I forgot the raccoons

I forgot the raccoons. My upstairs room in the house had a skylight and on my days off when I tried to have two normal days and nights like the rest of the world, I'd got to bed early and the two that would cavort in my skylight to warm themselves in the early morning sun would wake me up with their scratching and fooling around. I didn't hear them on the days I slept until noon. There was also deer in yard of the school just below our house that would stare at me as I rode my bike home at midnight.

And the Gilroy Radio Station at 3:00 am:

Gilroy Remembers Zany Radio Station With Co-founder's Death

Jun 1, 2007
 By

Gilroy - With the death of Laura Ellen Hopper, co-founder of Gilroy's cultish country station KFAT and its later Watsonville successor KPIG, Gilroyans are tuning their memories to a time when song and talk that defied convention issued from a tiny office on Monterey Street.

Hopper died Monday, a mere two weeks after the 57-year-old woman was diagnosed with cancer. Thursday, lifelong Gilroy resident Phil Lombardo was listening to KPIG tributes to the low-key DJ whose business savvy propelled KPIG to commercial success - success that eluded KFAT, its free-form Gilroy predecessor. Lombardo recalled the station's Gilroy days fondly.

"It was off-the-wall," said Lombardo, turning down his radio. "The sort of thing the FCC would look down on. Characters you wouldn't hear on any other radio station. People that normally wouldn't have gotten any recognition came to KFAT radio. It was a kick in the butt."

When the station landed in Gilroy in 1975, it replaced the lowest-powered radio station in North America - "a Gilroy station you couldn't get in Gilroy," former DJ Gordy Broshear once said, according to KFAT archivist Barry Porter. Originally, KFAT broadcast 20-minute songsets, unknown country singers and cornball classics such as Utah Phillips' "Moose Turd Pie" from an office above the downtown Vacuum Center, proudly proclaiming its place in "the Garlic Capital of the World," Porter said.

"KFAT put Gilroy on the map," said Porter. "That and garlic was Gilroy's claim to fame."

A few blocks from KFAT's first home, at Porcella's Musical Instruments and Accessories, owner Dave Porcella remembered KFAT's outlaw spirit. Between country-western, zydeco and blues, KFAT DJs played farcical tracks, sometimes with blue language that furrowed more conservative brows. Whiskey and brawling were just part of the fun, added Porcella, recalling some KFAT DJs who passed out, drunk, on top of their turntables. Porcella still owns a KFAT T-shirt, and a set of speakers emblazoned with a KFAT sticker.

Now, as listeners mourn Hopper across the Bay Area, Lombardo is awash with KFAT memories, his ear glued to the station. Porcella, too, is nostalgic.

"It meant a lot, and when they closed up, it was like a big part of Gilroy -" Porcella paused. "The soul had left."