Introducing the Hall of Fame class of 2015
The 10th Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame inductions will take place Saturday at the Basque Cultural Center in South San Francisco, with nine inductees to be enshrined. Terry McGovern will MC the program, which is produced by the California Historical Radio Society (CHRS) and hosted by the Broadcast Legends. The induction luncheon is open to the public. Go to www.broadcastlegends.com.
Here are sketches of the class of 2015: Sports: John Madden is famous as the Oakland Raiders’ greatest coach and a commentator on TV, most famously on “Monday Night Football.” But in the Bay Area, he’s been a fixture on the radio for over 20 years. His morning sports commentaries are a popular feature on KCBS. He began doing on-air chats with Gene Nelson on KSFO in 1982. When Nelson retired in 1994, Madden moved to KNBR, working with Frank Dill and, later, Steve McPartlin. On KCBS since 1997, Madden has partnered with anchors Al Hart and Stan Bunger. Program host: Dusty Street is a native San Franciscan (and, yes, that’s her real name) who was one of the “chick engineers” who ran the control board and turntables at KMPX-FM, one of the first free-form stations in the country, in 1967. After a staff strike and a move to KSAN, which didn’t employ engineers, she became a star DJ with a love of the blues. She left KSAN in the mid-’70s and worked at KTIM-FM in Marin before departing for Los Angeles. Her free-form show, “Fly Low,” is on the Flying Eye Radio Network. Program host: Lissa Kreisler, a native of New York, grew up in San Jose and majored in journalism at San Jose State. She began in radio as a newscaster on KLOK’s morning show. When the station switched to a Spanish language format in 1988, Kreisler moved to KBAY, again delivering news in the morning. She would become host of the morning show and, in 2005, program director Dana Jang teamed her with Sam Van Zandt. KBAY consistently has topped the San Jose ratings. Pioneer: Gil Haar is the newscaster known for his booming sign-off, “That’s the news. So now you know!” Before the news, he was a DJ and was on the Bay Area’s first Top 40 station, KOBY, in 1958 until it was sold in 1960. In Fresno, he became, he says, a “newsman and talk jockey.” From 1966 to 1975, he was news director on KNEW. He had the same title at KNAI, an all-news FM experiment that would become KYUU in 1977. He stayed until 1988, then did newscasts on KFRC, on and off, until “they retired me” in 2001. Pioneer: Elma Greer was famously known as “Legs” in the ’60s and ’70s, when such nicknames could be bestowed on women. She was the music librarian at KSFO in its golden age and was credited with helping forge the sound of that station. She guided a generation of college kids (including a future radio columnist) through “Records at Random,” a weekend guest-DJ show featuring awestruck San Francisco State broadcasting students. She also was the country music editor of the San Francisco-based radio industry magazine, the Gavin Report. News: Mike Colgan, possessed of a quintessential newscaster’s voice, full throated and rumbling with import, was first heard, locally, on the Top 40 powerhouse, KFRC (“The Big 6-10”), where he reported and delivered the news from 1975 to 1988. He then joined KCBS and covered some of the top stories of recent years, including Dan White’s murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Colgan, who was raised in San Francisco, now reports out of KCBS’ Silicon Valley bureau. Specialty: At KSFO, the late Peter Scott maintained a lower profile than the likes of Don Sherwood, Al Collins, Dan Sorkin, Jim Lange and Terry McGovern, but, McGovern says, “He was brilliant.” Born in Brooklyn, he left KSJO in San Jose to join KSFO as a production assistant in 1965, when the station ruled the market, and rose to become program director Al Newman’s right-hand man and, in 1970, PD himself, while having his own show on weekends. Scott later operated the Fat Cat Studio in San Francisco, voicing and producing commercials. Engineer: The late Ken Nielsen says fellow engineer Bill Ruck was instrumental in helping put the first FM radio station west of the Mississippi on the air, in 1941. It was KALW, licensed to the S.F. Unified School District. Studios were built at Samuel Gompers Trades School, where Nielsen taught engineering classes. Nielsen also persuaded the SFUSD to get into a new industry — television — and the school district acquired equipment and offered TV engineering instruction. After school hours, the equipment was used by a fledgling station: KQED. Nielsen taught classes and engineered at KALW until he retired in 1975. Executive: Harvey Stone was an in-house favorite at the CHRS for induction, as he was the general manager at KBLX who signed off on essentially giving the organization rentfree use of the station’s Art Deco building in Berkeley in 2006. The arrangement ended after Entercom acquired KBLX in 2012 and let Stone go. Stone had managed KBLX for 31 years. Its “Quiet Storm” format of pop, R&B and jazz was credited with inspiring the smooth jazz format. But soon after the sale, the “Storm” was over. R.I.P.: Arthur Finger, better known as Art Finley and as “Mayor Art” when he hosted a children’s show on KRON-TV from 1959 to 1966, died on Aug. 7 in Vancouver, British Columbia, of an apparent heart attack. Mr. Finger, who was 88, also worked on radio, hosting a talk show on KCBS. A full obituary ran in The Chronicle on Aug. 10 … Shana LiVigni, who was the first female DJ on former Top 40 powerhouse KFRC, died of a heart attack in late July, just weeks after moving from Southern California to Michigan to be closer to family. She was 62. Born Margaret Reichl in North Carolina, she came to San Francisco in 1974 from a station in Wichita. KFRC program director Michael Spears renamed her “Shana.” After two years, she moved to sister station KHJ in Los Angeles as its first woman DJ and worked on radio until 2005. Ms. LiVigni taught broadcasting, did voice work and wrote for an industry magazine. Just a week before her death, she was in touch with Boss Boss Radio about doing a shift on the online station.