Filmmaker Alan Snitow served as KPFA news director from 1974 to 1981. Political journalist Larry Bensky was the station manager of KPFA from 1974 to 1977 and spent a decade as its national affairs correspondent. Historian Matthew Lasar is the author of Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio's Civil War.

April 15 is an auspicious day-not for taxes, but as the momentous day when KPFA in Berkeley began broadcasting, sixty-five years ago. The first manifestation of Pacifica Foundation, listener-supported KPFA was the radical brainchild of Lewis Hill, who believed that radio should not be commercialized blather, but a meaningful and participatory aspect of a community's cultural life. Though the station has undergone upheavals and each new decade seems to display some shift in political orientation, KPFA remains a through-line in Berkeley's political history. Search local newsreel footage of the sixties, from the HUAC hearings in 1960 through People's Park protests in 1969, and you will inevitably see KPFA's microphones poking up from the podia. Veronica Selver's captivating documentary richly illustrates a history few of us know, particularly the first decades when luminaries such as Dick Gregory, Pauline Kael, William Mandel, Kenneth Rexroth, Elsa Knight Thompson (who once said "The truth is always left of center”), and Alan Watts were regular contributors to the community air. Even stranger is the fact that KPFA's ethos of fairness led them to include such dubious voices as Caspar Weinberger and the John Birch Society as guests. The seventies, with Larry Bensky often at the helm, saw KPFA broaden its view of cultural politics and usher in an era in which the station's staff began to more closely resemble the community at large. KPFA on the Air was produced around the time that grave struggles tore at the station's core. Battered but not beaten, KPFA is still with us: that true through-line, pursuing its mission to fill the air with understanding.