise handled the studio and transmitter controls during the one hour evening news program "Life on Earth."
I think that the described interview on Dick Cavett was after the first bombing. My recollection was that the second station reopening was covered live on the Dick Cavett Show. I could be wrong about either of these.
Some of my recollection of the reopening is also probably somewhat constrained because I believe that I continued to handle the studio transmitter controls after the station went back on the air, as the main activities of the reopening event and party were underway in the much larger work area at the front of the KPFT offices. Thus, I heard what was going on, but didn't see it, and my ten seconds of fame was then followed by an hour or more of working, but relative obscurity.
*
The recollections of those who remember hearing the Beatles "Here Comes the Sun" with some frequency may be mixing recollections. That song was also the theme song played at the introduction of an afternoon radio program called "The Kids Call This Stuff Music," which ran from 4 PM to 5 PM each weekday afternoon. That program, like most was volunteer staffed by several junior high school aged children, a couple of whom were children of donors or members of the advisory board, etc.
