Elegy to KOFY, K-O-F-Y, TV20

Another Bay Area institution is gone, and I miss the Bay Area of my childhood.

Another part of my childhood is gone. Yes, I often write about how the Bay Area I grew up in has changed so much. When I was in my hometown in March, I walked around the downtown, feeling like a stranger. Often I feel like Herb Caen, waxing poetic about days gone by. Today I am not writing about Baghdad by the Bay. I'm writing about KOFY TV-20. In the eighties, it was one of my favorite things to watch.

Every other weekend I visited my father in the City. Dad had expanded cable-he had HBO and Showtime. He had the channel where Reverend Gene Scott would smoke a cigar, then yell at people to give money. But best of all, it had TV20. If you loved reruns as I did, it was nirvana. TV20 had The Addams Family, Mister Ed, Flipper, and Lou Grant. Considering the fact I watched way too much television when I was a kid, this was my Nirvana.

James Gabbert bought the station in 1980, then created a station that celebrated television. Mothers who wore pinafore dresses in the fifties then switched to …