Historic Folios

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Historic Folios

KPFA, Berkeley KPFK, Los Angeles WBAI, New York CIty
September 1963 October 1962 January 1960
August 1973 July 1964 March 1972
  January 1968 May 1972
  April 1968  
  January 1969  
  February 1969  
  June 1974  

The goal of the Folio Preservation and Digitization Project is to make historic station program guides available to the public online, for research and other purposes.

The Folios, dating back to 1949, not only contextualize our audio collection, but they give a glimpse into the cultural, political and social concerns of their time.

For the pilot stage of the project, we scanned eight complete Folio issues (transforming them into page-by-page graphic images), and processed seven through optical character recognition software (OCR), enabling users to search within the document by keyword. Now all the folios we have are made available through the Internet Archive and can be found here http://archive.org/details/pacifica. Through the Internet Archive, the Folios can be viewed in many different formats, including page-by-page graphical images, as though you were flipping through the actual folio; plain-text versions, and PDFs.

KPFA, Berkeley

September 1963

This issue features a cover photo taken by Ernest Lowe of farm workers' children in Tulare County. Inside: Speech by Timothy Leary, children's programs, interview with Jack Lemmon, poetry reading by Theodore Roethke, jazz with Phil Elwood, commentary by Marshall Windmiller and Eastern philosophy with Alan Watts.

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August 1973

The Watergate issue. Programs featured include the radio play Embers by Samuel Beckett (with Leonard Nimoy performing), an interview with poet Maya Angelou, a reading by author Ishmael Reed and a lecture by anthropologist Dr. Margaret Mead.

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KPFK, Los Angeles

October 1962

The programming schedule in this folio catches the tail-end of the Cuban Missile Crises, but KPFK has been following the Soviet press as a regular program as is seen in the understated listing "Soviet Press and Periodicals": Report and interpretation by William Mandel. The featured program of this folio is the radio drama "The Ascent of F6" by poets W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood (with Isherwood in the lead role). Other programs of note include "A Day for Dylan" commemorating the 9th anniversary of the death of Dylan Thomas, "A Dialogue on Existential Psychology" between Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May and William Alansan, and a historical program on "The Salton Sea Disaster."

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July 1964

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January 1968

January 1968 started what was to become the most significant and tumultuous year in modern history. Here the Pacifica program guide documents what was planned in advance for the month's programs. We surmise changes were made to the program schedule as world events unfolded such as the January 31 Tet offensive in Vietnam. Included are photographs by William J. Warren, poetry by William J. Margolis, and Art by Avati. Notable programs include: The Room, by Harold Pinter, Zen poems read by eastern philosopher, Alan Watts, Ogden Nash reading his poetry; a radio documentary on Black Power origins and a speech by John Kenneth Galbraith.

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April 1968

Who knows what was really on the air during the week of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination? The April 1968 folio, entitled "Open your ears and say aaah!" began with a plug of that very week supposed to feature Carl Reiner, Peter Sellers, Carol Channing, James Baldwin, and Dick Van Dyke among other notables. Starting April 8th and running till the 30th, there are general programs of interest like operatic productions of Wagner's Tannhauser, Hadyn's L' Infedelta Delusa, and Rossini's Moses, Ravi Shankar interviewed by William Malloch, a rebroadcast of a 1964 BBC program "The Beatles Speak," a lecture by Dr. Lewish Yablonksy on "The Hippies in America," and an interview with Jeannette Rankin. The folio itself has an essay in memory of "Cuisine Bourgeoisie" host Sasha Shor by Sophie Stein and "KPFK SOUND '68 a prospectus for growth" which is an explanation of the different departments of KPFK along with the '68 KPFK budget ($16,200 for folio production).

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January 1969

Dedicated to the work of Bertold Brecht, this issue includes program descriptions, poems by Leonard Browne, an essay by Peter Bergren and the collage artwork of Jeanne Morgan. Other programs of note are talks by Krishnamurti and Thich Nhat Hanh.

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February 1969

This issue features art by Marcia Dalva, an editorial by journalist Chris Koch entitled KPFK & the Counter-Culture Countdown, and program listings that include Kenneth Rexroth on books, Vietnam: A Voice from the Villages, Black Poets II and La Raza Nueva with Montezuma Esparsa.

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June 1974

Cover art by Seymore Chwast. Featured programs: Fiesta Mexicana folk music festival, The Threat at Harvest (a documentary about the Coachella Valley farm workers), and a talk by Murray Bookchin on the energy crisis.

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WBAI, New York City

January 1960

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March 1972

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May 1972

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The Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation & Access Project is funded (in part) by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, grants from The Ford Foundation, The Pacifica Foundation, supporters of the Pacifica Radio Archives, members of the Adopt-a-Tape program, and listeners to Pacifica Radio Stations, KPFA, KPFK, KPFT, WBAI, WPFW.

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