Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Some days—not often, but on the rare occasion—I get to feel really stupid.

Stupid. Dense. Unobservant. Positively dim.

Yesterday was such a day.

When I was a kid, I was lucky. Unlike most areas, we had more than the usual three television stations. In the San Francisco Bay Area, we had five (count ’em, five!!) television stations. Our little 24-inch black-and-white Zenith, sitting on its tubular aluminum TV stand, could not only pull in ABC, NBC, and CBS, but also PBS and the local independent station. Such abundance!

We never really thought of the stations in terms of their network affiliations. We always referred to them either by the channel number, or by their call letters: KRON, KPIX, KGO, KTVU, and KQED.

When you’re eight years old, call letters are just that: a jumble of letters. At some point I learned that stations west of the Mississippi began with “K” while those east of the river began with “W,” though I couldn’t have told you why K and W, or why they had that geographical distribution. (I can now, and if you are interested, go here.)

But it wasn’t until I was older that I realized the call letter combinations weren’t random, and that in fact, they had additional meaning. (Watching  WKRP In Cincinnati and listening to George Carlin’s “Wonderful WINO Radio” routines made it pretty damned clear, even to my adolescent brain.) Still, though, I never gave much thought to the call letters of my hometown stations.

Until yesterday.

You may have looked at the call letters for the Bay Area PBS station above and seen the little Easter egg hidden within. I’ve been looking at those letters for nearly sixty years, and for some reason, I did not see it until yesterday. I don’t know why yesterday was different, but it was, because suddenly and apropos of nothing, I noticed that KQED, the Bay Area educational public broadcasting station, has Q.E.D built right into its callsign. Q.E.D., or quod erat demonstrandum. What clever brainiacs they were, back in 1966, naming their new station with a little insider joke.

For me, it was a real forehead-smacking moment, though. It’s so obvious now, I can’t imagine how I simply didn’t see it. 

Naturally, this revelation sent me down the rabbit-hole of Call Letter Research, now that it was clear that all call letters have some meaning. So, for my the stations of my childhood home, the letters shake out as follows:

• KTVU—TeleVision for yoU
• KRON—named for the original co-owner, the San Francisco CHRONicle newspaper
• KPIX—PIX as an abbreviation for “Pictures”
• KGO—named for original owner General Electric Oakland
• KQED—Quod Erat Demonstrandum

Now I can’t help but think of all the station call letters that I’ve ever heard of, and wonder. The meanings may be lost to history, but they all meant something to somebody at some time.

Any fun ones from your area?

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