Jim Dunbar was shot at five times by a disturbed listener. He may have been the only radio air personality to interview the "Zodiac" serial killer. As one of the pioneers of the news-talk radio format, Dunbar's long broadcast career has been marked by peculiar fate and fortuitous innovation, culminating in his election to the Radio Hall of Fame in 1999. "I'm still a little flabbergasted being up there on a wall," Dunbar said of his plaque in the Chicago-based Hall of Fame. ''It's still in a way kind of surreal, seeing your name up there between Tommy Dorsey and Don Dunphy, the old fight announcer" (all Dunbar quotations are from an interview with the author).

     Dunbar's career began in 1952 and included stints as a disc jockey and newscaster in Manhattan, Kansas, and Detroit, Michigan, before he became program director and morning disc jockey at WDSU in New Orleans in 1957. Four years later, he moved to WLS in Chicago as assistant program director and disc jockey.

     WLS was "a very special station that owned the Midwest," Dunbar said. "We had the Midwest by the ears." He spent three years there but yearned to relinquish on-air duties and be a program director again. "I turned 30 and faced the fear that I might be playing Patti Page and Pat Boone the rest of my career," Dunbar said. "I hated that music. I'm a jazz fan."

     Dunbar was hired in 1963 as program director for KGO in San Francisco, a station that consistently ranked last in a 12- station market despite adopting numerous formats. "They tried everything from German band music to bird whistles, but nothing seemed to work," Dunbar said. "Yellow-cab dispatch­ers had a bigger audience."

     As program director, Dunbar was charged with the responsibility of finding a format to pull KGO out of the ratings basement. He chose a new concept, news-talk, which he helped to shape. "I don't want to take credit for being the inventor of news-talk radio," Dunbar said. "A lot of people shared the credit. I just put together some things that had worked elsewhere, and that I thought would work here"-notably news, talk, and humor. "I had nothing to lose, so I thought, 'Let's give them something so compelling that they would hang on through the next commercial break,"' Dunbar recalled. "Radio had always been background. What we did was we made it foreground."

     As Dunbar defined it, the news-talk format is "fundamentally a bulletin service with a heavy emphasis on traffic, along with a series of talk-interview programs that would hold people," Dunbar said. "It was bubble gum of the mind."

     Dunbar introduced a duo of consummate practical jokers to the KGO mix. Jim Coyle and Mal Sharpe were masters of street pranks, devising an outlandish premise and then taping ad-lib interviews with unsuspecting passersby. They attempted to persuade people to graft chicken wings to their foreheads to enable them to fly, they tried to persuade a grocer to stock pre­ bitten fruit, they sought recruits for a private army of San Franciscans to invade Los Angeles and endeavored to rent pigeons in Golden Gate Park for $1.50 per hour. The well­-dressed, straight-faced duo recorded these exchanges while "pushing our victims as far as they'll go before they take a poke at us," Coyle said ("Rent-A-Pigeon," Newsweek, 13 January 1964). After they produced an album of their gags in 1963, Dunbar gave Coyle and Sharpe their own three-hour nightly show on KGO. "That's what I feel proudest of," Dunbar said of his career accomplishments. "They were so differ­ ent from anything else on the air. They were funny and unusual. They helped establish the difference between us and other stations."

     Despite Dunbar's innovations, the new format was not an immediate success. After one year, KGO's station manager wanted to abolish the news-talk format and switch to rock and roll. "I told him, 'We are about to turn the corner, and you are making a big mistake,"' Dunbar said. The station manager relented, and one year later KGO was one of the top-ranked stations in the market.

     Shortly after taking the reins as program director, Dunbar reversed his decision to stay off the air and made himself an afternoon talk-show host. "Vietnam and conservation were pretty much all anyone wanted to talk about" during the 1960s and 1970s, Dunbar recalled. In September 1973 a psychologically disturbed listener, recent immigrant Lawrence Kwong, believed he heard Dunbar's voice inside his head, threatening him. "He thought I was going to kill him, so he decided to kill me first," Dunbar said. Kwong stood on the other side of the studio window during Dunbar's show and fired five shots. The station had recently installed bulletproof glass, so Dunbar was spared. The enraged Kwong was undeterred, though, and headed for the studio door. When station advertising salesman Ben Munson tried to intervene, Kwong killed him and then committed suicide.

     Another unbalanced listener called in to Dunbar's show, claiming to be the notorious Zodiac killer who had committed a string of unsolved murders in California in the 1970s. He promised to give himself up if attorney Melvin Belli agreed on air to represent him. Dunbar invited Belli to the studio, where "Belli so dominated the conversation the guy hung up and called back 54 times in an hour and a half," Dunbar said. The caller made arrangements to surrender to police with Dunbar and Belli present, but he never showed. Dunbar is confident that the caller was the real Zodiac killer because he knew details of murders that had not been publicly revealed. (The killer has never been caught.)

     In 1975, Dunbar moved to the morning drive-time shift on KGO, a position he retained until his retirement in July 2000. Dismayed by the plethora of shock-jocks and rude talk-show hosts on the airwaves today, Dunbar said he got out at the right time. "We are now imposing on the listener so much, and picking at scabs, that it has gone from intrusive to invasive," he said. Instead he wishes that other show hosts would emulate his approach. "You reveal what your heart is telling you and you let people respond to that, one way or another.," Dun­ bar counseled. "That's how to do a talk show."