KcprHistoryKenLerch1968-69

Ken Lerch remembers KCPR, 1968-1969

I've been asked to write down remembrances from the early days of the KCPR.

I wish I had more information about how the station actually started but I was just a 3rd year, long-haired architecture student in 1968 who found a notice that a bunch of engineers were going to start a little campus radio station and were looking for people who knew something about music to be DJs. I went over to the journalism building and confirmed the story and was told that I would have to go to San Francisco, study and pass a test to get a federal 3rd class license before I could go on the air, all of which I did. So this isn't so much a description of how it all started as much as a portrait of the times.

There were others at the station that did more folkie type of things. They knew even less about radio than I did. We all had absolute freedom since there was no such thing as a music director, or if there was, I wasn't aware of it. The folkies brought their friends into the studio and sat around the mike and played guitars. I was usually always alone late at night. I once got intensely hungry, likely from having earlier ingested something that made me hungry and said on the air that whoever was the first to bring me a pepperoni pizza, I would let them stay with me in the studio for the rest of the program. Two nice guys from the dorm showed up about 40 minutes later.

I was there from the beginning, somewhere around the Fall of 1968 and went to the end of the term in 1969 when I left town to work and head off to Italy for a year. It was a great few months.

Ken Lerch