In Brief
The earliest days of what would become KPFT are recorded only in hard-to-access archives and fragments of documents that escaped the ravages of time. Many of the key players from that period have since passed away and so the oral history of the station is mostly lost, except in secondhand retellings.
The conventional story, summarized, is that
" KPFT was born in Houston about 50 years ago. In the late 1960s, Houston was still behind the times, meaning certain stories were ignored by the media and the ruling classes.
Our city’s first woman who was black had been elected to the school board. And even though there was pressure for desegregation and equal rights — the local papers, television, and radio declined to cover her victory.
Out of a first amendment urge, “two young, disillusioned journalists” started KPFT — Larry Lee from the Associated Press and Don Gardner from the Houston Post."
And that is true, but it excludes much effort, encouragement, frustration, and wheeling and dealing that led up to the launch of KPFT.
Records in care of this project from that era connect Houston and Austin in several important ways. Later work may delve more deeply into the backgrounds of Larry Lee and Don Gardner, and their connections to the Austin area, but for now, two men in that city provided important moral and practical support during the earliest years of KPFT.
In the interest of privacy any addresses for private residences have been redacted. Otherwise, the letters are transcribed faithfully.
1967 - Ronnie Dugger
The earliest records available to this project date from March, 1967 and reveal a few names not commonly mentioned when the foundation of Pacifica Radio in Houston is discussed.
This first letter is itself a reply to an earlier missive that is thus far undiscovered among the files available to this writer, and is from WBAI general manager Frank Millspaugh Jr., to Ronnie Dugger.
27th March 1967
Mr. Ronnie Dugger
<REDACTED>
<REDACTED>
Dear Mr. Dugger:
I received your inquiry today and am forwarding it to the office of the President of the Pacifica Foundation, Mr. Lloyd M. Smith, at 633 South Shatto Place, Los Angeles, California, 90005.
I personally am much pleased to learn of your interest in beginning a Pacifica Station in Houston. Roughly, I would estimate that it would take about $200,000 to begin a station, and about $225,000 per year to operate it. However, these figures can vary considerably depending on the location. Each Pacifica Station has free access to the program of all the others. A New Station would probably depend very heavily on the more established ones for programs at first, thus keeping its Program costs to a minimum.
While you await more precise information from Mr. Smith, I suggest that you determine whether there are many unassisgned FM channels in the Houston area. This would Probably be an "educational" channel.
I hope that this will be the first in a long and productive exchange of correspondence.
Yours Sincerely,
Frank A Millspaugh, Jr.,
General Manager
Ronnie Dugger was the founding editor of The Texas Observer and its' publisher for 40 years. He is a noted journalist, activist, and Texan.
A reply from Mr. Dugger soon followed:
April, 1, 1967
Mr. Frank A. Millspaugh, Jr.
General Manager
WBAI-FM (Pacifica)
30 East 39th St.
New York, New York 10016Dear Mr. Millspaugh,
Thank you for your letter of March, 27.
Two professional men whom I trust are proceeding to make the necessary inquiries as to Houston. One of them, who worked with Pacifica on the coast and is a dedicated educational radio-TV man, is running the library materials on the situation in Houston, and getting up what can be got up as to a budget. The other, a brilliant working journalist in Houston, equally dedicated, is making, and having made, inquiries in Houston as to the available bands. I gather from our preliminary information that they would much prefer an AM channel for the sake of listenership. This of course would cost more than the sum you mention for an FM channel; they will be inquiring as to the FM option, too. We of course have no-advertising that is standard with Pacifica as our first premise. In our initial inquiries, (which the are proceeding with; I am heavily and totally committed to a book on Johnson from Texas, and so they must do the labor), they are keeping me out of it. We fear that either might prejudice the purchase price if a channel can be got. We could use some advice on at what point it is judicious to introduce the requisite candor, which we fully intend, about our plans. Of course, we propose, whenever we deal with the F.C.C, full disclosure of all aspects of our project.
I am sending a copy of this to Mr. Lloyd M. Smith
Ronnie Dugger
Mr. Lloyd M. Smith
633 South Shatto Place
Los Angeles, California 90005P.S. I shall probably be in New York City early in May. If it appeared to be absolutely necessary, I could go to California, but I very much prefer not to do so until, at the earliest, later this year, because of the circumstances of my work.
R.D.
This letter sheds light on the earliest aims of the KPFT founders, especially an early affinity for an AM band station, which ultimately did not happen.
Although the men in Dugger's letter go un-named, it seems almost certain that he refers to Larry Lee and Don Gardner.
Unfortunately, the records available shed no further light on Mr. Dugger's affiliation or involvement in KPFT after this early planning stage. Should additional material surface this article will be revised accordingly.
1967 - Deck Yoes
Biographical information on Mr. Yoes is sparse, amounting to a small hand full of academic records and Texas Observer articles, but he did serve on the KPFT Board Of Directors in 1970, as well as contributed material to the station's early news program Life On Earth.
Screenshots courtesy The Texas Observer archives for March, 1970 and December, 1979.
As the following letter shows, he was also a dear friend of Larry Lee, and while not exactly wildly enthusiastic about a Pacifica station in Houston, was willing to put his shoulder to the wheel for his friends.
Austin, Texas
July 30, 1967Dear Larry:
It's all wrong, you dropping out of this thing. You are the man who should be at the middle of it, not an old has-been like R.D. or an old never-been like me. Don't you see, man? If I were the kind of person to organized something like this it would have been done already. I've been back here five f---ing years and haven't even finished a lousy thesis yet. If you really want to see this thing take root and actually happen, you should be organizing it.
I'll tell you a little secret. You probably guessed it, already, anyhow. I am not all that interested in a Pacifica station in Houston or elsewhere. It is, as I think I remarked in a previous memo, a twice-told tale for me. I know what's involved in it. It was great when I was twenty-five, a refugee from authoritarianism who knew only that he did not want to collaborate with mindlessness any more. Now that I'm ten years older, the idea of free radio still looks very good but I just don't have the energy; I know too much about how it works and why it is the way it happens to be.
The only reason I got excited about doing the thing in Houston was that you and R.D. were interested in it. If Ronnie is going to play hard-to-get and if you can't work with it, I literally don't know how there could be any satisfaction in it for me. I could do it, like a duty, but that' s what I've done all my life, and I am in imminent danger of ending my life having done nothing about the other things that are in me and me alone. There are lots of people around who can do some duty or other, but there is only one Deck Yoes, Jr., and there is only one Larry Lee, and their first concern is to foster what is unique about their existence. Does this make sense? Probably not; at any rate, I am not at all enthusiastic about launching yet another effort at doing good. If it ain't got that swing, it ain't worth it. And without you and R.D., it ain' t got that swing.
That's what's wrong with the Observer, incidentally. I could not agree with you more. Greg Olds may be a fine fellow, a competent journalist and editor, and dedicated to the principle (see how I automaticaly type principal now, after a year in the S. D. of Ed.? ) of the Observer, but he is not fired with excitement or enjoying the hell out of the paper, or if he is he’s first-rate at not letting his enthusiasm show in print.
Incidentally, that excitement is often missing from the Pacifica stations, too. After all, they have been going now for nearly twenty years (in Berkeley, at least) and they are still right where they were. They
haven't grown. It hasn't caught on. It's still a thrill for the people who come in contact with the idea for the first time, but for the rest, it's a duty. Naturally, it shows.A cardinal principle (got it that time! ) in life, I find, is that precise thing: it shows. It always shows, and a big part of maturing is learning where to look and when to look for the telltale bits of expressive
behavior or expressive form which reveal whether or not someone or some institution is authentic and vital or fake and dead. Pacifica is not dead, but it appears to have progressive atrophy in some spots, and perhaps cancer in others. State Departments of Education are frankly ossified, and happy about it. What about press syndicates? The Observer appears to be in decline. Am I right?Well, why not? Institutions, like men, die. Some live longer than others (by conserving their energy). The brilliant, spectacular ones often burn out rather quickly.
Now Pacifica did not become cancerous and atrophied without help. Plenty of forces have converged on this simple, healthy, delightfully UnAmerican idea of a subscription-supported broadcasting service with freedom to express individual viewpoints.
Biggest single item: the fact that while anyone with the money can set up a printing press, only a selected number of persons can operate broadcasting stations.
That's banal, you say. I quite agree. But that's at the root of it. Scarcity of a natural resource leads to regulation or control by some power or other. Read the history of the development of broadcasting
and you will see how the Federal Government acquired the power it has over the assignment of frequencies. Perhaps someday, through some new technical development, this may change, and a way be found to increase the effective spectrum to the point of practical infinitude. Or, also perhaps, new forms of social or political organization will alter the way audio and video productions are disseminated. (The record industry is an example -- you can put a great deal more on a record than you can on the air.) But for now, the Federal Government, and through it all the principalities and powers
which attain their ends partly or mainly through governmental action, holds the power of life or death over every broadcast licensee.Pacifica was literally in limbo for years. The Berkeley station operated until 1962 on a Construction Permit! That meant that the F.C.C. could theoretically have put them off the air at any time after a hearing for cause and subsequent thirty days notice. Repeatedly, hostile groups such as the Marin County Deputy Sheriffs' Posse, the Birchers, etc., tried to “get” KPFA' s licence. Several times it looked like they might succeed. Repeatedly, the manager was put into the position of being responsible for something done by a staff member, whom he trusted, about which he literally knew nothing and could not have exercised control had he known.
There were so many times when things were said which gave the station a scare that the Board of Directors finally decided, in 1961, that the mode of control being exercised was simply inadequate to the task. A station manager was not sufficient safeguard. There were threats from the Congress (read the material at the Senate Internal Security hearings on Pacifica) to pressure the F.C.C. to revoke the Pacifica C.P. 's and licenses.
The Board of Directors crumbled. They chose to place survival of the station above insistence upon freedom of expression. They assumed control.
That is a nutshell; of course, it could be argued that what happened was not as simple as that, but underneath the twisting and turning of logic and rationalization that's really it. So Pacifica, Larry, is not
as free as it likes to make out, and not nearly as free as a newspaper can be.The manager of a Pacifica station is not exactly a puppet of the Board of Directors, but he is in no sense as free as the editor of the Observer. They have him by the balls. And the F.C.C. has the Board by the
balls. And the Congress has the F.C.C. by the balls. The only check upon the editor of the Observer is the libel laws, his own courage and pertinacity, and the cost of operations.I have a strong hunch that a new generation is commng into being which will support far more freedom of expression than we have so far seen in America. You mention the new journalism. The Rag. The L.A. Free Press. You will have noticed, in the KPFK Folio, the hints that the station could, by appealing more to this younger group, become fantastically popular and very relevant. But to do so it would have to be able to say shit if it had a mouth full of same. And the fear that the younger staff members of the
station were, metaphorically speaking, about to do this was behind the action of the Board in the absurd controversy over the cancellation of the Pleasure Faire.You see, under the rules, a radio station cannot be permitted to be “terrible, but growing" in any relevant way. It can be as terrible as it likes in matters of taste and excessive commercially as it pleases, but it cannot enjoy the luxury of just being wrong.
If you get the impression from all this that I am cynical and not fully commited to what we are trying to do, you would be right... except that if you and R.D. were fully commited I would feel differently. I'm cyncial but prepared to tackle anything if people I respect feel likewise. On my own account, I am, as I have been all my life, withdrawing, analytical, and inclined to contemplation rather than action.
So there you have it. Now please let me hear from you, before you leave the country, or move to New York. My address is now <REDACTED>. There's a bunk for you any time you're passing through and need one. Maybe a beer, too.
Best Regards,
Deck Yoes, Jr.
Concluding Thoughts
The origin story of KPFT has been told many times, in many venues, and has, for the most part, featured the KKK bombings of the station's transmitters as a foundational experience. That certainly deserves to be remembered and shared, but the story of KPFT began years before it was temporarily silenced in acts of violence.
It is the hope of this author that these brief scribblings bring to light more of the rich history of the station from its' earliest days.
As always, comments, corrections, and commentary are welcome and will be added to the documentary history posted here. Please comment or Contact Us if you would like to contribute.
