Remembering KGO’s Jim Dunbar
• San Francisco radio icon Jim Dunbar, who reigned for nearly four decades on KGO 810 and was a pioneer of what we now know as News-Talk radio, died on Monday, April 22 due to the infirmities of old age, as reported by his daughter, Brooke Dunbar. He was 89. According to a terrific story in the San Francisco Chronicle, Dunbar was the first San Francisco radio personality to be inducted into the Radio Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1999. That’s Dunbar pictured on March 10, 1988, celebrating his 25th year on KGO.
“Jim Dunbar is in both the local and national radio halls of fame for good reason,” said Ben Fong-Torres, a Bay Area radio historian and contributor to The Chronicle. “He changed the Bay Area radio landscape by helping turn KGO from an also-ran into the greatest powerhouse on the dial, with a 30-year run at the top of the ratings.”
Dunbar’s lengthy commercial radio career started in 1956 at WDSU/New Orleans, as both station manager and disc jockey playing jazz records. On-air, he notably replaced Dick Van Dyke, who had been lured away to Broadway. It was in New Orleans that he met and married Beth Monroe — a marriage that would last 60 years. Later, while working at WLS/Chicago, Dunbar found a job at KGO in San Francisco, in hopes that Beth would stop complaining about the Chicago weather. “I told my wife we’ll be here for a year and then we’ll be gone,” he recalled in an interview with The Chronicle upon his retirement in 2000. “When I came out here KGO was in terrible trouble. It had tried every format from German bund music to bird calls.”
Dunbar added, “There were stations doing news and stations doing talk, but nobody put it together quite the way that we did.” KGO became so successful that the station later expressed regret that it did not copyright the slogan “NewsTalk.” Dunbar’s daughter Brooke said, “Dad took that station from dead last to No. 1 for 25 consecutive years. I don’t know anyone else who has that kind of record.”
After his retirement in 2000, Dunbar gave his alarm clock to his daughter and never got up again before 8:30 in the morning. Dunbar is survived by Beth, his wife of 60 years, daughter Brooke and son James of New York City. Services are pending. [Photo credit: Scott Sommerdorf / The Chronicle]
