If you’re lucky and you’re a packrat (archivist to some of you), sometimes it’s possible to go time traveling and land somewhere you haven’t been before. Or maybe you have but you forgot – or maybe you never left and missed it the first time around.
It’s easy to pick L.A, or San Francisco or Boston or New York. But those little towns – rural America, the places people pass through on their way to someplace else. Those little towns where buying a used car or taking your clothes to the dry cleaner were familiar rituals because you knew the people who ran those places and most likely you lived next door to them.
It’s the radio that added color to the picture – gives it voice, takes you on a sonic excursion – sets your brain on autopilot and lets you bathe in its faded wonder.
Long before Corporate Radio arrived and turned everything into a stew of nondescript and ambivalent mush there were little stations – stations that stayed on the air only in the daytime – stations where the studio opened up to an interstate and announcers sounded like the locals. Stations where everybody got their start and school dances and football games were major events.
Santa Rosa, California was one of those little towns at one time – north of San Francisco, neighboring Napa, Sonoma and Petaluma. Smack in the middle of Highway 101 and wine country. It’s grown since 1968 – it’s pricey – you wouldn’t consider it one of those bucolic burgs anymore when the population struggled to hit 50,000 – it’s lost its rural edge, even thought it tries to hold on, mostly for “old times sake”. And listening to this 3 hour slice of KSRO bears no resemblance to what it sounds or even looks like in 2025.
Like everything that grows up – people lose their innocence and towns do the same – they become worldly and shed old skin. They tend to not look back.
For the next three hours it’s a deep dive into Santa Rose – right in the middle of Primary season for the 1968 Presidential election as well as scores of local elections, all slated to take place a week after this broadcast aired.
It was a Saturday, it was a heatwave in Santa Rosa and it was lunch hour.
Grab a sandwich and Press Play.
