Urban Unrest

30 August 2007 | Pacifica | Ernesto Aguilar

This is part two of KPFT co-founder Ray Hill’s thoughts on KPFT’s earliest days. You are encouraged to come by KPFT (419 Lovett, Houston, 77006) to pick up your own copies of the KPFT Voice, in which this appeared, to distribute. Enjoy.

Wherefore KPFT?
A history and remembrance of KPFT in its earliest years: Part 2

By: Ray Hill

Ray Hill, programmer of the “Prison Show”, (airing Friday nights from 9-11 pm), provides the second in his series on the origins and direction of KPFT.

Last time I began the story of pulling together a ragged crew of political misfits to press for an idea whose time had not yet come but we pressed on anyway. We told others that they were missing so much with the media they had and for the most part they humored us more than saw our dream of a Pacifica radio station in Houston.

1970 was a different time. FM frequencies were available for the asking, especially down in the non-commercial part of the dial. We secured 90.1 and celebrated the day the construction permit came in the mail. Frank Martin was found. He was a real radio engineer who knew what Pacifica meant and dreamed of the trouble we could stir up with a station like that in Houston. We were a strange set of sound revolutionaries seeking a way to get our ideas and voices into the broadcast air. Soon there were musicians. They too had dreams but no way to get heard in commercial media or the available Christian and University radio stations. All together we were a good sized and determined crowd. We had meetings with music sometimes and concerts with speeches sometimes. We were a kind of gypsy/hippy evangelist movement to build a radio station (NOTE: at that time we blended into the stereotypes of the era, while it sounds strange now, then we did not seem too different)

There were “underground radio stations” trying to create a market with alternative thinkers and music but that was not working economically. One of them, KFMK let us use their studio and frequency to broadcast what we were talking about when we said we were building a different radio voice. I did my first KPFT radio show in their studio. It was in the attic space atop the Herman Professional Building. After going as high as we could on the elevator, we then took the stairs and had to climb a ladder to where the studios were a space without air conditioning. Sweating and doing radical radio. Oh how wonderful it seemed at the time.

Soon we were inside the old meeting space for Lone Star Number One Oddfellows Lodge building out our studios. They had changed name of the building after being bought by an insurance company but I had done degree work in that space when I was Grand Chief Ruler of the Junior Oddfellows Lodge of Texas. So I felt right at home but not for long.

We built our studios downtown and our transmitter at the base of a tower in a field off Clark Road in North Houston. We got the clearance to test our broadcast chain before officially going on air. There were several alternatives in sound tones or white air we could push into the atmosphere to test the signal but we chose to send Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles out for three days and nights to announce our coming alive in the radio darkness of this broadcast market.

Larry Lee, station manager, operating his own board started our broadcast life with a talk show asking people to call in and tell us what they wanted us to do with the station now that it was a reality. He did not get many calls from the listening public but the insiders rushed out of the station to find phones to use in an effort to help him use the time. (Hmmmm . . . Doesn’t that sound a lot like The Managers Report still?) We had put a lot of thought into how we were going to use the station and we had a rabble of volunteers who wanted to do shows but we did not have enough to use the full 24 hour broadcast day.

Initially none of us had a polished on air sound nor were we always prepared to fill our time with material. KPFT was seriously amateur radio.

I had a previous engagement to go to prison about that time expecting to stay for the next 160 years but with the right unit assignment and the best radio available in commissary I could keep my sanity in a strange place by listening to KPFT.

I read about the first bombing of the transmitter and was listening when the second bomb reduced the broadcast signal to white noise. KKK member/organizer Louis Beam was caught on his way to California to silence other Pacifica Stations. They found explosives and maps in his car that he planned to use finding and blowing-up KPFK’s transmitter. He was sentenced to 10 years of federal time for that and I discharged my 160 (reduced to and got out before he did. He is still around. I saw him not long ago at Almeda Mall near a Christian bookstore.

Next time: getting out and doing radio, Freedom is always worth the struggle.

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