Look Who’s Turning 50…
Around this time over the last decade or so, I’ve been prone to blogging about my unlikely broadcasting career and how it’s lasted so much longer than I (or any member of my family or friendship group) expected it to. This year, to mark my 24th season helming the KUIC Morning Show, I thought it might be fun to look at the history of the actual station, rather than a small component of it (me). It turns out KUIC has been providing music, entertainment and local information to the space between Sacramento and San Francisco for over 50 years. According to available online information, 95.3 KUIC (we’ve since dropped the “.”) was originally put on the air in 1970, as KVFS. That original call-sign represented the service area of Vacaville, Fairfield, and Suisun City (the “VFS”), and the station’s studio was situated in a mobile home in rural Vacaville.
Then, in 1973, the station was sold to another broadcast company and became the 95-3 KUIC FM we all know today. The KUIC Studios have moved around a lot, from the second story of the Triangle Building in Vacaville, to the California Hawaii Building, to a two-story building on East Main Street (where I started…”KUIC Plaza”) to our current building near the corner of Davis and Mason Streets near Old Town Vacaville. The early music formats were “often quite varied,” according to online sources, “often selected by the current disc-jockeys themselves.” One thing that hasn’t changed in 50+ years is what one online source describes as the stations’ “very local down-home flavor.” As I begin this 25th year of hosting The KUIC Morning Show – now christened “Hometown Mornings” – I am STILL amazed, grateful and slightly perplexed that I have been fortunate enough to represent The Morning Show at this radio station for almost half of its existence. And while I’m not anywhere near the longest-tenured KUIC employee, I often feel like the luckiest 🙂
