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Jim Dunbar Obituary

Jim Dunbar attended Fordson High School in Dearborn, MI. View the obituary, post a memory, or share a photo about Jim Dunbar.

Graduation Year Class of 1948
Date of Passing Apr 23, 2019
About Jim Dunbar, pioneer in SF newstalk radio, dies at 89

James H. Dunbar Jr. was born Oct. 9, 1929, in Dearborn, Mich., where he grew up. After graduating form Fordson High, in 1948, he attended Michigan State University. He needed a job to help pay his way through and the best option was at the campus radio station, calling the Spartans basketball games. This led to a two-year stint in the Army, where he was a broadcaster at the base station in Fort Riley, Kan.

In 1956, he arrived at WDSU in New Orleans, as both station manager and disc jockey spinning jazz records. On-air, he replaced Dick Van Dyke who had been lured away to Broadway. At a party in the French Quarter he met a Southern belle by the name of Beth Monroe. She was still an undergrad at H. Sophie Newcomb College, the women’s affiliate at Tulane University, but Dunbar wouldn’t wait. They were married before she graduated and celebrated their 60th anniversary last December.
Dunbar was playing the Big Bopper and Buddy Holly, at WLS, a top-40 station in Chicago when Dunbar found a job in San Francisco, in hopes that his wife 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 the station (KGO) was in terrible trouble. It had tried every format from German bund music to bird calls.”

Dunbar tried some formats of his own, including the zany “Man on the Street,” interviews of unsuspecting citizens conducted by comics Mal Sharpe and Jim Coyle.
“There were stations doing news and stations doing talk,” he told The Chronicle, “but nobody put it together quite the way that we did.” Before there was the loose blend of current events, commentary and call-ins that became known across the radio waves as “newstalk,” in the Bay Area, there was only Jim Dunbar, trying to rescue a desperate ratings situation on KGO-AM in San Francisco. “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.” KGO became so successful that the station expressed regret that it did not copyright the slogan “newstalk.”

While always local, his show twice made national news. The first was the Zodiac Killer. At the appointed hour, a man called in to Dunbar’s KGO TV show, station, spoke a few words and hung up. This was repeated 54 times over two hours until a surrender location was settled upon. But the caller never showed up at the drop point or called again.

KGO talk show host Jim Dunbar after surviving an assassination attempt.
The second national story came in 1973. He was on the radio when a man came into the station with a gun and fired at Dunbar inside his studio. Bulletproof glass saved him and he stayed on the air to describe it. A KGO employee was killed before the gunman went outside and shot himself.

For all those years, Dunbar got up at 3:45 a.m., was out the door at 4:30 and on the air at 5:05. He had it it timed to the minute. “He used to say, ‘They don’t pay you to be early,’ ” said Brooke, “But he was only late once in 37 years.” He played tennis, played the clarinet and collected cars. His garage and driveway were once packed but, at the time of his death, he was down to his last Ford Model A.

Survivors include his wife of 60 years, Beth, daughter Brooke of Foster City, and son James of New York City. Services are pending.

https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/jim-dunbar-pioneer-in-sf-newstalk-radio-dead-at-89
Jim Dunbar