Lewis Hill's Pacifist Radio Station and Alan Watts's Weekly Program

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

KPFA is a noncommercial, listener-supported FM radio station in Berkeley, California, signed on the air on April 15, 1949, by the pacifist and conscientious objector Lewis Hill. It was the first station of what became the Pacifica Foundation network and the first listener-supported radio broadcaster in the United States, a funding model built specifically to keep the station free of both commercial advertising and government control from its earliest days on the air.

From 1953 the writer and speaker Alan Watts hosted a weekly, unpaid volunteer program on KPFA, eventually broadcast under the title Way Beyond the West, continuing until 1962. A KPFA station manager at the time described the program as drawing what he called a legion of regular listeners, and the recordings from Watts's nine years on the station are held today by the Pacifica Radio Archives, forming much of the source material for his enduring lecture-audio afterlife heard online long after his own death. KPFA itself predates Watts's own 1953 arrival by four years, having signed on in 1949 as a deliberately noncommercial alternative to the advertising-funded stations that already dominated American radio at the time.